‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Recap: Till Death Do Us Part

Fear the Walking Dead just served up one of 2016’s great doomed romances. Show of hands: Who the hell saw that coming? Before today, this largely superfluous spin-off’s idea of tenderness was…well, who knows, since it never showed us. Travis and Maddie have all the chemistry of a wet firecracker, Daniel’s love of his late wife seemed primarily a matter of wanting to save her life and/or determine the time and place of her death, whichever was necessary, and Alicia’s two love interests either died in the initial outbreak or were part of a crew of pirates who nearly got them all killed. Enter Victor Strand and Thomas Abigail, two he-men with hearts of gold, separated by the apocalypse itself, tragically reunited just in time to say goodbye. Their love for each other made “Sicut Cervus,” this week’s episode, the best Fear the Walking Dead yet.

Credit here belongs largely to actors Colman Domingo and Dougray Scott, who as Strand and Abigail evince real emotion, attachment, and even physical chemistry, despite the latter’s worsening illness from a zombie bite. The way they cling to each other’s bodies as Victor helps Tom out of his chair and into bed, the way Strand lets all his coldness and posturing evaporate to curl up with the guy in bed and get cozy with a book like anyone might do with their sick partner — this is lovely, heartwarming, heartbreaking stuff, right up to the moment Strand chooses to shoot his late boyfriend rather than swallow poison and join him in the undead afterlife.

But their material isn’t just well acted, it’s well written, courtesy of Brian Buckner. When Madison knocks on their bedroom door to bring them food, Thomas asks, “Do we like her?”, the way you’d inquire about a co-worker of your significant other you’re about to meet for the first time. When Thomas asks Maddie, “Will you look after him when I’m gone?”, just the idea that Strand needs looking after — that anyone would care enough to want him to be looked after — is a shot to the gut. So is Victor’s attempt to defuse the moment: “Must we be so maudlin?” he laughs. Even near death, Thomas can give as good as he gets on this front: “How very Shakespearean of you,” he jokes when Strand offers to kill himself so they can be together in death. “Shut up, Thomas,” Victor replies with a smile, “before I change my mind.” This is sweet, sad, beautiful writing — both because it captures their love in all its comfort and discomfort, and because, for the first time, we’re watching people who care about each other pure and simple, not as part of some kind of us-against-the-world tribalism. It’s strong enough to put me in mind of George A. Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead and its quartet of lead characters, whose complicated but genuine feelings for one another remain the gold standard for the genre; even Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later operated in its shadow.

Just as crucially, we were finally presented with a scenario in which one of our heroes’ kill-or-be-killed mentality was unequivocally shown to be a kind of mental illness at best and blatantly immoral at worst. Angered at Maddie for her (correct!) refusal to believe he had to shoot their prisoner on last week’s episode, as opposed to doing so because the guy pissed him off, Chris slowly starts going psycho. He stands and watches as his stepmom nearly gets killed by a zombie, doing nothing to save her and forcing an aghast Alicia to do the job instead. When the two teens have a confrontation about it in the safety of Thomas’s compound (now run by Celia, his stepmom), he insists that her version of events is a “lie” in one breath, then implicitly threatens her should she tell the others. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he says — exactly the kind of thing people who do want to hurt people say. By the end of the episode Maddie and Alicia wake up to find him standing over their bed with a knife in his hand, their lives seemingly saved from his vengeance only by the commotion caused by Strand’s gunshot. When directed at outsiders, the kind of behavior Chris demonstrates here is typically celebrated by the show as a necessity; Here it’s revealed for the cruelty it is.

Contrast his conduct with that of his older stepbrother Nick. Like a junkie Tyrion to his family full of flat-affect Cerseis and Tywins, Nick is emerging as the conscience of the group, not to mention its most entertaining member to watch. Despite his bravery among the dead during the past several episodes, enabled in part by his discovery that you can fool them by smearing yourself in their blood and guts, he balks when confronted with a zombie child; He kills her with an axe to the head, but he’s so upset by it he’s barely able to get up and leave the scene afterwards. “I’m sick of it,” he tells Celia as he eats a before-dinner snack she serves him. “Of all the killing.” Haunted by the memory of all the awful shit he’s experienced since he became the first member of the family to walk with the zombies, he’s open to her theory that the dead aren’t really dead at all — that they’re the lifeform that “comes next.” They may still be dangerous, but looking at them as something other than an implacable enemy to be destroyed without mercy is a vital relief valve for his maxed-out mind, especially since his family, and virtually everyone else they’ve encountered, have extended this outlook to the living as well.

Finally, there’s Celia herself. The mother of Thomas’s late right-hand man Luis (she raised them both), she’s a welcoming sort, though it’s obvious she has some kind of secret the moment you realize she’s been shopping from the Game of Thrones home decor catalog. Yep, the trees have eyes…

…and the coins are creepy.

Valar morghulis!

Sure enough, we learn she’s keeping that cellar full of zombies, feeding them the occasional puppy for sustenance, and that she went so far as to poison the parishioners of the local church before they could storm her compound and slaughter her undead tenants. (As if “altar boy” didn’t come with enough occupational hazards as it is.)

But for all her brutality, Celia has a higher purpose in mind than the violence might lead you to believe. Yes, there’s a sense in which she killed all those people to protect her own. But there’s a key difference: By allowing the dead to linger on her property rather than putting them all down immediately, she’s making the argument that there’s something out there in the world that matters more than simply dodging death. As the theme song to Mr. Belvedere put it, life is more than mere survival.

I’m not saying Celia’s a saint — she did murder a choir full of altar boys, after all! I’m simply arguing that her faith in a higher ideal, if not a higher power, is a welcome alternative to the usual choice of either dog-eat-dog savagery or naive sentimentality, the fascistic false binary that has boxed in the series and its flagship predecessor from the start. Until now, the protagonists were only ever in conflict with people who shared their pack mentality, but were either more sadistic or less effective in employing it. Celia’s something else, something new, and while it’s hard to have faith that the show will avoid a final “Baja California ain’t big enough for the both of us” battle between her group and theirs, that novelty is worth celebrating for as long as we can.
[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.
[Gifs by Jaclyn Kessel, copyright AMC]