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?”