Cliff Curtis – Bitch Flicks

‘Fear the Walking Dead’: I’m From the Government, and I’m Here to Help

As with the writers on ‘The Walking Dead,’ these writers haven’t yet proven they have any idea how to write strong roles for women. But if they ever figure it out, they’ve got the right actor for the job.

Well, this was unexpected. Despite its occasional heavy-handedness and several key moments where characters did things that no one in their situation would ever actually do, the fourth episode of AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead was actually the best yet. And they didn’t even need a zombie attack! Or for Alicia (Alycia Debnam Carey) to do anything worth mentioning!

They haven’t added any Black characters since the purge of the first two episodes, but the Latino characters on the show are a relatively rich and varied lot, with Ruben Blades’ Salvadoran barber Daniel being given some of the show’s best dialogue. Toward the end of the episode, as he was preparing to go to a military field hospital with his wife Griselda (Patricia Reyes Spindola, who mostly just gets to groan in pain and suffer nobly), he talks to Madison (Kim Dickens), whom he clearly recognizes as the household’s most astute and proactive observer of the encroaching zombie apocalypse, about the Salvadoran government’s massacre of some people from his village, and about how his father said the perpetrators were not evil, but committed evil acts out of fear. I got a chill when he told Madison that his father was a fool “to think there was a difference.” Daniel is a strong enough character to make the show’s over-the-top anti-government paranoia seem downright rational.

The engaging performances of Blades, Dickens, and — I have to admit he’s growing on me — wild-eyed Frank Dillane as Madison’s heroin-addicted ninja son Nick go a long way toward selling the silliness of the plotting. There was also a pretty strong opening with Madison’s beau Travis (Cliff Curtis) jogging around the now militarized, fenced-in, and seemingly safe neighborhood to the strains of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” and then Travis’ son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie), from his perch on Madison’s roof, sees a flash of light from a building outside the fenced in area, from the area that was supposedly cleared of all residents by the military. It looks like someone’s using a mirror to signal the folks within the perimeter, perhaps for help. Or perhaps it’s a warning.

In any case, Chris shows Travis his video of the mysterious flash, and Travis, who firmly believes that their problems will soon be over now that the government/military has stepped in, shrugs it off. Travis has ingratiated himself to the local military commander, Moyers (Jamie McShane), by helping out when a frightened neighbor locks himself in the bathroom. He eventually tells Moyers about what Chris saw, but Moyers is using the neighborhood’s streets as his personal driving range (this is what I meant by heavy handed) and blithely assures Travis that the area’s been cleared.

Meanwhile, Ofelia (Mercedes Mason), Daniel and Griselda’s daughter, has struck up a romance with a guardsman played by Shawn Hatosy. There’s the suggestion that she’s using him in an effort to get medicine for her mother, which would not be wise in this scenario, as these military types clearly have too much power over the locals’ lives.

Chris eventually shows Madison the video, and she clearly takes it more seriously, because she responds by sneaking up to the fence, cutting a hole in it and slipping through, presumably so she can go find whoever is signalling and clear up what that’s about. I might have tried a pair of binoculars first, but anyway, using her training as a high school guidance counselor, she eludes the soldiers with relative ease.

On the other side, she finds a bunch of people shot dead in the street, and they don’t appear to have been “sick” (i.e. zombies) so her suspicion about the military’s methods grows.

Meanwhile, Nick was supposed to be kicking heroin, but he has another idea. He sneaks into the house next door, where Travis’ ex-wife Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez) has been using her nursing training to administer morphine to an elderly man with a heart condition. Even though Madison complains at one point about how much time she has to spend watching Nick, and even though the elderly guy’s wife lives with him and presumably keeps a pretty close eye on him, Nick somehow gets into their house undetected, and manages to unhook the guy’s IV and use it himself, while resting comfortably under his bed. It’s a shame he’s not using his superpowers for good.

When Madison gets back from her adventures beyond the fence, she catches Nick looking for the old man’s drugs, and slaps him around. Under these circumstances, who can blame her?

Liza is helping folks with their medical needs all throughout the neighborhood, and draws the attention of Dr. Exner (Sandrine Holt of House of Cards), the pretty face of the government/military carting away your loved ones in the dead of night. Liza tells Exner about Nick’s drug problem, and later regrets it when the guardsmen come to pick up Griselda that night, and instead of letting Daniel go with her, as Exner told him they would, they take Nick against his will.

