If there’s one good aspect to Fear the Walking Dead’s perennial inconsistency, it’s that a particular low-point is usually followed up by a rebound of some kind.
‘Do Not Disturb’ isn’t a significant uptick in quality from the disappointing blandness of the risk-free storytelling of ‘Los Muertos’, but it’s packed with enough tangible promise and encouraging plotting to constitute a bit of relief for Fear’s woes.
In a lot of ways, this is a piece-mover of an episode, going about the legwork necessary for Fear to really delve into the meat of the stories it wants to tell, so it offers few real surprises, but it’s the first episode since the return to offer a glimpse of the core stories this run of episodes is aiming to explore.
And, for the first time in a while, those feel like stories that are worth telling.
Like ‘Los Muertos’, ‘Do Not Disturb’ is bifurcated between two plots: the continuing hotel adventures of Alicia, and the long-awaited return of fan favourite characters Travis and Chris. Strangely enough, it’s the latter that offers the most intrigue this time around, despite the fact that Travis and Chris’ conflict is directly stemming from this season’s most wrong-headed character choice thus far in Chris’ rushed turn to violence.
That was a story arc that was stuffed with showy moments of shock-value violence from Chris that never made any logical sense, but ‘Do Not Disturb’ takes a couple of real steps forward from that error by focusing on Chris’ struggle through a more introspective lens.
The first good choice the episode makes in this regard is to sharpen the contrast between Chris and his optimistic-to-a-fault father, and a lot of that is simply achieved by letting the episode slow down and spend a significant amount of uninterrupted time with them on the road.
The lack of intercutting in the episode’s first post-title sequence means that ‘Do Not Disturb’ can encapsulate their complicated father-son dynamic with a volatile shift between the touching pathos of Travis teaching Chris to drive and a terser ideological debate about their two polarised views of how the future will map out.
The episode is brisk and efficient in laying out a specific debate that lays bare the gaping rift between father and son before bringing in a group of new characters who serve to exacerbate this divide.
Equally, the new group of marauders are very identikit in their characterisation which does prevent the episode from exploring more nuanced aspects of an outlook on the apocalypse that’s instead painted in broad, familiar strokes (they see themselves as gods of all they survey in the empty wasteland, a belief shared by… most villains on this and TWD).
Yet they serve their purpose well enough, which is to provide a foil for Chris as a group who have embraced their brutality, normalising it to the point where it’s a casual first resort that doesn’t require any kind of remorse.
Given that Chris’ arc suffered earlier this season from a lack of basis in his interactions with others, providing a group of people who would understandably fuel his confused lashing out for him to talk to is a simple but effective way to better justify the direction of his character.
When we see Chris comfortable in his own skin with these people contrasted with his terse manner with Travis, there’s a greater clarity about just why Chris is diving off the deep end of sanity.
This is all simple stuff, but it’s joined up, A-to-B storytelling of characterisation that’s actually substantiated and logical motivations – and considering how often Fear fails that litmus test, it’s worth highlighting when it does succeed in, simply, justifying its character arcs.
So, in that respect, it’s somewhat weird that ‘Do Not Disturb’ flubs its final clinching moment with Chris. In one respect, it’s frustrating to see Fear resort to the cheap shock of Chris suddenly killing someone again as a character turning point. We’ve seen that before, and it still feels like the show is trying to illustrate how daring it can be instead of telling a justified story.
Perhaps more importantly, though, the situation leading to Chris’ execution doesn’t justify the action. It’s framed, directly, as a revenge act for the farmer shooting one of the group – a petty and impulsive retaliation. But that would require Chris to have really formed a bond with the group, and that’s one aspect that ‘Do Not Disturb’ struggles with: the group never become a lot more than plot devices to highlight Chris’ impressionable nature and desire for acceptance, so it’s hard to really swallow that an emotional bond has been formed.
It’s a shame, because the rest of the storyline shows a desire from Fear to lean more on character interactions and drama to advance Chris’ psychological turmoil, so the shift back to unsubstantial ‘shocks’ can’t help but feel like a regression to cruder methods.
Over in the hotel, ‘Do Not Disturb’ is less compelling. Alicia’s trip through the walker-infested hotel is frequently tense, and the brief set-pieces of walkers surrounding Alicia and her subsequent daring escapes are tensely composed in order to elicit genuine, warranted suspense.
However, the road to the end-point is a little rough. The plotline is unfortunately chock-full of easy conveniences and cheap escapes – the exciting moments where Alicia is in seemingly inescapable peril are both solved by Fear pulling a new element, be that a character or an unrevealed escape route into play just when it’s convenient.
Likewise, the ongoing ‘mystery’ over whether Madison and Strand were killed in last week’s concluding walker attack is so half-hearted that the episode barely feels bothered to rack up any suspense – the couple of fake-outs we do get are low-grade attempts to fool the audience for about two minutes, and they’re so lamely conceived that it feels all the more frustrating when it’s revealed that they’re alive.
Why are they alive? How did they escape? These are important questions, but not to ‘Do Not Disturb’, which turns last week’s suspenseful cliffhanger into a deus ex machina off-screen discovery of hidden passage for which there was no set-up.
That’s an incredibly unrewarding pay-off, and it’s all the more baffling that Fear strings it out right up until the episode’s final moments, becoming an indulgence of this show’s very worst habits.
It’s clear that show can do a lot better than this, shown most clearly by the encouraging future direction the story eventually points towards.
The concept of thrusting our familiar characters into a volatile ongoing conflict existing between the hotel owner and the disgruntled residents who she betrayed is a fun one that lends itself very well to the kind of drama that can’t be elicited through cheap shocks and schlocky horror.
And while the character of Elena the manager, introduced here, adheres mostly to the familiar archetype of the tortured coward (see Father Gabriel from TWD), there’s an interesting undercurrent of sheer emptiness within the futility of her cowardly action.
The fact that her critical choice was not just a morally bankrupt action but a total failure is a much darker take on the kind of moral choices that are this universe’s bread and butter than we typically see, so it’s a promising angle to come at the familiar topic of a morality piece centred around the value of human life.
‘Do Not Disturb’ doesn’t fix Fear’s continuing malaise, because the central issues of frequently unjustified character beats and corner-cutting storytelling are clearly still plaguing the episode throughout. Rather, it puts the stabilisers on for a show hanging in the balance and briskly sets out enough of a road-map for the future that it’s possible to see the inherently interesting thematic points that the show is trying to make.
‘Do Not Disturb’ shows clear evidence of a better grasp of basic set up and pay off storytelling with a few glimpses of genuine, even subversive ambition off in the horizon. For the time being, that’s enough – but to really turn itself around, Fear is going to need to take this groundwork and rewardingly build upon it, while kicking up its ability to actually surprise along the way.
If it can do that, then perhaps it’s really beginning to learn from its past mistakes, and actually rectify them.
Aired at 9pm on Monday 5 September 2016 on AMC UK.
Buy the Season 1 box set on Amazon here.
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