Across its first 13 episodes, Fear the Walking Dead has continuously struggled to figure out just what kind of show it wants to be, and what aspects of the vast Walking Dead universe it wishes to explore in greater depth.
The conclusion to Season 2A saw the show settle on something of an answer by zeroing in on religious beliefs and spirituality in the apocalypse – how humanity seeks to give meaning to the apocalypse by imposing their own ideology onto it. Unfortunately, that conclusion came among critically rushed storytelling and hackneyed character development that saw the show’s main cast scattered to the four winds in decidedly unconvincing fashion.
The mid-season finale did some serious damage to Fear the Walking Dead’s steady progress and set it back a long way, so it’s perhaps not surprising that this week’s mid-season premiere, ‘Grotesque’, took little more than baby steps. The premise here was simple, focusing solely on Nick’s 100-mile journey from the Baja house to a community in Tijuana with a very sparse cast of guest characters.
A road trip episode is just about as safe territory as a Walking Dead show can get, and that’s reflected in the cautious, low-ambition feel of ‘Grotesque’, which really doesn’t push the boat out very far in terms of storytelling innovation or major advancements in the season’s ongoing plot.
It’s low on intensity, relying mainly on impressive visuals and modest character insights into Nick’s back-story with the odd sprinkling of shock value and gratuitous gore and never rising above a very sedate pace.
Nonetheless, despite the very tentative feel to the proceedings, ‘Grotesque’ accomplished its task in getting Fear back to meat-and-potatoes basics. Nick’s decision to abandon his family and strike out on his own was a particularly egregious example of the mid-season finale’s rushed, shallow storytelling, but thankfully ‘Grotesque’ went a long way to providing an understandable justification for his actions via a set of flashbacks into Nick’s time at rehab.
Flashbacks can be lazy and uninspired ways to dole out information we already kind of knew as ‘character development’, but Fear has gradually found a knack for making back-story into compelling and unpredictable drama in its own right (the season highlight, ‘Blood in the Streets’, was rife with them), and ‘Grotesque’ once again highlights that proficiency.
Anchored by a performance by Frank Dillane that mixes a typically taut, tense feeling of Nick teetering on the precipice of addiction with a rawer and more honest vulnerability in his scenes with Madison, the flashbacks greatly enhance the previously vague idea that Nick has always been somewhat adrift emotionally.
The flashbacks, briskly and densely executed to avoid meandering off into extraneous material that doesn’t relate to Nick’s journey, really provide a powerful sense of Nick as an ultimately good-hearted figure losing total faith in the idea of a lasting and reliable human connection, retreating to the quick fix of drugs to briefly fill that chasm of loneliness that can never quite go away.
And while ‘Grotesque’ accomplishes this point with a daddy-issues backstory that feels pieced together from dozens of similar storylines played out on other shows (which does highlight Fear’s play-it-safe tendency to reassemble tired tropes for its main emotional stories), it does successfully answer the question that ‘Shiva’ posed but could not respond to: why does Nick find comfort among the dead?
With that revelation, Nick’s proclivity for fading into an amorphous, shuffling herd links satisfyingly to his ongoing existential fears while opening up the spiritual debate about the humanity of the walkers in a way that’s genuinely interesting but also very much grounded in simple human emotion. That spiritual debate, when posed in the last couple of episodes, always felt like a bunch of lofty questions that were fascinating in theory but garbled and confused in their execution, so it’s good to see Fear get a handle on making that debate engaging by introducing much more human and simple ideas into the equation.
For the most part, however, ‘Grotesque’ was simply passable, delivering diverting but shallow moments of horror such as the dogs attacking and the baseball bat jump scare and keeping just enough of a sense of threat going with the ruthless highway man to ensure that the episode was a little more urgent than simply just aimless wandering about the desert.
It was also interesting to see a very particular focus on the simple aim of survival as a major cause of conflict, allowing nature and its capricious tendency to serve up all kinds of trouble to serve as the real antagonist of the piece, which also ties in nicely with a renewed attempt to portray the dead as an entirely impartial blank force of nature, sweeping through the land with no discrimination and no direction.
All of these ideas were very much rife with missed opportunities – Nick’s succumbing to hunger, thirst and exhaustion never felt very urgent or constant, with Fear only dipping in and out of its commitment to his slow decline in health, and the threat of ‘las manas’ was deeply generic in its execution, with no depth or intrigue to their boilerplate remorseless evil.
‘Grotesque’ made very few active storytelling errors unlike its immediate predecessor, but it also achieves relatively few genuine successes either – unlike Nick, it’s an episode that stays in the middle of the road from A to B and very rarely strikes out to do something genuinely new.
Perhaps that’s what Fear needed now – after all, ‘Shiva’ was its riskiest and most unusual instalment yet, and that was more or less the series’ nadir thus far, so a gentle nudge back in the right direction could go a long way going forwards.
I do hope, however, that future episodes are a little denser and faster than this one – Nick’s story did need a lot of room to breathe, but the better move from here might be to intertwine the stories of the splintered groups within episodes rather than dedicating an episode to each group of people.
That way, Fear can really get moving, and won’t just keep running in place in agreeable but uninspired fashion for the rest of the season.
With this episode, the show’s back on track, but it’s going to need to gun the accelerator to stay that way.
Aired at 9pm on Monday 22 August 2016 on AMC UK.
Buy the Season 1 box set on Amazon here.
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