With just a couple of weeks left before Fear wraps up this season, the series stalls with a slow-going episode that clumsily brought the separated characters into each other’s orbit once more.
Last week’s episode felt like one story, despite the total narrative separation of the stories at the colonia and the hotel, so it’s disappointing that ‘Pillar of Salt’, an episode that actively attempts to bring the season’s separate plotlines together, is more uneven than Fear has been in quite some time.
Typically, the coalescence of separate plotlines is a pretty exciting moment in any series, so it’s strange just how limp the linking up of the hotel and colonia’s storylines feels. Instead of providing a satisfying pay-off for all the legwork the show has put in establishing these separate stories, it just weighs down narratives that are actually more interesting when they’re entirely standalone.
Take the hotel plotline, which starts in a really compelling fashion in ‘Pillar of Salt’. The concept of building a community in the apocalypse is old hat for TWD, but Fear’s patient work in building the hotel community from the ground-up has created easily the most thematically interesting storyline the shoe has going for it right now.
It’s genuinely compelling to see this new colony tentatively rise up, pulled in several different directions by a ‘leadership’ filled with competing agendas and terse grudges, and when those disagreements are applied to an urgent situation in the form of Strand’s stabbing, ‘Pillar of Salt’ really sparks to life as a thoughtful exploration of a society that is slowly but surely mirroring the one destroyed in the apocalypse.
I hope the show finds room to keep that story growing on its own in future episodes, because it’s the kind of solid, character-based, thematically interesting plotline that this perpetually unstable show needs more of.
However, the intriguing world-building at the hotel screeches to a halt as Fear has to take a protracted detour to finally intertwine the hotel story with Nick’s time at the colonia. For one, it’s a section that’s far too long to sustain any real tension as it slogs through a meagre conflict involving a hotel resident and her criminal son that’s entirely centred around characters that we have no reason to care about.
Most importantly, though, it’s a section that’s fuelled by convenience and happenstance – the supermarket just so happens to be the nearest place to the hotel to find drugs, at which the escaped colonia family just so happen to be publicly interrogated, during which they just so happen to mention Nick loudly enough for Madison to hear.
Nothing is actually earned within this story – it’s just a bunch of shortcuts to the destination Fear wants to go, delivered unceremoniously with very little to cover up the contrivances, which makes it an unfortunately clumsy way to set Madison on a course to reunite with Nick.
It’s also problematic that Madison’s discovery appears to have set her character back an entire season, with her actions after that scene quickly becoming frustratingly irrational and impulsive. Fear has shown a lot of promise in justifying its plot machinations with real, substantial motivations, so it’s a bit frustrating to see the show regress to relying on cheap conveniences and dumb behaviour to get the characters to where they need to go.
Nick’s story has never been all that compelling or original in its themes, but the time spent at the colonia in ‘Pillar of Salt’ is especially lethargic this time around. There are some really interesting ideas in play here as the episode deals with notions of fanatical leadership and giving free will over to serve a higher authority, but it’s all delivered in such a boring, repetitive way that none of those ideas ever reach their potential.
The threats that ‘Pillar of Salt’ wants us to believe are urgent, i.e. the supermarket gang and the exodus of colonia residents, are mostly talked about a lot with actual evidence restricted to brief snippets, so it’s hard to really invest in the characters’ heated arguments about how to deal with these problems.
‘Pillar of Salt’ never really progresses beyond the basic ideas that Alejandro is a bit fanatical and that the pragmatic Nick is having trouble keeping faith, instead content to repeat slight variations on these motivations again and again without having any character actually reconsider their views.
It’s because of this that the gang’s discovery of the colonia has very little impact as a cliffhanger for this plotline – everything around the colonia and its inner workings is hopelessly thin in terms of development, and the gang are a distinctly generic foe, so Fear gives the viewer very little reason to care about what happens next.
It’s also questionable that ‘Pillar of Salt’ takes time off to present Ofelia’s back-story and journey back to the USA. It’s a perfectly well-told story, and it’s logically-told and coherent in a way that other plotlines here aren’t, but it still feels somewhat extraneous to spend significant screen-time on an arc that has no links to the other three stories ‘Pillar of Salt’ all deals with.
Perhaps this is leading somewhere, or perhaps it’s simply a bit of admin to park Ofelia away from the main stories for the time being, but within this episode’s context, it’s not all that interesting a plotline.
It’s a shame that ‘Pillar of Salt’ is so chock-full of missteps, because when the episode is good, it’s really good. Alicia’s story, for instance, continues to quietly grow into one of Fear’s most reliably interesting plotlines.
It helps that Alycia Debnam-Carey is such a compelling performer, imbuing regret and resentfulness in equal measure to a monologue with Strand that really brings clarity to the conflicted state of someone who has never really developed a reliable and beneficial relationship with someone. Her scene with Madison at the end is a great moment of catharsis, exposing Madison’s hypocrisies and obsessive focus with a son who wants little to do with her, and there’s a real sense here that Alicia is really progressing and transforming as a character in ways that are supported by her experiences.
There are just three episodes left of this season, and Fear is coming in to land in a typically inconsistent manner. ‘Pillar of Salt’ shows little of the promise of the last couple of episodes, reverting to a sluggish, low-intrigue feel where very little that happens feels particularly urgent.
Where the stories should be colliding together in time for an explosive finish, they’re awkwardly being welded to one another in really tenuous ways, just because a finale where everyone comes back together is almost certainly on the cards.
As the season heads into its final stretch, unfortunately, Fear is still dragging its heels instead of racing ahead to a conclusion.
Aired at 9pm on Monday 19 September 2016 on AMC UK.
Buy the Season 1 box set on Amazon here.
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