After a haphazard yet intermittently compelling first season that powered through the early stages of the zombie apocalypse, the second season looked to be the time for Fear the Walking Dead to even out and decide what kind of show it wants to be.
From the looks of this week’s premiere, ‘Monster’, Fear the Walking Dead has overcome its early-days instability and set out a long-term game plan for a substantially longer season than the abbreviated first, but in the process, it seems to have settled on a passable yet uninspiring plateau of quality.
‘Monster’, for want of a better word, is fine – competently acted, occasionally thrilling and well-shot television. However, despite reaching an impressive level of intensity early on, it mostly just chugs along at a pace that’s not terminally boring, but distinctly low-tempo nonetheless, parcelling out morsels of character development that are interesting in concept yet aren’t sufficiently developed enough to become truly compelling.
‘Monster’ certainly starts well, with a five-minute opener that captures a genuine sense of frantic fear as the family scramble to escape a burning Los Angeles while being attacked by walkers. It’s an effectively jarring way to start the episode, providing a small dose of the intense walker action that Fear has proved to be rather good at when it’s showed them on-screen while launching into this season’s aquatic setting in a style that nicely conveys the desperate need to escape land.
Despite this, like many of Fear’s big action moments, it’s not truly backed up by sound logic and context – so while it certainly looks effective and provides enough thrills to start the episode in style, ‘Monster’ skimps on actually explaining why Los Angeles is suddenly on fire so soon after the events of the last episode, meaning that some of the scene’s intensity is lost in confusion over the timing and context of this apocalyptic scene.
It’s not a huge mark against the episode, but just a little more background would have helped to start this episode in smoother style, as well as fleshing out a societal breakdown that mostly happened off-screen last season.
Once the survivors reach Strand’s yacht, Abigail, ‘Monster’ levels off to a familiar blend of character scenes amidst slowly unfurling intrigue involving other survivors.
The real problem here is that while ‘Monster’ presents some really interesting character drama such as Madison and Travis’ differing approaches to parenting, Daniel’s muted reaction to his wife’s death and Alicia’s overly revealing radio chat with a fellow survivor, but doesn’t give these subplots enough time to really make an impact, with short scenes that convey the surface-level details yet neglect to go deeper and really explore the nuance.
I’m sure these subplots will be fleshed out and expanded on as the season goes forward, but as an episode on of itself, ‘Monster’ is a frequently shallow piece of drama that presents character conflicts that really just amount to concepts that can only be expanded on for a very short amount of time before the episode has to move on.
There’s some subplots which do get enough time to make a mark, and that’s both to the detriment and benefit of the episode. Strand continues to be an engagingly enigmatic character, with Colman Domingo’s charismatic performance showing flashes of a more sinister self below the smooth, controlled surface.
Strand’s arguably the biggest mystery Fear has to offer, and it’s mostly thanks to Domingo that his opaque motivations are continuing to add continuing intrigue that’s sorely lacking elsewhere.
On the other hand, there’s subplots like that of Chris, a character who can’t quite be saved by Lorenzo James Henrie’s solid performance. He was a fairly bland and forgettable character in season one, but the death of his mother has catapulted him into a familiar brand of self-aggrandizing angst and torment that’s hopelessly unrewarding to watch – try as Henrie might, there’s just not much dramatic value in Chris’ continued moping, nor is there shock value in his unceremonious dumping of his mother’s corpse into the ocean.
Chris gets one or two decent enough scenes with Madison which aren’t quite as grounded in the deeply personal dynamics that make his scenes with Travis such a drag, but for the most part his subplot is a slog to watch due to one-note writing that renders a potentially complex character a mopey bore.
To its credit, ‘Monster’ does finish with a flourish in a solid action scene that delivers the unsettling revelation that zombies can indeed indefinitely float on water. It’s a viscerally creepy idea, and it’s portrayed extremely effectively through Adam Davidson’s capable direction that delivers a handful of really striking, memorable images as the floating walkers are juxtaposed with humans that don’t look all that different from a certain perspective.
Admittedly, it’s fuelled by questionable character choices, a problem shared by original flavour TWD, but the floating zombies are a great gimmick for the time being that provide some invigoratingly new ways to utilise a familiar foe.
‘Monster’ isn’t a bad start to season two, and there’s moments where it’s genuinely great – take Strand’s scenes or the walker action bookending the episode. For the most part, it’s distinctly middling and lacking inspiration, chugging along at a pace more typical of a mid-season episode than a premiere that should be racing out of the blocks to lay out the gameplan for the next fourteen episodes.
‘Monster’ is better than Fear at its worst, but this average, uninspiring level of quality sends the message that the creators are playing it safe and familiar, taking very few narrative risks under the assurance that brand recognition will keep the show’s ratings going well into the future.
Let’s just hope that intriguing cliffhanger, seeing an unknown and likely hostile boat jetting towards the Abigail, gives the season a bit of a kick-start…
Aired at 9pm on Monday 11 April 2016 on AMC UK.
> Buy the Season 1 box set on Amazon.
What did you think of this week’s episode? Let us know below…