‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Episode 1.3 “The Dog” (6 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.
When a person utters the phrases “blended family” and “zombie apocalypse” in the same sentence, the outcome can’t be good. During the show’s first few episodes, the implication that these characters would try and kill each other before the zombies did was pretty evident. During this episode, we finally got to see how complicated these wildly different relationships are. If you thought that a zombie crisis would be enough to reassemble the pieces of two broken families you’d be wrong.
Last week, we left Travis (Cliff Curtis) and his ex-family with the enigmatic Salazar family and their downtown shop. During the show’s first few moments, the group makes a break for it in order to reunite with Maddy (Kim Dickens) and her kids. The first half of the episode plays out a lot like last week’s dual storyline, in which we learn that Maddy is kind of a badass, and Travis is kind of a candy ass. From the moment that everyone meets up for the first time since the zombies came to town, we begin to see how the emotional complexity of the show’s main characters is going to present a unity problem later on down the line. It’s too early in the zombie apocalypse for anyone to start pulling a Rick Grimes and threatening anyone who doesn’t fall in line, so what we see are a lot of characters who are unsure of their convictions.
The two exceptions to this rule are Maddy and Daniel (Rubén Blades), and the show only does one of them really right. Daniel seems to already be in Rick Grimes mode. When he sees Travis dissuade Maddy from putting a hammer through the zombified skull of her beloved neighbor, Salazar calls Travis weak under his breath. At some point, the show will need a character like this, but Daniel’s apparent moral flexibility this early in the outbreak doesn’t make him a tough guy—it makes him a sociopath. Maddy, on the other hand, appears to be ruthless when she has no other choice. She’s the one who is going to maintain her humanity where Daniel is going to be the one who replaces it with cruel pragmatism. There’s nothing wrong with that, but they haven’t really given him much of a character arc to work with.
Not much was happening with the younger cast members except for the general angst and irrational thinking that plagues all teenage characters with parental issues. There was an interesting moment when Travis’s son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie) tries to help Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) down from a fence only to get elbowed in the face by her. It’s a little pathetic to watch, but it does capture the seemingly no-win familial situation in which Travis and Maddy have found themselves. If it comes down to the line and Travis can save only one of them, who’s it going to be? Who’s Maddy going to save? Probably the less annoying one, so shape the hell up, Chris.
Aside from the moral quandaries that are likely to come up as the characters evolve, the writing in tonight’s episode was pretty weak. For starters, our heroes appear to think that their best bet is to load up all of their crap and head into the desert. Not a specific destination in the desert, but the desert. Yes, it would be less populated, but so would one of the many California forests, which are environments designed to support life instead of extinguish it. I feel like at least one of the characters should have an estranged relative that lives in isolation with a tuff shed full of pitchforks and animal bones. It would at least give them an actual destination. Also problematic was the fact that these people have seen bodies get shot and then get back up for more, yet remain constantly fascinated and perplexed by this phenomena. It’s a lot to process, but after seeing three or four zombies, it’s not hard to see the writing on the wall.
The episode’s conclusion with the arrival of the military could take this into an interesting direction, so I’m looking forward to that next week. At least they’ve convinced our heroes to avoid driving themselves to a painful death by dehydration and vultures in the damn desert.