Early on in the episode, Madison makes an odd complaint to Travis about all the cooking and cleaning and, ahem, watching Nick she has to do, and wonders not why Travis isn’t helping — he has importantly manly town duties — but why Liza isn’t. Well, clearly it’s because she’s going around the neighborhood helping those with medical needs, but maybe she’s keeping that a secret for some reason. At the end of the episode, when Nick is taken away, Liza takes the mendacious Dr. Exner up on her offer to go to the medical facility and help out, in part, it seems, to look out for Nick, but Madison still tells Travis as Griselda, Nick, and Liza are carted away, “This is Liza’s fault.” It’s not that there aren’t people who would see the zombie apocalypse as a conflict between them and their significant others’ ex, but Madison seems too smart, brave (foolhardy, even) and clear-headed for that. This kind of trumped-up domestic drama seems a bit silly in this context, and Madison is not a silly character. As with the writers on The Walking Dead, these writers haven’t yet proven they have any idea how to write strong roles for women. But if they ever figure it out, they’ve got the right actor for the job.

The show ends with another effective, chilling moment, as that night Travis sits on the roof in Chris’ old perch, and watches as several flashes erupt in the house where Chris saw the mirror signal earlier. This time, the lights appear to be muzzle flashes, and the look on Travis’ face suggests that he recognizes his own culpability in what’s transpiring, as he told Moyers about the house. Hopefully, this means Trav will be pulling his head out of his ass soon. It would make for a better show.

Recommended Reading

“Fear the Walking Dead Pilot: Can It Be More?”

“Fear the Walking Dead: The Black Guys Die First”

“Fear the Walking Dead: Liberals Try to Stop Zombies with Words!”

‘Fear the Walking Dead’: Liberals Try to Stop Zombies with Words!

The audience knows so much more than the characters that at a certain point, it doesn’t work as dramatic irony anymore; it’s just frustrating.

I know I called Fear the Walking Dead reactionary two weeks ago (they took last week off for Labor Day), but I want to retract that. The show is not really conservative, in the same way that the current crop of Republican presidential candidates isn’t really conservative. It’s more radical and disturbing than a simple longing for a bygone fantasy era of law and order when everyone knew their place.

This week, tough, smart widow Madison (Kim Dickens, still doing better than the material deserves), heroin-addicted Nick (Frank Dillane, whose perpetually wild-eyed countenance and exaggerated limp are certain to get him mistaken for a zombie and shot some day), and Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) are stuck at home waiting for Travis (Cliff Curtis) as the neighbors begin eating each other. Travis is stuck in an L.A. barbershop with his ex-wife Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and their petulant teen son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie).

The barber, an El Salvadoran immigrant named Daniel (the great Ruben Blades) doesn’t seem to like Travis much, and it’s not clear why. He takes offense when Travis reassures Chris, who’s worried about the rioting and looting outside, that they won’t break into the barbershop because they wouldn’t be interested in stealing a bunch of combs. “There’s more than just combs in here,” Daniel indignantly tells Travis, thankfully out of earshot of Chris, who would probably be terrified to learn that the shop also has scissors, shaving cream, hair gel, and other loot-worthy items. In any case, the writers clearly struggled with how to introduce Daniel’s mistrust/dislike of the generally likeable-enough Travis, and ultimately failed to come up with anything compelling. So, the combs thing.

Eventually, rioters burn down the building next door, forcing Travis, Chris, Liza, and Daniel to run, along with Daniel’s wife Griselda (Patricia Reyes Spindola) and their adult daughter Ofelia (Mercedes Mason). It’s mayhem on the streets, as protesters, rioters, and looters dissolve into a violent mass, including some who have turned and are eating each other. Kind of the way the mainstream media depicted Occupy Wall Street. Cops are eating each other, too, though, adding to the madness. While Daniel wants to split away from Travis and his people (you remember, because of the whole combs thing), Griselda is injured when cops using firehoses on the protesters knock down a scaffolding. Travis offers to drive them to a hospital, but hospitals are pretty much zombie central, so Daniel convinces Travis to take them to Madison’s home.

