‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Episode 1.1 “Pilot” (6.5 out of 10) Created by Dave Erickson & Robert Kirkman; Starring Cliff Curtis, Kim Dickens, Frank Dillane, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Rubén Blades, Mercedes Mason; Sundays on AMC.
I once heard Patton Oswalt compare ‘Star Wars’ episodes 1-3 to John Voight’s balls. His reasoning for such a comparison followed that just because a person finds Angelina Jolie to be attractive, a closeup of where she came from is not as equally attractive as the end result. I liked this comparison, and it’s caused me to heavily scrutinize films or TV shows that tout themselves as prequels to an already successful property. Keeping that in mind, let’s talk about AMC’s new series ‘Fear the Walking Dead,’ shall we?
The pilot spends most of its time on our new characters and their current struggle to hold together a blended family. On what was just supposed to be a normal day for high school English teacher Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis) and his wife Madison Clark (Kim Dickens), a guidance counselor at the same school, some serious shit goes down. Zombies are involved in a roundabout way, but the real struggle is a result of Nick Clark (Frank Dillane) and his drug addiction. See, Nick has spent the night in a drug den—a creepy, derelict church—and has gotten hit by a car while trying to escape from his recently zombified girlfriend. The episode focuses on Nick’s unreliability as a narrator, since what he claims to have seen was likely a result of shooting heroin. We get snippets of Travis’s previous family—his son hates him, obviously—and a few scenes involving Nick’s sister Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), a tragically beautiful brainiac who can’t wait to graduate high school so she can leave her crazy blended family behind.
The pilot gets a few things right. It introduces our characters succinctly and with just enough depth to make us care about their upcoming fates, and it succeeds in anchoring the drama with Travis’s and Madison’s seemingly futile attempts to make a blended family work. However, the characters come across in exactly the ways one might expect. The younger members of this blended family are extremely good looking, disaffected and angsty in the same ways as every other show with teenage characters. The same goes for the older cast members. Obviously if our main character is a teacher, he’s going to be the best damn teacher you’ve ever seen (look how he engages that one kid who’s sleeping! What a wonderful human!). Ditto for Madison, who is savvy enough to have a heart to heart conversation with the weird kid who’s trying to sneak a knife into school because he’s heard things about zombies. Cliff Curtis and Kim Dickens are solid actors, and they make you believe that they really want this relationship to work for everyone involved, but thus far, it feels like we’ve seen all of these characters a hundred times somewhere else.
As far as horror goes, ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ has a few decent moments. The opening scene in which Nick sees his girlfriend chomping on the face of another drug addict is pretty disturbing. The leaked security footage that shows a seemingly deceased man on a stretcher reach up and pull a paramedic towards his hungry, undead mouth was also fantastic. There wasn’t a ton of exploration here, but I didn’t necessarily mind that. I like my zombie dramas to make me care about the characters before it puts them in danger.
Despite my reservations, I’m going to give ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ some time and optimism. It doesn’t quite have the same caliber of writing and acting talent as we saw in the first episode of ‘The Walking Dead,’ which makes me return to Patton Oswalt and John Voight’s balls. For this show to be successful, it needs to strive desperately to carve out its own niche and become amazing, otherwise it will soon get branded as a money-making scheme just like those that brought us episodes 1-3 of ‘Star Wars’ and episodes 1-3 of ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ which they called ‘The Hobbit.’ Right now, it could go either way. Let’s find out what happens together, dear readers! Until next week!