‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Finale Recap: Eff The Walking Dead

And now, a musical question for all you Fear the Walking Dead watchers out there: Is that all there is?

The first season (and definitely not the only one, since it was renewed before the pilot even aired) of the hotly anticipated spinoff of the most popular show on cable is now one for the history books—if, that is, history is written by the terminally bored. “The Good Man,” last night’s Fear the Walking Dead season finale, was a slapdash affair even by this show’s low standards. Its big zombie setpieces proved only that zombies are dangerous en masse and that soldiers can’t stop them, which we knew since unlike these characters we’ve seen The Walking Dead before. Its emotional climaxes centered on how people now have to shoot everyone in the head when they die or get bitten so they can’t come back as zombies, which, again, we knew, and how badly that sucks, which, yeah, you get the point. Everyone in the extended Clark-Manawa family learned a hard but valuable lesson, which I suppose might resonate with you if you were able to power through half a dozen dull, unsmiling, underwritten performances, including a career-worst from poor Kim Dickens, and find a way to give a shit about any of these people.

Still, this season finale had something to say, and it said it loud and clear, and it was this: The Walking Dead franchise is the most morally repugnant thing on television.

The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead send the message to a society in the throes of endless war, openly nativist and racist politics, and mass gun psychosis that the only way to ensure the survival of you and your loved ones is to act with maximum brutality at all times. It’s not that I’m saying these shows are turning people into killers; on the contrary, everyone involved knows damn well that this is decadent nonsense since virtually no one watching will ever be in the personal position to do anything like what Travis Manawa and Madison Clark are made to do. But the same is true of the NRA or Donald Trump or Ben Carson, who for political and financial profit fuel the paranoid, masturbatory murder fantasies of a country full of gunfucking shut-ins terrified of the unwashed, undead masses flowing over the border, out of the ghettoes, and into Main Street USA. Ideologically, Rick Grimes and George Zimmerman are just a zombie apart.

It’s important to understand why this violent show, among the countless ones now on offer and racking up gangbusters reviews as well as ratings, stands out. What’s wrong with Fear the Walking Dead and the series that spawned it that isn’t wrong with Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Americans, and on and on and on? To find the source of FTWD/TWD’s ethical failure, you have go look at an artistic failure, a hole in the writing the show falls into time and time again. On those other shows, characters are presented with moral choices between right and wrong options—one side may look more appealing or viable than the other, one may have better or worse repercussions, one may be easier to live with or live through, but their nature is never truly in doubt. Fear the Walking Dead is different. It repeatedly offers characters and viewers alike a false choice, one in which the only options are brutality and survival on the one hand or naïveté and death on the other. In this closed moral circuit, violence is both vital and virtuous; no other correct answer is allowed.

It sets up this bogus binary over and over. Some examples are minor throwaways, like Ofelia insisting on viewing her late mother’s corpse when it’s obvious any kind of detour for an impromptu wake would get her killed, or Travis telling Liza she can save herself from infection with antibiotics when that is so self-evidently not true that it transcends wishful thinking or even character-based stupidity and reaches the level of plain bad writing. In such cases the show sends the message that only starry-eyed fools care about niceties like “a proper goodbye” or “not shooting your ex-wife in the head,” since the alternative is so obviously fatal.

Other examples have a more actively callous component. As the Clarks, Manawas, and Salazars drive out of their neighborhood, they see their oblivious neighbors walking their dogs or gathered around the table with family. All of these people, supposedly, are slated for “humane execution” by the military the next morning (though how that would work if all the soldiers had already bugged out is not something the writers bothered to mention). But Travis and Madison do nothing to save them from being slaughtered, and Ofelia comes out and says that for doing nothing to prevent soldiers from taking Nick and Griselda to the infirmary, they deserve what they get.

Nevermind that there’s nothing anyone could have done against heavily armed goons anyway—which has been sort of the point of the entire military-quarantine storyline to begin with. Ofelia is making the argument that because the neighbors failed to step in on their behalf, they themselves should fail to step in on the neighbors’ behalf in turn. She is saying, in other words, that two wrongs make a right. This sounds completely fucking ridiculous to type out since it’s the kind of thing we learn is idiotic in fucking kindergarten. But the Walking Dead universe, “Two wrongs make a right” is the golden rule.

Elsewhere, Strand, the snappily dressed weirdo who frees Nick from captivity, makes the case that callous indifference to the lives of others is the practical choice as well as the ethically justified one. When they use Strand’s pilfered key to unlock their chain-link prison cell, they promptly blow the joint, leaving their fellow prisoners to their fate. Nick, understandably, asks why they’re not stoping to help them. “Helping them could hurt us,” Strand replies in his typical aphorisms-for-sociopaths fashion. “There’s no value-add. Save yourself, Nick. Let others drop behind.” Why freeing everyone the soldiers have interned would make their dash to freedom less likely to succeed rather than more so, given the confusion such a mass escape would create, is not a question the show chooses to answer, largely because it can’t—no more than it can explain why saving three family members justifies leading an entire horde of undead cannibals to a compound full of living human beings, many of who are sick and imprisoned or working to save lives just like your family members, makes any fucking sense whatsoever. It has to create scenarios in which survival through strength, with strength defined as the willingness to kill or be killed, live and let die, is the only option. Allowing the characters any more range of behavior would topple the whole house of cards.

But the most egregious example of this moral sleight-of-hand is yet to come. When Travis frees Andrew, the soldier that Daniel Salazar captured and tortured for information on the Army’s plans, it seems like the humane thing to do. This, of course, is because it is the humane thing to do, unless you’re prepared to make the case for kidnapping, mutilation, and murder, which had been Daniel’s plan.

Indeed, Salazar’s objections to letting Andrew go made little sense. Supposedly he could tip the soldiers off to their plans, but to pull that off he’d have to get to them on foot before the Clark/Manawa/Salazar caravan arrived by car. After that, Daniel’s whole idea was to get noticed by the guards—he walks right up to them and says hello, a Pied Piper horde of zombies at his back. Why kill Andrew, then, except to be needlessly cruel? Well, because…uh, because doing the right thing is bad. Seriously, that’s the answer! “See where doing the right thing gets you,” Salazar sneers at Madison when she backs up Travis’s catch-and-release plan.

And sure enough, the show dutifully constructs the one plot twist where Salazar’s cold heart could be seen as clear eyes, instead of rejected as the sadistic nihilism it really is: Andrew shows up, gun in hand, to menace the family as they make their escape. He doesn’t even shoot Daniel, which would be awful but at least understandable since the man tortured him—and is also, you know, literally a fugitive fascist war criminal from El Salvador’s killing fields. He shoots Ofelia, which makes no sense at all—unless you’re the writers of this show and you realize that in the bloody-minded atmosphere you’ve created, Daniel’s death could be seen as justified, so an innocent must be sacrificed to maintain your warped moral arithmetic. The wages of kindness is death, always, no matter what.

Fuck that. Fuck the thinking behind that. Fuck the show that sells it to us.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island.

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