Fear the Walking Dead: Season 3A
July 21, 2017 7:04 PM - Season 3 (Full Season) - Subscribe
As Fear the Walking Dead returns for Season 3, the families will be brought together in the vibrant and violent ecotone of the U.S.-Mexico border. International lines done away with following the world’s end, the characters must attempt to rebuild not only society, but family as well.
So says the beginning of AMC's summary of the season, but now that we are at the mid-season break, the rebuilding of family has meant the end of the Manawas with the death of Travis (at the hands of someone we finally meet towards the end of the half-season). The Salazars aren't brought together at all, but Ofelia and Daniel are both alive and continuing the family tradition of hallucinating about conversations with their dead or presumed dead family. Strand remains without a family. And the Ottos, the new family in the mix, turns out to be really racist and don't really make it through the half-season intact. Oh yeah, Luciana disappears about the same time Ofelia shows up, since we're only allowed one Latina character at a time this season.
If I got nothing else from this season so far, I just learned what ecotone means.
So says the beginning of AMC's summary of the season, but now that we are at the mid-season break, the rebuilding of family has meant the end of the Manawas with the death of Travis (at the hands of someone we finally meet towards the end of the half-season). The Salazars aren't brought together at all, but Ofelia and Daniel are both alive and continuing the family tradition of hallucinating about conversations with their dead or presumed dead family. Strand remains without a family. And the Ottos, the new family in the mix, turns out to be really racist and don't really make it through the half-season intact. Oh yeah, Luciana disappears about the same time Ofelia shows up, since we're only allowed one Latina character at a time this season.
If I got nothing else from this season so far, I just learned what ecotone means.
Add me to the list of those still plugging along with this. It's more about multiple story lines than getting some sort of civilisation working. The conclusion that I'm coming to is the only hope for mankind in an apocalypse is some form of dictatorship, but let's not make this political.
Cliff Curtis was fridged because he is now starring in the upcoming Avatar: The Series for the next decade or two.
Daniel's return was good to see, if only for an episode almost completely in subtitles.
I've got a few more episodes of the half-season to watch, and I guess I'll decide to continue on the basis of the last one. It's a bit plodding at times.
posted by arzakh at 6:18 AM on July 22, 2017 [1 favorite]
Cliff Curtis was fridged because he is now starring in the upcoming Avatar: The Series for the next decade or two.
Daniel's return was good to see, if only for an episode almost completely in subtitles.
I've got a few more episodes of the half-season to watch, and I guess I'll decide to continue on the basis of the last one. It's a bit plodding at times.
posted by arzakh at 6:18 AM on July 22, 2017 [1 favorite]
Honestly, I really enjoyed the 100% Spanish-only episode. As a person who studied the language for 9 years, and can read (and speak, but... slowly and not very well) Spanish, it was incredibly refreshing to see the story not be about White People's Societal Fall.
Whenever I watch subtitled Spanish stuff, sometimes I pause and re-listen or ruminate about the generalities and cultural inflections that get switched around so innocuously during the translation process. For example: There's a scene where Daniel is explaining to Efrain how he woke up magically not burned while everyone around him was basically bbq briquettes (we saw how badly he was injured, though -- just saying it's like a passage from a Jonathan Carroll novel, where you begin to question reality vs. magical realism). He says that he escaped and then the subtitles say "they didn't get me" -- but what Daniel SAYS is, "they didn't eat me."
Also, Ruben Blades is a treasure, and I LOVE hearing him speak Spanish. Everyone's accents are so different, I appreciate the variance between how he's speaking vs. say, Efrain, because El Salvador and Mexico don't share the same accents.
That said, the point about Madison is, yes, we know she's cozying up to a racist, murdering nut bar. BUT! If you've been in really awful codependent relationships, and your Spidey senses go off in the Apocalypse around someone who gives you that same feeling, many people's first thought is not "omg no," but "omg, I need to befriend this weapon."
When you're brought up in an environment where normal, rational behavior isn't helpful or rewarded, but stacking the odds in your favor, even with dangerous options, can sometimes keep you safe and alive, then yeah, you end up with the baby-faced serial killer bff. It's not a good choice, by any means.
