How would you react to slowly passing a sinking vessel, one close enough for you to hear panicked pleas for help? Before you judge Strand or Travis too harshly for their hard-line refusal to stop, ask yourself how you felt as Alicia blindly volunteered the Abigail’s location to “Jack,” over the radio. The walkers might be mostly limited to land, but the dog-eat-dog morality of the apocalypse has clearly followed them onto the water. The majority of “Monster” was about establishing the parameters of the new world at sea, which, from a security standpoint, doesn’t seem to be much better than the one the survivors left behind.
The propeller incident aside, Sunday’s season premiere demonstrates that a zombie, er, “walker” story doesn’t need to be a blood bath in order to be tense. But while it might seem inevitable that viewers would become immune to that sort of gore, it doesn’t have to be. After all, the zombies we take such delight in seeing pulverized in new, gruesome ways - this episode included a run-in with propeller blades - were once people.
We want him to understand all the new rules of his world already.Ī common, and fitting, criticism of the “Walking Dead” universe is that its viewers can get jaded or bored by the depictions of violence. Of course Chris has every right to be upset: He’s been in a room with his mother’s body for hours. There are moments that should tug at your heartstrings, like when Chris dumps his mother’s body into the water with pain masked as petulance, but those of us who are viewers of that other show must remember young Carl Grimes putting a bullet in his mother’s head and marching on resolutely. Season 1 of “Fear the Walking Dead” was stymied by a sluggish pace and the burden of introducing new characters and landscapes, even one as recognizable as Los Angeles, to a rabid audience already familiar with this world where the dead walk and the plot moves at breakneck speed. If there was a horrible earthquake, would you share water with your patently unfriendly neighbor? If “Mayday” were to come over your ship’s radio, would you answer the call? If we were in their shoes, would we know? What would we do? These questions are at the root of why actual history and imagined futures fascinate us, or at least those of us who find a perverse sort of joy in forcing ourselves to imagine dreadful scenarios. Who could blame those who assume that somehow, some time, order will be restored? It’s only because of that other show that we know this world is irrevocably broken. The audience knows the world is unraveling, of course, but only the especially savvy characters understand what they’re seeing.
When we last saw this group, it was making its way to the coast as civilization collapsed all around.
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