Meanwhile, Madison and the kids are staying up late playing Monopoly. Hey, they don’t know it’s the apocalypse yet. It’s a reasonable way for a mom to keep her kids from thinking about what’s going on outside while they wait for Travis to come home. It doesn’t make sense for Madison not to tell Alicia what’s going on out there, but it’s for the girl’s own good, right, and I’m sure she won’t do anything stupid and reckless because she doesn’t understand the threat. Later, after a dog startles them, they decide to go to the neighbor’s house, because they have a shotgun, but for some reason they leave the back door wide open, which is unwise in L.A., even if you don’t know there are zombies everywhere. After they find the gun, they hear the dog barking, and look back at their house to see the zombie neighbor go in. Do zombies eat dogs? Why yes, they do. Then Madison sees Travis pulling up to the house.

In a recurring motif, Madison is too slow, or doesn’t yell loudly enough to keep someone from entering a dangerous situation. Travis goes inside, followed by Daniel and them. He finds the neighbor munching on the dead dog, and surmises, “He’s sick.” While Travis struggles to keep the “sick” neighbor from biting him, Daniel comes up with the shotgun and fires. The first shot just gives us the best gore effect so far (and that’s what this is all about, for a lot of viewers), but the second one goes straight into the brain. It’s almost like Daniel has seen those George Romero movies that don’t exist in this universe.

Travis’ compassion is clearly meant to be seen as a liability. When he finds Daniel showing Chris how to use a shotgun, he gets angry. “You know how I feel about guns,” he chastises Madison. Yes, because gun control is not a reasonable response to the insane level of gun violence in our society, but something that weak-ass people will still be worrying about in the midst of a zombie apocalypse.

And then there’s the neighbor, Susan. Susan was apparently Madison’s rock after her husband died. She tries to eat Alicia, so Madison considers braining her, but Travis has a hard time accepting that she’s not just “sick.” He convinces Madison not to end Susan, while Daniel looks on from a distance and pronounces Travis “weak.” When Ofelia tries to convince him they should leave with Travis and Madison because they’re good people, Daniel says flatly, “Good people are the first ones to die.” Well, on this show, after Black people, apparently.

The next morning, Travis, Madison and their families are set to leave town, but as they’re driving off, Madison spots Susan’s husband returning home. I didn’t catch the name of this actor, but his obliviously cheerful calling out to his wife as though he was in a soap commercial (“Honey, the airport was closed because of the zombie apocalypse! What’s for breakfast?”) was another welcome dose of unintended comedy. Anyway, Madison tries to warn him, but again, she’s too late. She needs to take yelling lessons, or something. Just as Susan is about to bite the poor guy, the army moves in and takes her out. It should be a poignant moment, after all the hand-wringing over Susan. Instead, it’s just more ridiculousness. Travis thinks the cavalry’s arrived, and they’re saved. Daniel, who probably came to this country fleeing death squads in El Salvador, knows better, yet again.

It would help if the show was more coherent and focused in its direction, and sure, if the writing were stronger, but the aesthetic problems already seem like they’re inherent to the premise. The audience knows so much more than the characters that at a certain point, it doesn’t work as dramatic irony anymore; it’s just frustrating.

Beyond that, the show’s themes are troubling. After killing off every Black character, and depicting police brutality protesters as ignorant buffoons and lowlifes last week, this week, the show slams gun control and suggests a dystopian future where the government stepping in during a crisis is the worst possible thing that could happen. Fear the Walking Dead is falling more and more in line with radical right-wing politics every week. It can only end with Donald Trump vanquishing the zombie curse while calling Travis a “loser” and selling his new book, The Art of Zombie-Killing.

Recommended Reading

“Fear the Walking Dead Pilot: Can It Be More?”

“Fear the Walking Dead: The Black Guys Die First”

How Female Characters in ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Are Represented

Outside of their relationship, the fleeting glimpses of strength illustrated in the women are immediately overpowered by their lack of emotional self control. Alicia’s weaknesses lay in her annoyance and resentment of Nick and Travis. However, Madison’s issues run a little deeper.

This is a guest post by Maria Ramos.

Recently, AMC premiered their new show Fear The Walking Dead to the tune of 10.1 million viewers. We were all introduced to a highly dysfunctional family unit living unwittingly at the outset of a zombie epidemic. The episode began with teenaged drug addict Nick (Frank Dillane), waking up in an abandoned church and discovering that his friend Gloria has eaten at least two people. As he runs away into traffic, he’s hit by a car and hospitalized. These events are also our introduction into the lives of the female characters, Madison (Kim Dickens) and Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey).