Frankly, a lot of this season for me showed the same pattern for every survivor:
- Strand doesn't want to believe that in a world where money is worthless, he still can't bribe his way through life. Now, he has to recall his hustling powers to full form.
- Alicia doesn't want to believe that her mom would go Full Metal Prepper or brother would get sober and still not be someone she can depend on, or that she can still be snobby to the last teenagers alive who speak her language. In her mind, this isn't a new society we are creating, but a blip in the previous one. This season, she found a realistic guy to crush on and started taking inventory of her potential future. Pretty undeveloped at this point, but shows like this can't write women characters very well, IMO.
- Madison was fighting to stay on the 12-step normalcy path until Travis died, basically. Now she's falling back on her own hypervigilancy/fight-or-flight skills she learned from pops. The question is, can she reconcile these divergent instincts? We all know you can't go full HAM in the Zpocalypse without turning in Shane or Rick.
- Daniel is trying to get by in a world he understands very well using his previous life skills, but really, his biggest struggle is probably with himself. Does he want to create a new life on his own, or chase down Ofelia? She represents the new identity and softer version of Daniel that came after his time in the death squads ended. Can he be good, or will he keep throwing innocent people like Efrain up for sacrifice to protect himself? I hope we find out.
- Ofelia, funnily enough, seems to have shacked up with a guy who reminds her of her father. I'd prefer it if she struck out with Strand somehow and they showed us the rest of the FtWD landscape as a series of asexual buddy-cop adventures.
- I have no thoughts about Junkie Depp other than he's the laziest villain and junkie on earth, and that's really saying something. They need to figure something out with him or kill him off, because I can't be bothered with that guy. Hell, I can't even remember his name, and we're on season 3!
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 8:41 AM on July 22, 2017 [4 favorites]
Whenever I watch subtitled Spanish stuff, sometimes I pause and re-listen or ruminate about the generalities and cultural inflections that get switched around so innocuously during the translation process. For example: There's a scene where Daniel is explaining to Efrain how he woke up magically not burned while everyone around him was basically bbq briquettes (we saw how badly he was injured, though -- just saying it's like a passage from a Jonathan Carroll novel, where you begin to question reality vs. magical realism). He says that he escaped and then the subtitles say "they didn't get me" -- but what Daniel SAYS is, "they didn't eat me."
Also, Ruben Blades is a treasure, and I LOVE hearing him speak Spanish. Everyone's accents are so different, I appreciate the variance between how he's speaking vs. say, Efrain, because El Salvador and Mexico don't share the same accents.
That said, the point about Madison is, yes, we know she's cozying up to a racist, murdering nut bar. BUT! If you've been in really awful codependent relationships, and your Spidey senses go off in the Apocalypse around someone who gives you that same feeling, many people's first thought is not "omg no," but "omg, I need to befriend this weapon."
When you're brought up in an environment where normal, rational behavior isn't helpful or rewarded, but stacking the odds in your favor, even with dangerous options, can sometimes keep you safe and alive, then yeah, you end up with the baby-faced serial killer bff. It's not a good choice, by any means.
Frankly, a lot of this season for me showed the same pattern for every survivor:
- Strand doesn't want to believe that in a world where money is worthless, he still can't bribe his way through life. Now, he has to recall his hustling powers to full form.
- Alicia doesn't want to believe that her mom would go Full Metal Prepper or brother would get sober and still not be someone she can depend on, or that she can still be snobby to the last teenagers alive who speak her language. In her mind, this isn't a new society we are creating, but a blip in the previous one. This season, she found a realistic guy to crush on and started taking inventory of her potential future. Pretty undeveloped at this point, but shows like this can't write women characters very well, IMO.
- Madison was fighting to stay on the 12-step normalcy path until Travis died, basically. Now she's falling back on her own hypervigilancy/fight-or-flight skills she learned from pops. The question is, can she reconcile these divergent instincts? We all know you can't go full HAM in the Zpocalypse without turning in Shane or Rick.
- Daniel is trying to get by in a world he understands very well using his previous life skills, but really, his biggest struggle is probably with himself. Does he want to create a new life on his own, or chase down Ofelia? She represents the new identity and softer version of Daniel that came after his time in the death squads ended. Can he be good, or will he keep throwing innocent people like Efrain up for sacrifice to protect himself? I hope we find out.
