‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Recap: Survival of the Sh*ttiest

The first rule of Fear the Walking Dead Club is kill or be killed. The second rule of Fear the Walking Dead club is there is no other rule. Three episodes deep into its second season, the Walking Dead spinoff demonstrates no clear raison d’etre other than demonstrating how vitally important it is to stamp out any people who stand in the way of your tribe’s survival without mercy. Every other rule of survival? Who the fuck cares? Certainly not the creators, who pepper the story that surrounds the punishment of empathy with death and the vicious treatment of outsiders with decisions a shitty slasher movie couldn’t get away with. In this regard, “Ouroboros,” this week’s installment, is as lazy as it gets.

The episode begins with the survivors of a plane crash who find themselves stranded on a lifeboat together. Before long, there are only two, though it’s not until the end of the episode that we discover which two they are: Alex, a tenacious woman who rescues and defends Jake, a badly wounded teen, from the other passengers. Once the opening title hits, we cut back to our “heroes,” who eventually discover the wreckage from the crash — including luggage containing tons of supplies, with seemingly no infected in sight — washed up on a nearby beach. At the kids’ insistence, Salazar takes them ashore to collect what they can.

Here’s where it starts getting ridiculous. Yes, the show hammers home the absolute necessity of killing people to stay alive — somewhat literally, in fact, since shamefully sensitive Chris finally gets his true baptism of blood by braining a survivor with a gruesome broken spine:

Nick, meanwhile, gets to be Truly Hardcore by saving his comrades while soaked in the blood of the dead:

But anything else they might reasonably do to ensure their own safety? Right out the goddamn window. Despite Salazar’s explicit and eminently reasonable instruction to the kids to stay where he can see them, Chris just up and wanders off. When he comes across the remainder of the plane’s fuselage, he for some reason opts not to tell anyone else before he enters this enclosed, unstable, almost certainly zombie-infested deathtrap by himself. When Salazar realizes Chris is missing, he tells Nick and Alicia to stay together, but then breaks his own advice by wandering out of sight to hunt for the missing kid instead of all of them searching together. When Alicia decides Salazar and Chris have taken too long and decides to set off in search of them, Nick jokes that he’s right behind her, but stays exactly where he is; she notices but walks away anyway. When Nick hears the telltale gurgle of an infected, instead of running away or calling for help, this dumb motherfucker just kinda moseys on over to a small sandy cliff to investigate the source of the noise, at which point he promptly falls off the edge. In short, the characters on this show are maddeningly careless when it comes to basic common-sense safety, and by extension the show itself is willing to write them this way to justify continued zombie run-ins.

Absolute ruthlessness when the lives of other people are in your hands, though? That is the Great Commandment of this repulsive show, while empathy is its cardinal sin. As Daniel puts it to Ofelia when his daughter suggests reaching out to Maddie for her much-needed antibiotics, “If she had to choose between her daughter and yourself, who do you think she would choose? This stays between us.”

The barbarity of this us-or-them mentality is illustrated in the most appalling way yet when, having improbably survived a massive zombie swarm on the beach (the ability to magically escape literally hundreds of zombies if the writers want you to is something Fear has in common with The Walking Dead 1.0), Salazar and the kids bring back Jake and Alex, the wounded teenager and his caretaker from the intro. By this point, Alex has killed two of her fellow passengers on the lifeboat (the guy in the suit in the intro, and apparently the guy who begged her to put Jake out of his misery, since he’s the zombie who got lodged in the yacht’s intake valve) to defend this kid, displaying that good ol’ Walking Dead fascist mentality to a tee. He’s part of the tribe, they’re not, and the boat ain’t big enough for all of ‘em.

But now it’s her turn to be on the outside, where no human consideration can be afforded her whatsoever. Over the kids’ protestations that she and Jake should be brought on board, and Strand’s demand that she be left behind entirely (“They’re a liability” — ooh, we got a badass here!), Travis comes up with a Third Way (one every bit as humane and effective as the real-world neoliberal political equivalent has been): Give the newcomers food, water, and blankets, but leave them in their life raft and simply tow them along. “Are you people really debating this?” Alex asks incredulously — a-fucking-men, lady. But we can’t have the sick infecting the body of the state from within, can we? Thus Alex and Jake are concentrated, you might say, in a specific contained location, where they are forced to…camp, let’s call it.

But not even this profoundly gross outcome is gross enough for Fear the Walking Dead. After the hubbub dies down, Strand simply walks out and cuts the rope, leaving Alex and Jake adrift on the high seas. Madison tries to stop him with about as much gusto as Willy Wonka saying “stop, no, don’t” when Augustus Gloop is drowning in the chocolate river; She does nothing to raise the alarm with the other passengers, force the boat to turn around and pick them up, push Strand overboard. That fate, she said earlier, would only befall him if he went after her family. Any other human being might as well be livestock.

Now today of all days, you might be asking, “How is this any different than the dog-eat-dog world of Game of Thrones?” It’s simple: Game of Thrones clearly can’t fucking stand its dog-eat-dog world, and is full of characters fighting and sacrificing to improve it. They don’t always make it, but at no point are you meant to think it wasn’t worth the effort. By contrast, Fear the Walking Dead works relentlessly to show that kindness is always weakness, and to deny the possibility that any other approach could ever be successful in its world, that it’s foolish to the point of suicidal to think otherwise.

But at the very same time it’s nowhere near as ironclad in any other respect. On a plot level, the characters repeatedly do stupid, risky shit, as we’ve seen. And in artistic terms, the performances, just to single out one element, are perfunctory at best;  I don’t know what was worse here, having to pretend that Maddie and Travis have any sexual chemistry whatsoever or listening to Strand deliver pretentious-bad-guy clunkers like “Forgive me if I neglect certain niceties in light of our current predicament.” It’s killing, and only killing, people who aren’t part of your in-group that the show takes seriously. That makes the show a sick joke.

[Where to Stream Fear The Walking Dead]
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island. He also recaps Showtime’s The Affair and HBO’s The Leftovers for Decider.