In ideal televised femininity, Madison enters the show juggling a semi-chaotic household and loving relationship with boyfriend Travis (Cliff Curtis). Her initial moments of happiness are interrupted as she and her family are summoned to the hospital for her son Nick. It is obvious she is frustrated with Nick’s addiction, but her overly haughty attitude towards the details of his accident is perplexing. She is initially portrayed as a ball of emotions, both rude and dismissive. Eager-to-please Travis steps up (again and again) as the voice of reason. Although his efforts are initially dismissed by Madison, his rationality allows Nick (who doesn’t seem to like him) to confide in him.

Alicia is Madison’s daughter. We get the sense that she has the potential to be a strong character, but her scenes are relegated to a huffy annoyance at her mother’s relationship with Travis and junkie brother Nick, as well as a puppy love relationship with boyfriend Matt (Maestro Harrell). Unfortunately, the introduction of Alicia is no more than a hackneyed down portrayal of a teenage girl with a modest case of raging angst. It’s a waste of the smart and witty nature we see glimpses of throughout the episode. It is also pretty worrying that Alicia’s relationship with her mother largely concerns the men in their lives. When she’s not offering moody wisecracks about Travis, she is complaining about Nick. The show’s failure to produce a meaningful dynamic between mother and daughter is one of the ultimate fails of feminine portrayals as documented by the Bechdel Test.

Travis is brought front and center due to his role in solving Madison’s problems, despite having a major one of his own. He is solitary in his struggle to connect with his estranged son, yet Madison surrenders to a complete reliance on him. It is also important to note that most of the male characters are well versed in her problems. With the historic premiere of the show, Madison has joined the endless ranks of emotionally delicate women needing to be saved in television. Yes, she’s a working mom and an authoritative figure at her job, but it’s a thin veil of independence written to mask her reliance on the men around her.

Ultimately, the Fear The Walking Dead pilot fails to introduce a strong female character and it’s disappointing. To be fair, its sister series The Walking Dead has suffered notoriously with this as well, despite making modest strides in recent seasons towards the equality of the females in the group. The women of Fear The Walking Dead don’t need to be ruthless zombie assassins in order to exhibit strength. The real strength of character comes from the ability to recognize and deal with their own weaknesses. One can hope the show may address this through future episodes, but it may be too early to speculate. You can catch the show on AMC through cable TV and watch as its female characters unfold (or not).

Maria Ramos is a writer interested in comic books, cycling, and horror films. Her hobbies include cooking, doodling, and finding local shops around the city. She currently lives in Chicago with her two pet turtles, Franklin and Roy. You can follow her on Twitter @MariaRamos1889.

‘Fear the Walking Dead’: The Black Guys Die First

There’s a conservative bent to much horror, but this conflation of real-life police brutality and genuine tragedy with the killing of zombies crosses a line.

The second episode of Fear the Walking Dead was an improvement, in some ways. It seemed to move a little faster, and there were some genuinely strong moments amid the show’s touted “blended” family. (Yes, Kim Dickens is a substantial talent.) But it was also one of the most reactionary pieces of entertainment I’ve seen in years.

The episode picks up right where the pilot left off. Nick (Frank Dillane), Travis (Cliff Curtis), and Madison (Dickens) are fleeing the scene of Calvin’s (Keith Powers) death and re-awakening. They race home, stopping along the way to pick up Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey). While Nick deals with withdrawal (and I have to assume that there is hours of footage of the exuberantly over-the-top Dillane, wailing and rolling his eyes back in his head, that was left on the cutting room floor), Travis drives off to find his son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie) (great, another annoyingly petulant teen!) and ex-wife Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez).

Madison eventually decides that she needs to leave, too. She heads to the school to find some confiscated meds to help Nick through his crisis. There, she runs into young, middle-aged-looking Tobias (Lincoln A. Castellanos), who dispenses more wisdom about the weird apocalypse that’s just started. What exactly is Tobias doing at the school? Well, he came to get his knife back. Yes, he went out during the zombie apocalypse to retrieve the common steak knife that Madison had confiscated from him the previous day. That must be one special steak knife. Maybe he just hates doing the dishes? He also decides to loot a shopping cart full of food from the school cafeteria, with Madison’s help.

As they’re leaving, they run into Madison’s boss, Art Costa (Scott Lawrence), the principal. Art apparently likes to spend his off days roaming around the school jingling his keys and, I dunno, investigating stuff, so yeah, he seems to have been bitten and turned into a zombie. Even though Madison’s had some experience with Black zombies, and there’s blood all over Art’s shirt, she decides to approach him and offer aid. Luckily, Tobias has that steak knife. When that fails, Madison leaps to the rescue and bashes Art’s head in with a fire extinguisher. Congratulations, Madison. You’re the first character on this new show to figure out how to kill a zombie.