- Ofelia, funnily enough, seems to have shacked up with a guy who reminds her of her father. I'd prefer it if she struck out with Strand somehow and they showed us the rest of the FtWD landscape as a series of asexual buddy-cop adventures.
- I have no thoughts about Junkie Depp other than he's the laziest villain and junkie on earth, and that's really saying something. They need to figure something out with him or kill him off, because I can't be bothered with that guy. Hell, I can't even remember his name, and we're on season 3!
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 8:41 AM on July 22, 2017 [4 favorites]
The conclusion that I'm coming to is the only hope for mankind in an apocalypse is some form of dictatorship, but let's not make this political.
Eh. If you didn't wanna talk about it, you shouldn't have brought it up. ;)
If you're talking about the first 48 hours of something like this, there are arguments to be made for temporary autocracy, but I don't think they're inevitable at all. Some work has been done on the topic, actually. Offhand, there's Thinking in an Emergency, which is a fascinating read on the topic of disaster preparedness in places other than the US. It's not about zombies, but zombies are just a convenient stand-in for real catastrophe anyway. The short version is that we're leaving ourselves open to dictatorship, but it's not at all inevitable.
On a longer timescale, it's my personal observation that we've had a lot of apocalyptic events in human history, and here we are anyway: in a world with tons of different kinds of government, including a huge number of democracies. In fact, some catastrophes directly shook stuff up in favor of the common people: the Black Death actually left the survivors better off in terms of bargaining power because of labor shortages. Hell, World War II was a big step forward for women in the US economy.
The truth is, the depiction of Rick and the gang as a Road Warrior style band of wandering looters who would probably be better off in a benign autocracy is actually extremely unrealistic on any kind of timescale, even one as short as the show has offered us so far. They should've been farming by, like, month six. Here at seven years into the franchise, walled communities with some kind of formal government would definitely be a thing, and there wouldn't be any good argument in favor of dictatorship besides 'maybe one guy has enough firepower to make it stick.'
Honestly, I really enjoyed the 100% Spanish-only episode. As a person who studied the language for 9 years, and can read (and speak, but... slowly and not very well) Spanish, it was incredibly refreshing to see the story not be about White People's Societal Fall.
Heh. This is a good point. I also like the implication that Mexico has it together better than we do here in the US. I wonder if that was intentional.
When you're brought up in an environment where normal, rational behavior isn't helpful or rewarded, but stacking the odds in your favor, even with dangerous options, can sometimes keep you safe and alive, then yeah, you end up with the baby-faced serial killer bff. It's not a good choice, by any means.
Hm. Maybe? If it's just supposed to be about 'pick the winning team,' then it doesn't make sense for her to turn down Walker's offer - his people look like the winning side in any conflict with the ranchers, and killing Travis was an honest mistake in what amounts to wartime.
(I grew up in some pretty rough circumstances - massive derail for a thread about a zombie show - and they taught me to be extra wary of guys like Troy because he's plainly nuts and the thing you want in a bad situation is stability. Jeremiah or Walker look like acceptable risks to me, but Troy looks like the very first guy to see about giving an 'accident' to.)
Frankly, a lot of this season for me showed the same pattern for every survivor:
I agree about everything here except Madison though, Daniel and Ofelia especially. (I would've loved for Ofelia and Strand to team up.) And yeah, they've completely failed to give Junkie Depp anything interesting to do this entire season.
posted by mordax at 10:51 AM on July 22, 2017 [1 favorite]
Eh. If you didn't wanna talk about it, you shouldn't have brought it up. ;)
If you're talking about the first 48 hours of something like this, there are arguments to be made for temporary autocracy, but I don't think they're inevitable at all. Some work has been done on the topic, actually. Offhand, there's Thinking in an Emergency, which is a fascinating read on the topic of disaster preparedness in places other than the US. It's not about zombies, but zombies are just a convenient stand-in for real catastrophe anyway. The short version is that we're leaving ourselves open to dictatorship, but it's not at all inevitable.
