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Fear the Walking Dead

It had to happen sometime — no, wait, scratch that. A good episode of Fear the Walking Dead never had to happen at all. Sure, the series has come close, like, twice, notably with the semi-promising pilot and the Victor Strand/Thomas Abigail doomed-romance episode earlier this season. In both cases, any success was short-lived. After the pilot, the show raced through the interesting, relatively under-explored territory of the early stages of a zombie apocalypse, and pushed Frank Dillane’s compellingly vulnerable junkie Nick to the sidelines just as quickly in favor of his insufferably dour family. Victor and Thomas’s love affair, meanwhile, came with an expiration date from the start, and neither before nor since has the series shown any interest in getting that intimate and emotional again.

So no, Fear’s track record doesn’t bode well for the high quality of “Grotesque,” its “mid-season premiere” (god I hate these network neologisms), carrying over beyond its closing credits. But to be blunt, who cares? Fear the Walking Dead aired an episode that was well shot, well acted, and well written (almost — not quite, but almost) from start to finish. That’s reason enough to smile right there.

As with the pilot, which feels like it aired five years ago now, we have Frank Dillane’s Nick to thank. With the exception of a flashback in which Kim Dickens’s Maddie visits him in court-mandated rehab as the bearer of very bad news, he’s the sole core cast member to appear on screen the whole time. This means several things. One, we get to focus on the show’s most interesting physical actor. The juxtaposition of his androgynously lovely face and underfed addict’s body with his camouflage coating of human blood. The way his brown eyes seem alert and alive even as his posture and overall physical bearing give him the vibe of a guy who just woke up from a nap and is calmly strutting to the fridge to grab a drink. His wholly convincing panic when confronted with danger, mostly from the living — enraged parents upset he’s broken into their home, wild dogs looking for a quick meal, gun-toting Mexican road warriors. (Hey, this is a Walking Dead show — you didn’t think it’d be entirely free of weird revanchism regarding the dangerous and deadly Other, did you?) Hell, even the seemingly superfluous flashbacks were strong, from Nick’s resentment of his father for being too exhausted from work to ever really listen or be there for him, to his devastation when Maddie delivers the news that his dad died in a car accident while Nick was locked up. This guy can anchor an entire episode all by himself in a way that no one else on the show — from the uncharacteristically drab Dickens’ Maddie to perpetually perplexed Travis to rote sullen teens Chris and Alicia — simply can’t.

Two, we never have to put up with the show’s endless rehashing of its kill-or-be-killed ethics for longer than a few seconds at a time. Yes, there are those gun-toting gangsters to worry about, though they (rather idiotically — again, this is a Walking Dead show) get themselves killed. And the secure-for-now community that rescues him initially leaves him to die of thirst and exposure, courtesy of hardass scout Luciana. (I know, I know, an “it’s him or us” hardass on Fear the Walking Dead. I hope you were sitting down.) But these encounters are brief, a sideshow from the main event. Without Nick’s family and friends around, we’re saddled with no arguments between Travis and Maddie over whether they should shoot a pregnant stranger, no cryptic pronouncements about Bad Men and Good Men from the now-departed war criminal with a heart of gold Daniel Salazar — just one lone human being’s quest for survival, on his own.

Three, we get a good look at what that kind of quest looks like. Here, perhaps, is where the episode shines brightest. Instead of the usual cheap jump scares from the dead or fascistic clashes with the living, “Grotesque” derives nearly all its tension, suspense, and shock from Nick getting either lucky or unlucky, doing things right or doing them wrong, as he walks a 100 miles of highway to Tijuana. As mentioned earlier, he finds shelter and settles in for a night’s sleep, but then is rousted and nearly beaten to a pulp by a mom to whom he’s merely an intruder, leaving his water supply behind as the woman’s daughter screams in fright. Later he’s set upon by the aforementioned wild dogs, who fuck up his leg something awful before falling victim to the dead themselves. He tries to get water out of a cactus, as countless desert-based cowboy movies have taught us to try, but fails. He eats the pulp, and promptly throws up. He drinks his own piss, and only that seems to work.

The beauty of all this is that Nick is neither a born survivor nor a feckless, hapless loser. He’s a guy trying his best, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. The false dichotomy usually present in Fear the Walking Dead’s survival stories, where living to fight another day usually comes down simply to how violent you’re willing to be, is nowhere to be found. And throughout, director Daniel Sackheim — veteran of some of television’s best-made shows, including The Leftovers, The Americans, and Game of Thrones — frames Nick with some of the series’ most striking shots to date, driving home both his isolation and the lyrical, largely wordless nature (after all, he’s got no one to talk to) of his emotional and physical world.

It’s reminiscent, frankly, of the long, lovely, riveting silent stretches of, say, The Leftovers or Better Call Saul. Sure, it shows how much potential Fear squanders — imagine if it were like this every week! there’s really nothing stopping it! — but even so.

All in all, Nick’s journey here favorably compares to similar passages in, say, Stephen King’s The Stand, where the main obstacle to survival was distance itself — the vast amount of terrain that survivors of the apocalypse had to cover, and the sheer variety of dangers, large and small, they’d have to face on the way. Frankly, this entire franchise has never earned a comparison with a genre touchstone that strong before. I fear it won’t last, but for one week anyway, it’s manna from survival-horror heaven.