After saving Tobias’ life, Madison brings him home and they wish each other luck. At this point, Gidget, my viewing companion, lamented, “All that and he didn’t even get his food.” I realized she was right and indeed, Tobias had neglected to bring all his purloined food home with him. “Who can think of eating after that?” I imagined him saying to Madison as they grimly left the school. But he might regret that decision in a week or two. Hey, at least he got that steak knife back!

Alicia, who’s mostly avoided the horror so far, wants to leave the house to check on her “sick” boyfriend, Matt (Maestro Harrell), but Nick manages to stop her by having a seizure and vomiting everywhere. “Not now!” Alicia exhorts him, but really when is a good time?

Meanwhile, Travis goes to Liza’s and eventually they figure out that Chris is at that big, unplanned protest on TV, and they go to get him. In the chaos that ensues, they find themselves caught between riot police and looters, and convince a barber, Daniel Salazar (Ruben Blades) and his family to let them hide out in his shop. We can tell Daniel is a man of high character because he insists upon finishing a customer’s haircut before closing his shop due to the end of the world happening outside.

For some reason, Travis doesn’t feel the need to explain to anyone what’s actually going on, with the dead coming back to life and everything. He’s just kind of a private guy, I’m thinking.

There’s a surprisingly effective moment at the end of the episode, when Alicia sees their neighbor across the street attacking some people, and starts to go outside to help, and Madison steps in front of the door and won’t let her leave. It’s a reasonable response, based on everything Madison’s seen, but it’s also a chilling indication of how quickly one can start to lose one’s humanity in a life-threatening crisis.

Anyway, what did I mean by “reactionary”?

Most blatantly, it’s a cliche these days that the Black characters are killed off first in horror movies and TV shows. There are Tumblrs about it and everything. The trope has been ridiculed in more than one horror film, but the creators of Fear the Walking Dead, in what seems almost a willful avoidance of political correctness, have just been killing off one Black man after another. First, in the opening moments of episode one, it was a nameless dude getting his face eaten in the church, then there’s Alicia’s boyfriend Matt, who vanishes, and then, of course, there’s Calvin, the evil murderous drug dealer wild-eyed Nick kills, multiple times, in self-defense. I thought it was unfortunate that the show’s creators made these choices, but based on how badly the original series dealt with non-white and women characters, especially early on, I wasn’t really surprised.

Episode two, though, doubles down on the trope to an extent that did kind of surprise me. First, we learn that Matt has indeed been bitten by a zombie, and is not long for this world. He nobly insists that Alicia leave him to die. The next character we see transformed is Art:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7hdK9UW8Qc”]

So that’s three Black speaking roles, and every one of the characters is a zombie in the first two episodes. That’s almost impressive in its obliviousness, assuming there isn’t some more conscious decision being made about the type of show this is. Even the homeless dude zombie gunned down by the cops offscreen (the incident that provokes the spontaneous protest) turns out to be a Black man.

Here’s an interview with the show’s co-creator and showrunner, Dave Erickson, where he essentially says that they wanted a diverse cast, and that they didn’t know who was going to die when they cast those roles. When The Hollywood Reporter is challenging you about decisions like this, you have to know you’ve done something wrong, right?

Beyond that, I found a couple of things disturbing. While Travis is on his way to see Liza, they speak on the phone. He makes it clear that he has to see Chris immediately. She launches into a tirade about abusing his visitation rights. The thing is, Travis doesn’t make a real effort to explain the situation, and under normal circumstances, she’s absolutely within her rights to demand that he limit his visits to when they’ve been scheduled, but my sense is that we’re not supposed to look at it that way. We’re supposed to see Liza as shrewish, controlling, and short-sighted. The brief scene made me wonder if the writer had gone through some sort of bitter custody battle with his ex, and I’m not prone to that type of personal speculation.

