After a relatively pedestrian set-up episode, Fear the Walking Dead went a little bit crazy for its mid-season finale, and not entirely in a good way.
Fear the Walking Dead is a show that can afford to be cautious and risk-free in its storytelling – due to the in-built brand recognition that gives it stronger ratings than most broadcast shows, the show has been relieved of the need to be wholly compelling and unpredictable on its own merits.
‘Sicut Cervus’ last week was a prime example of Fear’s free pass for low-tempo, sedate storytelling – distinctly workmanlike, far from genuinely great, but acceptable at getting from A to B in a way that was consistent with the show’s internal logic and established characters. Fear has innovated a great deal more in its second season with some original, thought-provoking stories, but it’s generally played it safe with plotlines that are relatively familiar from the established template provided by the source material.
With that in mind, it’s somewhat surprising that Fear has delivered an episode as downright unusual as ‘Shiva’, in which no less than three of our familiar group members undergo a complete psychological transformation in ways that are barely justified by what came before, and where a location and villain that looked to form the backbone of the season’s second half quite literally went up in smoke in surreally short time.
‘Shiva’ has a lot of interesting ideas, and its commitment towards really committing to a dark, twisted ending to this season is admirable on paper, but it’s simply unable to turn these ideas into compelling and logically sound television – instead, it comes out as an unfortunately abstract and garbled instalment that crashes a lot of the good work Fear has been doing this season.
Take Daniel, whose psychological breakdown continued to accelerate here. His sudden burst of madness last week never felt credible, and ‘Shiva’ does very little more here to justify exactly why Daniel has broken down. To his credit, Ruben Blades does very well with the sparse material he’s handled, convincingly portraying Daniel’s complete spiral into irrationality and then hallucination with sensitivity and finesse, but Blades’ performance doesn’t make up for the fact that this feels like character development on rails.
The whole plot pivots around Griselda, Daniel’s wife who died towards the end of last season, but that’s a shaky fulcrum from which to hang the storyline because Griselda was both poorly developed and thinly sketched while she was alive, feeling distinctly surplus to requirements, and has barely been mentioned since until Fear arbitrarily decided that her demise would heavily contribute to Daniel’s complete deterioration.
The ending, in which Daniel sets fire to the mansion with him in it, is a great and very satisfying send-off on paper, but with the fundamentally unconvincing and rushed build-up, it rings hollow, with the choice not to show his body robbing the moment of any emotional resonance it could have had purely on its own. It constitutes a bizarrely fast derailment of a character that breaks entirely from the show’s established reality, and it’s just one of the head-scratching big swings Fear makes here.
Then there’s Chris, whose own breakdown has, to be reasonable, been a clear through-line of this entire half-season, as the show has pushed him further and further in a clear trajectory towards insanity – and that’s been justified to an extent, because the moment of his turn-around always seemed likely to come. Indeed, that moment is distinctly hinted at in ‘Shiva’, but by the point Fear commits to that, there’s a feeling of too little, too late.
Last week, Chris’ actions made some level of sense as the scared, impulsive decisions of a psychologically fragile teenager whose own descent was being enabled unwittingly by those around them. This week, his decision to hold a kid hostage and blackmail a father with his life feels completely empty, abdicating from any kind of rational logic to the point where it comes across as vapid – the show aiming for ‘look how far we can go!’ shock factor over natural, measured character development.
Fear seems to be trying to replicate the iconic descent into madness of Shane from The Walking Dead, but it’s attempted to distil that two-season arc into a few episodes. It’s been a reasonably compelling arc thus far, but ‘Shiva’ negates a lot of that good work with egregious corner-cutting that dispenses of any kind of logical context for Chris’ actions (the first time he speaks this episode is in the hostage scene, which means we have to go by the flimsy idea that his family’s rejection last episode caused him to hold a child at gun-point) in order to get to the flashy shows of evil.
When Travis commits to helping him out of this rut at the end, it’s a nice moment on its own that should hopefully bring about a more controlled storyline that doesn’t feel like a careering runaway train, but the damage has already been done, and Fear has already sabotaged Chris’ development by sapping him of the vague empathy we could feel for him as viewers last week.
By comparison to the outright breakdowns of Daniel and Chris, Nick’s transformation in ‘Shiva’ is a great deal more measured. Nonetheless, it’s similarly flawed in its construction due to the way Nick’s arc entirely lacks nuance. The common theme of developments failing to find basis in previous episodes crops up again here – though Fear at least attempts to justify Nick’s major disillusionment and decision to leave the team through linking it to his heroin addiction, an interesting and thematically rich idea, ‘Shiva’ insists on Nick buying wholesale into Celia’s crackpot philosophy despite the transparent craziness of it all.
There’s no real attempts to even provide any kind of tension as to whether Nick will choose Celia or his mother’s more pragmatic ideology, because Fear is so dead set on putting Nick on this path that his arc simply becomes a straight line to an inevitable conclusion, with no alternate forks in the road credibly offered to add an element of volatility to the storyline.
Admittedly, Nick’s character has been taken to a bold place here and there’s a lot of potential now that he’s struck out on his own, but the route from A to B, once more, feels railroaded and contrived, the illusion of naturalism entirely fading away to reveal the clear puppet strings behind it all.
In ‘Shiva’, compelling drama is thin on the ground. There’s some solid character interactions that don’t involve those three aforementioned characters – Strand, post-Abigail’s death, appears to be easing back into his affably snarky self from season one, which creates newly engaging and entertaining dynamics here.0
The idea, in concept, of the group splitting up is one that could really pay off, shaking up the show’s formula by allowing for a greater exploration of each character without the need to service all of the ensemble all at once, even if it rests upon the poor ideas served up elsewhere. It’s slim pickings on the whole, unfortunately, which means ‘Shiva’ ends up being dominated by those three botched character arcs.
Fear the Walking Dead has had a relatively decent half-season on the whole, with a handful of genuinely good episodes. There’s still a long way to go until it matches even the inconsistent quality of the parent show, and there were certainly rough spots on the way to this mid-season finale, but this run of episodes felt, generally, like an improvement on what came before, exhibiting a more cohesive and stable vision on the part of the creators.
It’s a shame, then, that Fear has gone into its hiatus with such a misfire of a mid-season finale that’s going to require a lot of repair work when the show returns in August to alleviate the strangely accelerated, barely credible character developments pulled off here.
Will Fear get back onto smooth seas, or stay on choppy waters? There’s a three month wait to find out…
Aired at 9pm on Monday 23 May 2016 on AMC UK.
> Buy the Season 1 box set on Amazon.
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