‘Fear the Walking Dead’: A Familiar Face Returns for the Season’s Best Episode

Fear the Walking Dead has been a lot of things in its short run. It’s been a family focused Walking Dead prequel. A zombie horror movie set on a boat. A potent border/immigration metaphor, in one of the series’ best run of episodes. But with last season transitioning showrunners and jettisoning most of the original cast, it’s taken a while to figure out what this newest iteration of Fear is, here in Season 5.

Just a few episodes in, but with tonight’s excellent, “Humbug’s Gulch,” written by Ashley Cardiff and directed by series star Colman Domingo (who stays off screen for the duration of the hour), it’s now clear what Fear the Walking Dead is, and it’s a shocking word hardly ever associated with the Walking Dead franchise: the show is fun.

Spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead‘s latest episode “Humbug’s Gulch” past this point.

The headline event for the episode is the return of Dwight (Austin Amelio), who disappeared off the mothership show after Rick Grimes’ (Andrew Lincoln) war with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Turns out the scarred former villain has been searching for his missing wife Sherry (Christine Evangelista), who ran away from Negan’s clutches back in Walking Dead Season 7’s “Hostiles and Calamities.” She’s been leaving him notes and clues as she travels from place to place, and when we meet Dwight again, he’s been searching for Sherry for “about a year.”

Obviously Dwight hasn’t been checking off a calendar or anything, but that sets the current run of Fear a few months before the beginning of The Walking Dead Season 9. The reason that’s significant is because Althea (Maggie Grace) was seemingly taken by the same group who absconded with Rick Grimes in a helicopter in Season 9’s “What Comes After.” So whoever this mysterious group is, they’ve interacted with Walking Dead‘s Jadis (Polyanna McIntosh), but have not, as of yet, taken Rick — which certainly adds some fire to the popular fan theory that the people who took Rick are none other than the Fear the Walking Dead crew.

Anyway, back to Dwight. The man we meet in “Humbug’s Gulch” is significantly sadder, softer, and more desperate than the one we last saw on TWD. That doesn’t sound like a recipe for a rollicking good time, but the fun comes from John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt) and June (Jenna Elfman) accidentally stumbling on the titular Humbug’s Gulch, a sort of Western theme park complete with tumbleweeds and a soup store named “Broth-el” that seems like it hopped right out of The Good Place. As June lovingly needles John about it, she slowly discovers he worked at a Humbug’s Gulch (there’s a chain of them)… Though he denies ever participating in a “theatrical” cowboy show, despite his prowess with a gun.

This whole storyline is a nice respite from the action of the first two episodes of the season, and finally gives us a chance to see how June and John work as a couple. So much of their time “together” has been spent apart that we’ve been told about their love story, instead of seeing it. Given they’re caught in a storm and stuck in a fake saloon, bottle episode style, for most of the episode’s runtime, it’s a great chance to meet John and June for the first time — and Dillahunt and Elfman have a sweet, funny chemistry that sells the relationship.

Dwight is tracking them because he spotted them in what he thinks is Sherry’s car; and after a classic “good guys fight” situation, John talks Dwight over to his side with humor and warmth. After 14 seasons of Walking Dead shows wallowing in sweaty manliness, seeing Dillahunt’s Dorie defuse a situation with kindness is a delightful surprise, and helps set up the best set piece in the episode.

Hurt after a fall, Dwight is wrestling with a zombie corpse, and John only has one bullet. Two other zombies are approaching, so John tells Dwight to hold up an axe that’s near him. Pain coursing through his body, Dwight complies, and John fires, splitting the bullet and taking out both of the dead. Then of course he cops to June that perhaps he did participate in some of the more theatrical elements of the theme park, after all.

It’s a wonderful moment, and paralleled by the giddy grossness of the B-plot, which finds Morgan (Lennie James) and Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) trying to figure out what’s going on with the Red Rover walkers, zombies tied up by their own intestines and blocking the roads. Though this section takes on a more somber tone as Morgan attempts to talk Alicia through her darkness — he can see she’s repressing feelings from her family dying by turning into a remorseless killing machine, something Morgan knows a thing or two about — it’s still deliciously gruesome, well edited, and much more fun than the usual hand-wringing about what the world has become, now that the dead have taken over.

And it all leads up to the two groups converging, with Morgan offering a simple “let’s move on” to Dwight on their reunion, after their complicated relationship during the Rick/Negan war. This is complete with a hero moment as they all vow to figure out the secret of the Red Rover walkers, which is, of course, interrupted by the next threat. Turns out, they’re gonna be tangling with a bunch of evil children, which might be the weirdest group of enemies ever. And again: that’s fun.

Will this continue as the season goes on? Maybe. I hope so. Certainly, there are a lot of threats the team is juggling, even three episodes in, so there’s every chance this can all go real dark, real quick. It’s not called Fun the Walking Dead, after all. But if Fear can take some chances with its tone like it did in “Humbug’s Gulch,” the show, and the franchise, will be better for it. Nobody ever said living in the zombie apocalypse had to be a slog.

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.

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