We see Chris arrive at the scene of a police shooting. Eyewitnesses are saying that the police shot an unarmed homeless man. Chris videotapes the aftermath of the shooting, and is told by the cops to turn his camera off. It’s not particularly clear why they insist on not being filmed, when the violence is already over. In any case, the mob gets increasingly upset, and again, under normal circumstances, their outrage would be perfectly understandable. They DON’T KNOW there’s a zombie apocalypse. But the show presents their actions as reckless and stupid, and then some punk rock girl zombie gets shot in the eye by a policewoman, and the riot cops show up, and all hell breaks loose. There’s a conservative bent to much horror, but this conflation of real-life police brutality and genuine tragedy with the killing of zombies crosses a line. There are nefarious reasons for the militarization of police departments across the country, and for police shootings of innocents, rooted in racism. The coming zombie apocalypse doesn’t have anything to do with it.

Key moments like this make it harder for me to enjoy the show as fun Sunday night entertainment. I imagine they’ll make it difficult for some viewers to engage the series at all. Nevertheless, I’ll be back next week with another recap.

Recommended Reading

“Fear the Walking Dead Pilot: Can It Be More?”

‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Pilot: Can It Be More?

This is more than just a “companion series” to ‘The Walking Dead’; it’s a second chance.

Fear the Walking Dead would be an idiotic title for a series if the original The Walking Dead didn’t exist. It’s even more idiotic because The Walking Dead does exist, and the people who created Fear the Walking Dead were so uncertain of our cognitive abilities that they thought they had to put the whole title of the old show in the title of the new show, or we might miss the connection. Plus, fear them as opposed to what? What else were we going to do about the walking dead?

The ad campaign, while seemingly more thoughtful than that title, is a bit too subtle — coy, even — in seeming to suggest that this new show might be kind of like Where’s Waldo with zombies. Hey, there he is in the background of those kids playing basketball! There he is down that dark hallway! My favorite is the “Footprints in the Sand” one. “Why, when I needed you most, was there only one set of footprints?” “That’s when zombie Jesus was carrying you!”

This is more than just a “companion series” (for some reason, “prequel” and “spin-off” are considered incorrect) to The Walking Dead; it’s a second chance. It’s a chance to take our beloved zombie genre in an all-new direction, correct past mistakes, and right past wrongs. They hired some very good actors for this show, most prominently Kim Dickens (Deadwood, Treme), who probably wouldn’t play a character as poorly conceived as Lori Grimes or Andrea Harrison. Or at least, I’d hope not.

What I’m getting at is, Fear the Walking Dead offered an opportunity for the creators to address the criticism of the first couple of seasons of the original series, which, if subsequent seasons are any indication, the creative people behind TWD were sensitive to, even if they didn’t quite know how to address them.

Casting Dickens certainly opened up an opportunity to feature a strong, complex woman character on the show, and setting it in Los Angeles presented an opportunity to feature Black and Latino characters more prominently and realistically than the unfortunate T-Dog. So far, though, there are no major Latino characters (Ruben Blades will make his series debut next episode), and the two most prominent Black characters on the show are either dead or missing and presumed dead by the end of the pilot.

So far, this “companion series” is mostly about the kids. Are they going after the CW audience? It might be worthwhile if they had anything compelling to say about what young people’s lives are like in 2015. So far, that’s not the case. Carl and his stupid hat are bad enough. Do we really need a Zombie Diaries or a 9021-Dead?

Dickens is fine as Madison, a high school guidance counselor who’s just moved in with her boyfriend, English teacher Travis (Cliff Curtis). There’s that horrible cliche early on, where Travis is fixing the leaky sink on his own, while Madison wants to call the plumber. We get it, “Travis is a fixer,” co-creator Dave Erickson tells us in this interview, but you might have found a more original way to spell that out for us than a routine that felt a little tired by the time they did something like it on The Honeymooners.

They both work at the school, though not much of interest happens there. There are a lot of kids and teachers out sick, but that doesn’t really jibe with where the contagion is at this point in the show. Are those people zombies already? Do they just have some idea something bad is going on so they’re staying home? Are they running for the hills? Then why do most of the locals seem so oblivious? There’s only one kid, Tobias (Lincoln A. Castellanos), who looks like he’s 35, but actually seems to have a clue. He brings a knife to school, and when Madison catches him with it, they have a chat in her office, after she covers for him with the school security guards. When pressed, Tobias expresses impossible certainty that the world, as we know it, is coming to an end. It’s like he’s already been watching The Walking Dead for five seasons. What is this kid seeing that we, the viewers, don’t see?

