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Fear the Walking Dead

No one believes me when I tell them this — no one except other critics, anyway — but I’m in the liking-things business. When a television show is bad I’m going to say so, and when it’s really bad I’m going to say so hard. But the pact I’ve made with myself to stay relatively happy and sane is to assume, at the start of every episode, that there’s every probability that I’ll have considered it time well spent by the closing credits. If I didn’t want to enjoy myself every time I sit down to watch a TV show, I wouldn’t watch them for a living, you know? Bad shows don’t fulfill my pessimistic expectations, they disappoint my optimistic ones. Even in the case of Fear the Walking Dead, a series I think is not just “bad” but also ethically and politically noxious, I’m out here every week looking for diamonds in the rough. If the best I can come up with is cubic zirconium, hey, I’ll take it.

“Pablo and Jessica,” this week’s installment of Fear, falls on the slightly shinier side of things. That it accomplishes this mostly by spinning its wheels instead of doing much of anything is telling. FtWD’s worst episodes happen when our heroes encounter a hostile outsiders — as far as they’re concerned there are no other kind — and unleash the mindless atavistic fury that is the show’s stock in trade. This time around, the characters on which the episode is focused aren’t in that situation. Nick is comfortably ensconced in his pharmacist friend Alejandro’s mostly placid colony, where as long as no terminally ill people are being fed to zombies as some sort of religious ritual things are basically fine. Hell, dude even gets in a little sexytime with Juliana, a dull tough-guy character who left him to die a few days ago but I guess has changed her mind.

And in an extremely rare move for anyone on this show, Maddie, Strand, and Alicia actually broker a peace agreement between the rival groups holed up in their high-rise hotel together, the guests and the employees. (This would be a solid dark-comedy allegory for the pointlessness of factionalism, a la the Star Trek episode with the black-and-white people, if factionalism weren’t the driving engine of the whole fucking franchise, but oh well.)

As always, the proceedings are marred by gaping logistical and behavioral logic holes. Alejandro, for example, exerts his hold on his people because they believe he was bitten by an infected and made a full recovery. When he tells the story of the bite to Nick, he notes that he ran afoul of the zombies that day because he was trying to rescue a twigged-out junkie who’d been mistakenly thrown in with them. At this point it’s obvious who did the biting — honestly, it was clear from the get-go that whoever bit this dude wasn’t undead at all — but neither he nor Nick seem to notice. Perhaps they’re too focused on doing Breaking Bad cosplay; their interactions here give of serious Jesse Pinkman/Gus Fring vibes.

Over at the hotel, after a painfully wooden mother-daughter rapprochement (I’m going to have to re-watch “Something Very Expensive” from Deadwood as a sort of “Kim Dickens is a talented actor” reeducation program after this is through), Maddie and Alicia devise a plan to rid the whole hotel complex of its infestation: lure the zombies out of their rooms, through the halls, out onto a long pier, and into the ocean, where the riptide will supposedly do the rest.

Like most interactions with the zombies in this franchise, the sequence completely neutralizes their menace by making it possible for multiple humans to just kinda walk around a few feet ahead of them without breaking a sweat; but this also makes the humans look suicidally stupid anyway, since a single false move will kill them. But I’m just so happy to see people on this show cooperate instead of shoot each other in the head over chickens or whatever that I’m willing to look the other way.

But as was the case last half-season, the unexpected star of the show is Victor Strand, closet romantic. After the newly unified hotel residents clear their quarters of the dead, they settle in for a very somber “celebratory” dinner. When the young newlywed whose bride and father-in-law set off the outbreak in the hotel, Strand realizes the problem: He’s still got his late wife, in zombie form, locked up in the honeymoon suite. You get the usual “that’s not your wife” business from their conversation, sure, but Strand is more clever than just calling it a day right there. “Death parted you,” he points out, using the phraseology familiar to everyone from a million weddings. “Your vows give you leave.” Then he digs deeper, telling Pablo how there will come a day when the pain subsides and you become a new person, different from who you were when the one you loved was still living. “I liked who I was,” Pablo says as the fight goes out of him. “So did I,” Victor replies, his eyes welling with tears.

At moments like these — when Victor acts with decency rather than cruelty, when characters are permitted more emotions and drives than survival and preservation of the in-group — you get a glimpse of what this show could be. There’s nothing stopping Fear the Walking Dead or its mothership from featuring multidimensional people with complex lives. No one’s holding a gun to their head and forcing them to do “kill or be killed” shit all the time. While this can’t be said for the characters, it’s certainly true for the creators.