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Fear the Walking Dead asks: What do you do with the time you have left?
In This Episode ...
Almost the entire episode is shot in handheld, amateur style. The gang is putting together a "recruitment" of sorts, and leaving it around town with VCRs and a walkie, instructing people to call channel four.
On the video, our group mostly shares why they have decided to focus on helping people, why they can be trusted, and that they are just regular people hoping to get back to a normal way of life. The main "plot point" of tonight's episode is when our group gets a call from a woman named Tess. She hasn't left her house in over two years, because her husband Ben thought it would be safer for them to stay put and wait for help to arrive. When their son needed an inhaler, Ben went to go find one. She can't leave the house because Ben covered the front yard with landmines and didn't tell her where they are located. But this is an easy excuse, because she has no desire to leave the house.
The group splits up and goes looking for Ben, and/or an inhaler. They find Ben -- he has become zombified -- but he has the inhaler, which they return to Tess. While they are gone, the other half of the group is trying to figure out how to fix Tess's broken fence. A small horde of zombies causes the fence to fall, and Morgan rushes in to protect her. He steps on a pressure-sensitive landmine. Tess finally comes out onto the porch to give Morgan a pin to deactivate the landmine. He manages to escape, but the mine goes off eventually. When the rest of the group returns with the inhaler, Tess finally trusts the gang and joins them.
The final act of the episode follows a young man who has been watching the video that the group has made at a roadside outpost. He is unsure whether to believe the sappy message of the group. He takes some gas from the generator to gas up his motorcycle, but as he is about to leave, Logan and his crew roll up. The young man insists he is not with the "video people," and one of Logan's lackeys shoots out the tires on his motorcycle -- then the rest of the lackeys turn the motorcycle into Swiss cheese. Logan suggests he call the video people and warn them that they are making more enemies than friends. They have "more bullets than they know what to do with."
Well-done "found-footage" style shooting
It wasn't exactly found footage, more documentary-style, but it was done well all the same. Too frequently, found-footage films rely on the audience not asking simple questions like "How did the battery on that camera stay active for weeks out in the woods" or improbable shots. This felt very well organized, realistically shot, and didn't feature any bumpy, handheld, running-through-the-woods moments.
It was kind of sentimental
And if you haven't figured this out by now, I am not one for sentiments. This whole season has been a lot more about feelings and a lot less about zombies, but the documentary style really seemed to amplify this. That said ...
Exploding zombies!
... there were exploding zombies! Watching them get blown up on landmines was pretty excellent. It yielded a lot of blood getting sloshed around (although don't get me started on why zombies have fresh blood flowing through their veins) and, even better, little bits and pieces of zombie flying through the air. This is the content I signed up for!
