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Hey, look who dropped in for a bite!

Unfortunately, high-rise-hotel-dwelling zombies attracted by the ruckus raised by the extremely drunk Maddie and Strand in the lobby weren’t the only things that went plummeting on “Los Muertos,” this week’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead: The show’s quality did, too. After airing its first top-to-bottom Good Episode with last week’s quiet, thoughtful, Nick-centric survival-horror road-trip ep “Grotesque,” the series has returned to form: fascist tribalism, ham-fisted dialogue, half-baked philosophy, and more idiotic and inconsistent behavior than you can toss an empty shot glass at.

The trouble starts early, as Nick awakes in the infirmary of the compound that’s taken him in and, finding the normally teeming streets and alleys empty, makes his way to the periphery. There he discovers a little girl crying, alone, because her ailing father is about to sacrifice himself to the zombies massed outside the walls. We eventually learn this is part of another cockamamie post-apocalyptic pseudo-religion, one that’s even more incoherent than last year’s “the dead aren’t really dead, they’re still our loved ones and may return any time.” As best as I can cobble it together, these folks believe the dead are a cleansing purge of the world’s sins, that anyone who’s survived has been chosen and protected by God for their faith — and also, contradicting the whole premise but oh well, anyone who gets sick should sacrifice themselves to the zombies because that protects the other survivors. “From death we come, and to death we deliver ourselves” goes the motto, chanted with the reliable mindlessness such stories always impart to the menacing Other. As such they reject creature comforts like the candy Nick steals at one point to offer the grieving child, not to mention just having someone hang out with the kid so she didn’t wander over to watch her father be eaten alive or whatever. But they also continue offering sick patients medication long past the point at which their cases are clearly terminal, because…I don’t know, something to do with fear being bad? Worse than enjoying comforts and giving themselves freely to death, I guess? If you can figure out how any of this makes sense, I’ve got a boat called the Abigail to sell you.

While Nick is coming to terms with the First Church of Alejandro, Pharmacist, his family and friends — running low on gas and water, their boat stolen, Nick and Travis and Chris MIA — search for a place to hunker down. They settle on a seemingly abandoned hotel, free of both infected and survivors. Then boy oh boy do they make themselves at home. Despite warning Alicia not to search the hotel��s towers with Ofelia — an injunction delivered, like all of Kim Dickens’s lines, with the enthusiasm and passion of a person who opens a laundromat dryer only to discover the towels are still damp — Maddie overlooks her own instructions to be more careful and gets absolutely shitfaced drunk with Strand in the hotel bar. They have a crushingly dull walk down memory lane, thinking of what might have been had they met under different circumstances, breaking glasses as they toast to various morbid things until Strand starts playing on the bar’s horribly out-of-tune piano. Good thing zombies aren’t attracted by sound!

I’ll give Fear this: The visual of the undead tossing themselves off balconies to get closer to the source of the noise is a strong and scary one, driving home the implacability of these creatures. But you can’t go five minutes without Fear or its flagship show The Walking Dead immediately negating the threat posed by zombies for the sake of narrative convenience. It happened earlier, when Nick and his traveling companion outfox the perimeter wall of zombies by smearing some blood on themselves in full view of countless walkers. And it happens here, when a horde of zombies that have smashed through storefronts and plummeted several stories to get to Maddie and Strand are suddenly thwarted by a chest-high hotel bar.

The stupidity of the characters is as frustrating as the inconsistency of the threat their stupidity brings down upon them. And it’s not like Alicia and Ofelia fare any better in either regard. Stumbling across a zombie who’d hanged himself in his hotel shower, Alicia asks, in all sincerity, “Why do you think he gave up?” Yes, who can possibly solve the mystery of why a man stranded in a zombie-filled hotel during the middle of the end of the world while billions of people die across the globe might decide life was no longer worth living? Later, looking for Ofelia, who it’s implied may have committed suicide by jumping off the balcony herself, Alicia barges through a fire door without first knocking to see if any infected are on the other side — and sure enough, there’s a whole gang of them…just not enough to stop her from pulling the door shut on them again. Some unstoppable menace these things are, huh? The less said about Nick nearly getting himself killed for stealing candy that would easily have fit in the cart a gang of menacing Mexicans (are there any other kind in this show?) provided him and his companion for picking up supplies, the better.

So yeah, we’re back to square one: a Fear the Walking Dead that depends on bad decisions, wonky plot mechanics, and an attitude toward death and violence that borders on the worshipful to move forward. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

[Where to Stream Fear The Walking Dead]
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
[Gifs by Jaclyn Kessel, copyright AMC]