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Fear the Walking Dead

The best way to describe “Do Not Disturb,” this week’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead, is that it’s in large part a Travis and Chris episode — a fact that made me groan “oh, God” the moment I saw it was true — and that’s still not the worst part of it. What’s more, it’s an episode where they meet three callow young American bros named, I shit you not, “Brandon, Derek, and Baby James” — guys who unironically say things like “more cushion for the pushin’” — and that’s not the worst part of it.

Don’t get me wrong, though, that’s all still pretty goddamn bad! But the worst part, by far, is Elena, the mad fascist…hotel manager. Yes, this winner of a character willingly sentenced an entire wedding party to death when one of their number turned zombie. Why? “I had the hotel to think about. We were at capacity.” Oh, well, alright then! “I contained the situation,” Elena explains. You know who else “contained the situation,” Fear the Walking Dead? You might say that Elena found the final solution to the guest question in her hotel.

It’s not inconceivable that Elena might react to a sudden zombie outbreak in her hotel’s ballroom by locking everyone at the party in with the dead. Had she been shown to be panicked, preoccupied, or even just a little nervous about reports of “the sickness,” that kind of snap decision would make sense. On the contrary, she blows off the mother and father of the bride’s concerns about the dawning apocalypse mere seconds before the dad drops dead. (A tidy bit of plot-hammering right there!) In that light, her reaction to the infection of a paying customer, and his sudden decision to chew the face off his child in the middle of their father-daughter dance, looks either insanely sociopathic or insanely poorly written. But hey, this is Fear the Walking Dead — why choose?

And after Elena hooks up with Alicia — first rescuing her from a truly moronic jaunt into an infested hallway and elevator shaft, then threatening her with an axe, then helping her down to the lobby with a needlessly risky zombie-baiting technique — her murderous mentality seems to metastasize, finding in Alicia a kindred spirit. “I’ve seen worse,” Alicia reassures Elena after she hears the grotesque wedding story. “I’ve done worse.” This, of course, is true, much to the show’s moral and artistic detriment. Sure enough, when the pair are cornered by the guests, who really have taken Elena’s nephew Hector hostage (I was convinced all the guests were dead and this was all paranoia on Elena’s part, the promising casting of Seinfeld’s Sue-Ellen Mischke as the bereaved mother notwithstanding), Alicia frees an entire horde of zombies to take the guests out while she and her new pals flee. Why is this necessary? Why is it desirable? Why is it even a good idea on purely survivalist grounds, given that zombies eat everyone, not just the people you want them to eat? Because this is a Walking Dead show, and unleashing death and destruction upon anyone who isn’t your people is treated as an inherent good.

This is true even to Travis, who’s supposed to be the voice of reason on his and Chris’s half of the storyline. To his credit, he insists that Chris and his absurd new fratboy friends not, you know, murder a man in his home so they can steal his chickens. But what was his bottom-line reason for not trusting Brad Max and his Road Warriors? “They’re good people, they’re strong people,” Chris protested to him.” “They’re not our people,” Travis responded. And there you have it. Blood and soil, baby! Or to put it in AMC-ese, La familia es todo.

How can someone who says something like that occupy the moral high ground when his nightmarish failson decides to shoot a guy to death in order to successfully steal his poultry? He can’t. And yet it’s clear that Fear wants us to feel Chris is too far gone to be redeemed, while the countless other characters willing to brutalize everyone they come across in order to survive within the false-binary world the show has constructed is a-ok. But they can’t have it both ways. Either it’s justifiable to kill to preserve “your people,” or it isn’t. You can’t have your war crime and call it an act of self-defense too.