Fear the Walking Dead: Los Muertos
August 31, 2016 8:31 AM - Season 2, Episode 9 - Subscribe

Madison, Strand, and others move forward after the compound falls; Nick gets picked for a dangerous assignment.
posted by tobascodagama (4 comments total)
 
Took us 2.5 seasons to end up with the most obvious possible episode title for a zombie TV show set in Southern California and Northern Mexico, but we're finally here. We did it, everyone!

Apparently, the writers heard us when we refused to shut up about Z Nation, 'cause now we're bartering Oxy for supplies and there's a dude who survived a bite and set himself up as a zombie messiah.

Easy snark aside, I'm still really liking this show. It's miles better than the East Coast version. That one pretends to be character-driven, but this one actually is. Even the obligatory scene where survivors who should know better do something stupid to draw a zombie horde worked for me here, where it usually doesn't, because you could feel the weight pressing down on those characters and see how the process of losing themselves in grief and forgetting the rules of their new world was a slow, alcohol-lubricated decline rather than an arbitrary, plot-driven slip.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:36 AM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


It bothers me how much this show depends on the characters being idiots in order to move the plot along. When I enter a building, I shut the fucking door behind me, and that's just to keep out bugs and wind-blown trash. If I lived in a world full of hungry, animate corpses, I imagine that that's something that I'd be extra fucking careful about.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 2:51 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]


Easy snark aside, I'm still really liking this show. It's miles better than the East Coast version. That one pretends to be character-driven, but this one actually is.

I do like that about this. It still suffers from a lot of Idiot Ball writing, much like the original, but I don't hate these guys.

Good stuff:
* The conversation between Ofelia and Not-Lexa was pretty good all around. I loved the opening:
Ofelia: God, hotels creep me out.
Not-Lexa: The dead walk the Earth, and *hotels* creep you out?
Ofelia: I think it's the carpets.
I also liked getting into debate about the value of suicide versus hope.

* The conversation between Strand and Madison was good too. I think Strand's the first openly bi character in the franchise, with the notion of, 'I am a seducer of people.' Loved that. I also loved Madison openly regretting bringing children into a world like this. That was worth watching.

* Zombies raining from the balconies. I have often said that what keeps me watching TWD is their budget, and their creative use of it for spectacle. This is not the first time they have made it literally rain zombies, but it was creative and well executed, and I suppose I will continue to watch these as long as they put them out in the hope they'll keep doing that.

* I appreciate the web of communities that obviously exist in Mexico. That's a lot more what I'd expect out of a zombie apocalypse than the nihilistic 'every family unit for themselves and shoot everyone else' schtick in TWD proper. I've talked about it a lot before, but it remains an important distinction between the two shows for me, and it makes FTWD a lot more interesting. TWD has one ahistorical narrative, while FTWD is at least acknowledging that, hey, people will get together. Probably there will be cults and gangs and also normal people just trying to get by. I hope they don't burn all these people down - I'd rather there was a background civilization struggling to rebuild from the ground up.
posted by mordax at 4:41 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


Couple of other random thoughts:

* There's a moment of surprise when Abigail has been stolen, but that seems like honestly a really predictable turn of events?

* Is Nick's side of the story leading to quislings? Nick seemed to be heading there himself last episode, and it would explain why Alejandro was able to survive a bite.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:46 AM on September 2, 2016


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