Everybody hates Chris.
Even in a cast where only half of the characters are truly interesting, Chris is Fear the Walking Dead’s problem character. He was a boring non-entity who faded into the background of Season 1, and the show’s solution to that has been to introduce a psychological breakdown arc that made Chris into a textbook whiny teenager who just so happens to shoot people unnecessarily every now and then.
So it’s no real surprise that ‘Date of Death’, an episode that places Chris’ moral quandary at its centre, is not a good episode. It was starting from a poor foundation, after all. But it’s more surprising that, given the chance to at least bring some complexity to Chris’ confounding character arc, ‘Date of Death’ doubles down on all the mistakes Fear has been making.
By leaning on an awful group of caricatures as crucial plot devices and refusing to allow any real tension about Chris’ state of mind, it squashes an already-thin character into an irredeemably awful, two-dimensional cliché. Make no mistake, this episode is bad.
The centre of the episode’s problems rest in the choice to pivot Chris’ crossroads moment around the bros from ‘Do Not Disturb’, who were introduced as enablers for Chris’ violent tendencies and very little else. These are characters that are crucial to Chris’ eventual decision to turn his back on his father and embrace his ‘true nature’, so they ought to at least feel believable, with their ultra-pragmatic ideology justified by their actions.
Unfortunately, they’re never fleshed out.
For the entire episode, they’re either annoying high school movie stereotypes who constantly seem to be mentally high-fiving one another, or outright awful people who make inexplicable decisions like rushing off to San Diego with no basis behind their actions. They’re irredeemable villains, pure and simple – the ones who execute a lifelong friend marked out as the only sympathetic one of the group and barely remark upon it.
The fact that Chris, a character whose arc rests upon the audience believing there is genuine good left in him, is so fixated upon them is totally illogical, because there is nothing redeeming about these characters – it simply makes Chris look entirely stupid that he can’t see their blindingly obvious true nature.
With Chris, ‘Date of Death’ attempts to do a kind of morality debate. ‘Attempts’ is the key word here, because it’s a debate in the same way Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump is a debate. It’s two characters stating their point of view to each other again and again, one of which is so obviously marked out as the rational choice that it seems ridiculous to take anything other than that side of the debate (I didn’t realise how close these real-world parallels were!).
Chris’ point of view is baffling, entirely comprised of empty clichés about the need to ‘do what it takes’ filtered through the lens of a pouty teenage strop, and that’s all we really get for an insight into his psyche.
There’s no nuance, no attempts to convince us of the validity of Chris’ perspective – because he doesn’t justify his own beliefs, and because the action he’s trying to justify is an unnecessary cold-blooded murder, ‘Date of Death’ just further undermines Chris as a character with whom we can share some sympathies.
If Fear let us show a glimpse of Chris’ vulnerability, of indecisiveness about the path he’s taking, then perhaps this lop-sidedness would work out, as it would become a tense story about whether Chris would learn to overcome his worst instincts.
That’s what ‘Date of Death’ purports to be, but the outcome is obvious: Chris never wavers in his beliefs, so the trajectory towards his separation with Travis is so blindingly clear that a lot of the episode just becomes a dull trudge towards inevitability.
Even the chance of a potentially daring end to the story where Travis has to kill Chris to prevent further consequences of his impulsiveness is cut off at the end, which is a particularly flat end note for the flashback scenes – an unremarkable change in the character dynamics that just reconciles the physical distance between characters with the emotional distance that already existed.
And yet, ‘Date of Death’ isn’t irredeemable, because of the mounting hints that what seems like a slog in the here and now could be building to something altogether more interesting.
Some of those hints are subtextual, such as Cliff Curtis’ committed performance in the present-day scenes that conveys a trauma and crushing regret that hints at a worse crime than his understandable condemnation of Chris, and others are more obvious – the shot of Travis in the shower, reeling from events, and the final glimpse of the bros reaching the hotel without Chris.
If this episode was pulling an unreliable narrator trick and the events that transpired were more complex than glimpsed, then that doesn’t excuse this episode – however, it does leave the promising possibility that ‘Date of Death’ is setting up a very interesting character arc for Travis after an act from which it could be near-impossible to recover from.
‘Date of Death’ seems to botch the conclusion to a long-running character arc with Chris, but if the all-too inconsequential ending is merely a falsehood to embellish Travis and cover up his crimes, then there’s a case to be made that this episode will play a valuable role in retrospect.
Next week sees Season 2 bow out with a two-hour finale, but Fear is approaching the end of its sophomore run in a less stable position than ever, thanks to a couple of episodes that have sapped the season’s momentum and derailed many of the character arcs.
However, with a whole host of dangling plot points needing to be cleared up, there’s still a real chance for Fear to make something of this tumultuous season. Let’s just hope it takes the opportunity…
Aired at 9pm on Monday 26 September 2016 on AMC UK.
Buy the Season 1 box set on Amazon here.
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