Anyway, solid as Dickens and Curtis are, the focus is more on Madison’s son Nick (British actor Frank Dillane), a junkie, and her daughter, Alicia (Australian actor Alycia Debnam-Carey), the kind of television-style genius/rebel who skips class frequently, and never has much intelligent to say, but is somehow accepted into UC Berkeley. Of course, Alicia has a terrible attitude toward her mom and presumed stepdad-to-be, but that’s mostly just surface teen petulance. Over the course of the episode, we see her genuine concern for her family, including her troubled older brother. Alicia has a sweet, artistic boyfriend, Matt (Maestro Harrell) who happens to be Black, so we hope you didn’t grow attached.

Nick is more problematic. Like Debnam-Carey, Dillane is a good-looking kid, kind of like the love child of Johnny Depp and James Franco, but as Nick is supposed to be a junkie living on the streets of Los Angeles, his well-scrubbed attractiveness strains credulity. Dillane overplays Nick’s dishevelment to the point of slapstick comedy, so he’s admittedly kind of fun to watch. There’s probably some tragic backstory to explain that limp, but what could explain Nick’s frequent agape looks of terror and confusion. Drugs are bad, kids, I guess.

Drugs are bad and drug dens are dangerous places, but when the hospitalized Nick tells Travis that he might have been hallucinating, but that he saw a dead junkie woman eating someone at an artfully abandoned church that doubles as a shooting gallery, Travis decides to investigate, on his own, in the middle of the night. Now, I am the type of horror movie watcher that gets annoyed at viewers who complain that the person onscreen is stupid to go outside in the middle of the night to see what that strange noise was. When you hear a strange noise outside your house in the middle of the night, you go see what it is, unless you know you are in a horror movie. Usually, the characters don’t know. Travis’ decision to traipse around a known drug den, a decrepit shithole where murder and cannibalism have allegedly taken place earlier that day, seems a bit beyond the realm of normal human behavior. That’s more post-apocalyptic behavior than pre-apocalyptic-something-kind-of-strange-seems-to-be-going-on behavior.

There are a few effective sequences, but even the real scares, as with that first zombie-chomping scene in the church, are sloppily edited and drawn-out, and the false-alarm jump-scares are waaay overplayed, as when Madison slowly walks up to the hunched over principal at school and ominous music plays (he’s just eavesdropping on his teachers to evaluate them(?)) or, worse yet, when Travis explores the church and finds, behind a door, a screaming, gibbering, terrified junkie. It’s meant to be a shock and then a relief but it’s so overblown in every aspect (other than Curtis’ performance) that it just comes off as comical.

Calvin (Keith Powers) is an interesting case. When Madison and Travis go looking for Nick, who’s escaped from the hospital after fleeing a zombie and running into traffic, they find the chipper Calvin at his parents’ house, and he does this Eddie Haskell thing where he convincingly acts like a stand-up guy who doesn’t hang with Nick much since Nick went bad. Some time later, Nick meets Calvin at a diner, where the man has been transformed into a taciturn thug, quick to decide to murder his childhood buddy Nick because Nick might have told his mom that Calvin is a drug dealer, even though Madison gave no indication that she had any idea what Calvin did for a living. Cal is a hard man, but somehow Nick, a skinny, strung-out junkie in the midst of withdrawal, manages to overpower him when Nick sees that gun that that a badass like Calvin probably should have known to keep hidden until he was ready to use it. Anyway, it’s horrifyingly unsurprising that the first major character to be killed on the show is Black. So much for progress from the original series.

It’s pretty obvious that thematically, Nick’s half-dead. That zombie-like shuffle and his demented wide-eyed looks suggest that he is very close to turning. The actual zombies on the first episode are a fellow addict, an accident victim who goes “bath salts” crazy and is shot dead by the cops, and, eventually, Calvin. It makes sense that the show would depict this contagion spreading among working and lower-class people — the discarded, the ignored, the voiceless of East Los Angeles — while the rest of the city is quick to demonize and slow to take action. That’s not what the show depicts, though. Instead, it settles for a facile metaphor, likening drug addiction and drug culture to a kind of voluntary zombie-ism. “Drugs” seems a simplistic and inapt target, and it’s certainly an inauspicious start to a series about the eventual breakdown of society.

The show’s not all bad. It has Dickens, for one thing, and she makes us care about Madison. Dillane is ridiculous, but actually genuinely fun to watch. The idea of giving us time to get to know these characters while the horror gradually ramps up could be a good one, if anyone writing this show was good at writing characters and dialogue. I still think it has the potential to surpass the first couple of seasons of The Walking Dead.