Despite some solid episodes and unique new characters, season 4 of Fear the Walking Dead hasn’t kept pace with its promising beginning.
Unfortunately for Fear the Walking Dead, it’s in that awkward preteen phase where it’s not a lovable toddler, nor has it quite hit puberty and ‘found itself.’ It has moments of greatness that are scattered among moments where it’s so annoying you wish you could shut it off. Interesting new characters are weighed down by contrived storylines, and it’s making the latter half of season 4 feel like trying to keep a broken door closed during a hurricane.
One of the biggest complaints about The Walking Dead has been its tendency to separate characters for episodes on end. Each pairing or small group has their own side story before eventually reuniting with everyone else. At the beginning of Fear the Walking Dead season 4, it seemed the spinoff show understood our complaints. Season 3 ended with the group scattered, but season 4 began months later after everyone reunited. We weren’t subjected to the painstaking, time-wasting episodes of watching everyone’s journey back together.
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Nevertheless, it was all deceit, as the latter half of season 4 has the new group split apart by the hurricane. To a point, it’s understandable why this was done. It’s always been clear that both the parent and spinoff show is more about people than killing zombies. At their core, they’re character shows, not monster shows.
By this point, we’ve lost most of the characters we started with, and lots of new characters have been added to the group. We need time and opportunities to get to know these new people, and that’s difficult to achieve when they’re all together all the time. By separating them into smaller groups, or pairs, we’re granted quality time with them to really get to know new characters, and see how original characters grow alongside them. This way, with so many people to juggle, nobody is reduced to one-off quips, and everyone is granted opportunities to shine.
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Although the separation is a great way to evolve characters, these types of character-centric episodes only work if the stories behind them aren’t boring or predictable. Recent episodes, however, have become just that.
Obviously a zombie apocalypse show is fictional and unrealistic, but we still expect a certain level of realism elsewhere on the show to add believability so we’re not constantly rolling our eyes. More frequently though, particularly in the latest episode, Fear the Walking Dead‘s plot resolutions have become too convenient.
Start with Luciana’s story. What are the odds that the one person she runs into is the same man who started “Take what you need, leave what you don’t”? Then it turns out his dying wish is to have one final beer. How convenient that a character was recently introduced who makes beer, and of course she finds a box with said beer. But there is something poetic that the very mission he started to help people ended up helping him in the end, so maybe we can forgive this cliche.
What isn’t so forgivable though, are the odds that both Luciana and Alicia happen upon the new set of boxes that have Morgan’s radio dial. It’s also unrealistic to believe that they’ve all ended up on the same road in such a short time, after being so blown apart.
Then we must consider the Filthy Woman’s procurement of Al’s van. More specifically, how and where did she acquire so much gas so quickly, just in time for a truck chase? June and Al had so much difficulty finding gas, yet for the Filthy Woman it seems to have been no problem.
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Some episodes back, the radio signal was oddly inconsistent. The Filthy Woman’s radio picks up anyone’s signal just fine, but June couldn’t get anything along the same stretch of road. It feels an awful lot like a plot device to create a problem, when it should feel more organic.
As it stands, Fear the Walking Dead needs to figure out how to get itself back to its glory days, instead of using the same frustrating time killers and plot devices the parent show uses.
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