It’s been one step forward, one step back for Fear the Walking Dead in Season 2.
The second outing for the ‘companion show’ has been sporadically compelling, coming up with some fascinating ideas every now and then, but capitulating all too often to its tendency to opt for tired tropes, delivered at a sluggish pace. Its two-hour second season finale more or less encapsulated that feeling of running in place, as powerful drama gave way to a shapeless, uninspiring finish.
The two episodes were broadcast together, but they feel very separate in terms of quality. Of the two, it’s easily the first, ‘Wrath’, that’s the strongest. It’s by no means a classic episode, but it succeeds in places because of the genuinely strong story at its spine, concerning the final fate of Chris and Travis’ ensuing reaction.
There’s a tangible sense of foreboding and momentum as the mystery builds and Travis gets closer to confronting the two bros once and for all, and the tension in the desperate quest to keep Travis away from the inevitable culminates in a pay-off that earns the lengthy build-up towards it.
‘Wrath’ takes its sweet time getting Travis in a room with Brandon and Derek, but the result is like a pressure cooker finally giving out and exploding: it’s one of the most visceral, powerful scenes Fear has conjured up yet. A lot of this rests in Cliff Curtis’ powerhouse performance, bringing a feral brutality and rage to Travis that seems just disconnected enough from reality to make Travis’ red mist convincing – Curtis is strong enough to breathe new life into a concept that, admittedly, has been done before multiple times in the Walking Dead universe.
I’m not exactly sad to see Chris go, but ‘Wrath’ brings his story to an end that feels appropriate to his downward spiral – it’s cold, harsh and ultimately devoid of any moral, but that just speaks to how distanced Chris became from any of this show’s most straightforwardly moral characters. His refusal to listen to Travis’ reason back in last week’s episode seems almost tragic in retrospect; a way of sealing his own fate by closing himself off from the one presence who could have brought him away from his inevitable path to death.
It’s a slam dunk of a plotline, and for a time, ‘North’ can run off the momentum of that climatic moment as Madison and Alicia resolve to leave the hotel with the now-exiled Travis, leading to a confrontation with some of the hotel residents that achieves a surprising level of unpredictable tension by offering no apparent way out. Yet even within the hotel story, that momentum leaks away.
For one, some of the moment’s power is sapped by the characters’ deeply prosaic interpretation of it: yet again, it’s used as another reason to assert the tired old idea that ‘there are new rules’ and sometimes brutality is justified. That’s a clichéd idea, but it’s also a really strange interpretation of Travis’ brutality – it’s presented as mindless, animalistic violence… yet we’re supposed to believe that it was completely justified, when the scene is accompanied by a whole bunch of sympathetic characters trying to get Travis to stop?
It’s a frustrating example of Fear’s tendency to walk back its moments of boldness just so it can return to its familiar vices, and it means that Travis’ brutality ultimately doesn’t have that much significance in the long run.
At La Colonia, it’s the same as it ever was. Nick’s time at the colony always felt a bit flat and listless, inching towards some level of peril with the supermarket gang but rarely offering anything of true dramatic interest. The finale doesn’t change that, and the half-season-long threat of the Narcos comes to absolutely nothing: they remain faceless, generic villains throughout the two hours, and they die nondescriptly off-screen in a way that doesn’t even seem all that credible.
The character material fares a little stronger, and the episodes do briefly touch upon some interesting ideas of blind faith as Alejandro is (unsurprisingly) revealed to have led the Colonia through falsehood, but it doesn’t really lead anywhere. Nick’s big moment of stepping up to the plate and taking leadership is fudged, with the transition between him and Alejandro taking place off-screen in a way that prevents Fear from actually showing Nick genuinely exercising leadership (aside from… walking at the front as they move north), so his big character turn towards independence falls flat as there’s simply no power to his decision.
Likewise, the eventual outcome of the Colonia residents packing up and moving out is a completely flat plot development – it’s established early on in hour one as the only legitimate option for a group that are evidently outgunned; and as with Chris last week, the rest of the episodes become a long march towards a conclusion that has been predictably marked out.
Ultimately, the main flaw of the finale, ‘North’, is that it’s shapeless. Last season was rough, but it came up with a strong finale that closed off the season’s story and organically set up a new path for the next season with the Abigail – there was a clear direction and intent there, and a build up a climatic emotional moment with the death of Liza, despite its inconclusiveness. ‘North’, however, just plods along until it stops.
There’s no clear sequence or moment here in either plotline that feels like a full stop for the stories or themes this season has been telling, and the cliffhangers that the two stories do reach are painfully familiar, respectively putting Madison back on Nick’s trail and opening up another location that seems reasonably similar to the dozens we’ve already visited.
The Nick cliffhanger is especially uninspiring, because it follows on from a development that actually seemed like it would open up an interesting new well of stories – a story where Nick led a group across perilous territory would, at the very least, be an original place for this show to go, and would follow through upon the character changes that ‘North’ muffled through garbled execution.
Instead, we get the introduction of a new militia group, which seems like territory already well-trodden from the US army in Season 1, and it’s particularly hard to see anything other than a reassertion of the same old themes with this new plotlines.
As a season finale, this doesn’t make that many egregious missteps. Indeed, with the Travis story of ‘Wrath’, it has one of this season’s unqualified successes.
But, for the most part, this is a tepid finale. It’s dispiritingly keen to play it safe, wrapping up its storylines with unsatisfying, unoriginal conclusions that are vaguely passable but cover no new ground. Especially with ‘North’, there’s almost no boldness here – it simply brings bland stories to a bland end, and sets up Season 3 by, as ever, sticking with the small pool of ideas and themes that feel exhausted after 21 episodes.
Season 1 ended with promise for the future and an intriguing unpredictability as to what will come next, but on year on, it’s abundantly clear what the future holds for Fear: more of the same.
Aired at 9pm on Monday 3 October 2016 on AMC UK.
Buy the Season 1 box set on Amazon here.
What did you think of this week’s episodes? Let us know below…