With the mid-season finale coming up, this week’s Fear the Walking Dead focused on setting up all the cards that’ll presumably be knocked over in next week’s big instalment.
‘Sicut Cervus’ is a fairly workmanlike episode of Fear, containing the same mix of assiduously executed, mildly intriguing drama that fails to truly spark and a few, almost-grudgingly doled-out moments of walker action alongside a great heaping of philosophising about the new world order.
For every storyline it aces with surprising incision, there’s one that feels disappointingly muted, sapped of its considerable potential by journeyman execution that fails to imbue real meaning into the character drama.
Our group finally reached the fabled Baja house in ‘Sicut Cervus’, and for the time being it’s an intriguing new destination. This is primarily because of the introduction of Celia, the matriarch of the house whose ideas about the meaning of the apocalypse are genuinely intriguing to discover.
There’s a compelling dissonance to Celia’s character, in how she’s almost casually detached from reality that elevates her relatively familiar beliefs that the walker aren’t truly dead – her total lack of recognition of the destruction that her actions, such as poisoning an entire parish and locking them up as walkers, have brought about makes her a somewhat unnerving presence.
Celia may not be ill-intentioned enough to be classified a true villain, but ‘Sicut Cervus’ manages to make her a tangibly creepy threat; dangerous because she can’t even comprehend that her actions might be wrong.
Chris’ story was somewhat fumbled last week as Fear never seemed quite ready to commit to the psychological complexity of his actions, instead falling back on familiar and unsatisfying teen angst to illustrate his action. ‘Sicut Cervus’ doesn’t fully remedy that problem – Chris remains such a mopey drain of a character that his sociopathic actions often seem irritating rather than frightening – but it certainly takes some considerable steps towards a no-holds-barred exploration of the twisted darkness of Chris’ increasingly sociopathic tendencies.
‘Sicut Cervus’ handles his story in a much more nuanced manner, taking care to underline how Chris’ spiral is exacerbated and compounded by the actions of his family that can’t quite seem to grasp that Chris just wants to be appreciated.
The journey towards that ending moment is very deliberately a complete mess – people misinterpreting each other’s reactions and unnecessarily escalating hostility, a lack of communication leading to dangerous assumptions on either side of the conflict, all leading up to a classic ‘it’s not what it looks like’ moment with Chris holding the knife in Alicia and Madison’s room, a scene very deliberately crafted to illustrate the total mishandling of the situation on either side.
I’m not entirely sure how far Fear intends to go with Chris’ character, but from the looks of this episode’s smartly chaotic handling that makes everyone complicit, the best way to improve Chris’ story is to embrace the relatively untapped darker sides of every character involved, because his storyline certainly benefited from the ramping up of moral ambiguity here.
However, it’s worth noting the misses as well as the hits. The introduction of Strand’s backstory and old connections in ‘Blood in the Streets’ made for some thematically rich, compelling drama that had plenty of potential for the future, so it’s frustrating to see that Fear more or less dismantled what it had set up here.
The death of Luis is a confusingly rushed moment after a couple of episodes of building tension surrounding his animosity towards Strand, but it’s the handling of the more fleshed-out Thomas Abigail, Strand’s partner, that really doesn’t work here. It’s understandable that the benevolent, personable Abigail wouldn’t have been a very sustainable character as a regular presence so his death here is not surprising, but ‘Sicut Cervus’ fails to really bring his character to a satisfying and natural end.
Strand and Abigail’s relationship was a potentially fascinating new addition to humanise Strand, yet it’s barely given any further exploration beyond what we saw in the flashbacks, and neither is Abigail himself – ‘Sicut Cervus’ seems content to bring Abigail back just so he can die, and fails to really layer any new insights or knowledge about this mysterious figure in the meantime.
There’s a brief, intriguing dilemma sketched out for Strand as he contemplates committing suicide along with Abigail, yet the screen-time afforded to their relationship is so sparse and skin-deep in terms of drama that it’s extremely hard to buy Strand’s angst.
‘Sicut Cervus’ offers up the dilemma but doesn’t substantiate it with insights as to exactly what Abigail means to Strand, so the motivation behind Strand’s near-death movement is vague and hazy. Perhaps it’s cynical to assume complacency on the part of the writers, but there’s certainly a pervading feeling here that simply telling the viewer something is enough to make it compelling, which greatly weighs down the thin and undercooked Strand storyline.
Equally, it’s hard to really become invested in Daniel’s own psychological trauma, presumably stemming from his dark past as an interrogator, because it seems to have come out of nowhere. ‘Sicut Cervus’ expands upon the voice Daniel heard last week with an out-of-context vision of him strangling a boy, but it’s content merely to sit back on the vague hints of what’s to come, teasing out a mystery that’s tediously familiar rather than intriguing.
Mysteries like this are all well and good, but ‘Sicut Cervus’ seems to want the viewer to become invested in his struggle as if it were a typical ‘past comes back’ character arc, which is odd because so many of the crucial pieces of Daniel’s trauma are intentionally being held back.
This trauma doesn’t seem to have naturally stemmed from his actions or experiences (Ofelia refers to the loss of his wife at the end of last season as something that’s damaged him, which doesn’t explain why he seemed relatively fine before the voice moment last week), so ‘Sicut Cervus’ can only contrive forced and very obvious ways to try and get the viewer to care, such as having him freeze up when confronted with a young walker boy in a moment that feels forced into the scene merely to set-up some vague, ill-defined psychological strain that Fear expects viewers to invest in without fleshing out the details.
‘Sicut Cervus’ is a clear table-setter, and it more or less accomplishes its goal of providing obstacles for the group to surmount in the mid-season finale in the form of Celia’s imprisoned walkers and Chris’ spiralling out of control.
Yet it often feels hollow as a piece of drama in of itself, doling out workmanlike character development that lacks depth and context, and expecting it to be emotionally resonant, which makes it a somewhat disappointing episode in certain areas.
It’s put Fear in a perfectly fine place for the mid-season finale, but after seeing the great things the show can do in other episodes and even in parts of this one, it’s a shame that it’s going into a major episode at a relatively sedate pace.
Aired at 9pm on Monday 16 May 2016 on AMC UK.
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