The first two episodes of the original Walking Dead spin-off are a shocking return to form. Will it last?
BY: JACOB POLITTE
Online Editor
Fear The Walking Dead: “The End Is the Beginning”/ “Welcome to the Club”
Season 6, Episodes 1 and 2
Airdate: 10/11/2020 and 10/18/2020
I was not prepared for “Fear The Walking Dead” to be this good.
The last two seasons of this show have been largely abominable. The early episodes of Season 4, way back in early 2018, showed great promise under new showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian B. Goldberg. But things quickly took a drastic dive once Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) was killed off, and Morgan Jones (Lennie James) became the focal point of a show he didn’t help to build.
The decision to make Morgan the show’s center of gravity was not the only one that drove this show off a cliff. The writing and dialogue became insufferable to sit through, none of the stories made any logical sense, and all of the character development from long-time characters like Alicia, Strand and Daniel (Alycia Debnam-Carey, Colman Domingo and Rubén Blades, respectively) was seemingly stripped away; those characters became butchered shells of their former selves. It was ungodly depressing to watch all of this great talent and potential be completely wasted.
Season 5 of this show, as I discussed in a previous Montage article over one year ago, was the show hitting what I thought was rock bottom. I was fully prepared to write this review (which for the sake of full transparency, I’m only doing because Law and Order: SVU isn’t back yet and we’re not getting more Walking Dead episodes until the spring) with nothing but negativity.
I’m happy to say I was wrong.
“The End Is the Beginning” and “Welcome to the Club” are two of the best episodes of Fear that I have ever seen, and certainly are better than anything we saw in Season 5 and most of Season 4. I don’t know what gave this show the kick in the ass that it needed, but I’m glad it happened.
“The End Is the Beginning” picks up with a very different looking Morgan in a severely weakened state. He survived the events of the Season 5 cliffhanger (I’m not going to recap that here, please don’t make me live through that trauma again), but whoever saved him did a very poor job of patching him up. There’s a bullet still lodged in his chest, and the wound from it is dangerous and infected. Even the walkers (er, rotters) don’t want anything to do with him; the smell makes them think Morgan is one of them.
Morgan is still a hunted man whether he’s dead or alive. Virginia (Colby Minifie) has hired a bounty hunter named Emile to track him down and bring her his head in a box. I don’t think anyone reasonably thought that would happen, and of course Morgan has the bullet removed and recovers with a little bit of help. But this episode as a whole was a fine showcase for Lennie James and the Morgan Jones character, even if his character has long outlived his usefulness. The old Morgan is dead, and the character has changed yet again. I will never get upset seeing Lennie James do his thing on-screen.
Long-time fans of the show will really enjoy “Welcome to the Club” as it shifts its focus to three “Fear” originals who have been greatly underserved since Morgan arrived on the scene. This is the first episode Alicia, Strand and Daniel showed signs of their old selves in a long while and I couldn’t be happier to see it. Daniel faking amnesia is a brilliant move to get intel from Virginia is a brilliant move, and his alliance with Morgan has real potential to be something special.
And of course, Strand returned to his old and selfish ways, murdering someone in cold blood and earning the trust of Virginia. He secures an important position in Virginia’s community and abandons Alicia. While this isn’t great news for his friends, it’s more in line with what Strand as a character would do. He’s an untrusting, scheming con man. He’s a better character that way.
Overall, this was a shocking return to form for a series I thought was buried six-feet-under a long time ago. Will it last though? I sure hope so, but we’ll see what happens going forward.
SCATTERED OBSERVATIONS:
- This review is being published a bit later than planned, but I would like to spoil things a bit and say that the next episode, “Alaska,” is another great installment in the series, even with all of the unnecessary tie-ins to the larger Walking Dead world. A review of that will be published soon.
- The next thing the show should do is kill Charlie. That’s right, I’m advocating for the death of a child. Alicia may have forgiven her for killing Nick but I sure haven’t.
- They could also bring back Madison. That would really kick this show into the next gear again. Sure, she supposedly died in that baseball stadium, but we never saw a body.
- I’m not sure where this show is taking place time-wise. The Walking Dead and World Beyond are taking place, ironically enough, in 2020 from all accounts. I think this show is somewhere in 2015 or 2016, but I could be wrong about that.
- I’d like to think that Chambliss and Goldberg took note of the criticism that show has received during their tenure and made changes while accommodating the story they want to tell, but they’re still on thin ice with me. Please guys, do better. Make this fun again.