On a longer timescale, it's my personal observation that we've had a lot of apocalyptic events in human history, and here we are anyway: in a world with tons of different kinds of government, including a huge number of democracies. In fact, some catastrophes directly shook stuff up in favor of the common people: the Black Death actually left the survivors better off in terms of bargaining power because of labor shortages. Hell, World War II was a big step forward for women in the US economy.
The truth is, the depiction of Rick and the gang as a Road Warrior style band of wandering looters who would probably be better off in a benign autocracy is actually extremely unrealistic on any kind of timescale, even one as short as the show has offered us so far. They should've been farming by, like, month six. Here at seven years into the franchise, walled communities with some kind of formal government would definitely be a thing, and there wouldn't be any good argument in favor of dictatorship besides 'maybe one guy has enough firepower to make it stick.'
Honestly, I really enjoyed the 100% Spanish-only episode. As a person who studied the language for 9 years, and can read (and speak, but... slowly and not very well) Spanish, it was incredibly refreshing to see the story not be about White People's Societal Fall.
Heh. This is a good point. I also like the implication that Mexico has it together better than we do here in the US. I wonder if that was intentional.
When you're brought up in an environment where normal, rational behavior isn't helpful or rewarded, but stacking the odds in your favor, even with dangerous options, can sometimes keep you safe and alive, then yeah, you end up with the baby-faced serial killer bff. It's not a good choice, by any means.
Hm. Maybe? If it's just supposed to be about 'pick the winning team,' then it doesn't make sense for her to turn down Walker's offer - his people look like the winning side in any conflict with the ranchers, and killing Travis was an honest mistake in what amounts to wartime.
(I grew up in some pretty rough circumstances - massive derail for a thread about a zombie show - and they taught me to be extra wary of guys like Troy because he's plainly nuts and the thing you want in a bad situation is stability. Jeremiah or Walker look like acceptable risks to me, but Troy looks like the very first guy to see about giving an 'accident' to.)
Frankly, a lot of this season for me showed the same pattern for every survivor:
I agree about everything here except Madison though, Daniel and Ofelia especially. (I would've loved for Ofelia and Strand to team up.) And yeah, they've completely failed to give Junkie Depp anything interesting to do this entire season.
posted by mordax at 10:51 AM on July 22, 2017 [1 favorite]
Cliff Curtis was fridged because he is now starring in the upcoming Avatar: The Series for the next decade or two.
Meant to mention: thanks, guess that'd explain it.
posted by mordax at 10:55 AM on July 22, 2017
Meant to mention: thanks, guess that'd explain it.
posted by mordax at 10:55 AM on July 22, 2017
I had to laugh at the cosmonaut conversation with Strand because it was just way too close to having been cribbed from Last Man on Earth. I guess it is mildly interesting to have confirmation that the apocalypse was world-wide, but did anyone really doubt that?
According to the Walking Dead Wiki, we're now on day 52 of the outbreak. That's still one week before Rick walks up in the hospital on TWD. This half-season covered about two weeks of time. That feels really, really fast to me.
I don't think they've done a good job of conveying the amount of desperation that must be driving the Clarks (and others) to find a stable situation. What I think they could be exploring more is the tension between communities that have some history (the ranchers, the Nation) and how they integrate newcomers like the Clarks. I really liked the idea that TEOTWAWKI brought the conflict over land between the Ranch and the Nation to a head, and I like where they are going with the fights over water and how that will bring these communities into conflict.
posted by jimw at 1:06 PM on July 22, 2017 [2 favorites]
According to the Walking Dead Wiki, we're now on day 52 of the outbreak. That's still one week before Rick walks up in the hospital on TWD. This half-season covered about two weeks of time. That feels really, really fast to me.
I don't think they've done a good job of conveying the amount of desperation that must be driving the Clarks (and others) to find a stable situation. What I think they could be exploring more is the tension between communities that have some history (the ranchers, the Nation) and how they integrate newcomers like the Clarks. I really liked the idea that TEOTWAWKI brought the conflict over land between the Ranch and the Nation to a head, and I like where they are going with the fights over water and how that will bring these communities into conflict.
posted by jimw at 1:06 PM on July 22, 2017 [2 favorites]
Oh dude jimw, there's also a cosmonaut bottle episode on Z Nation.
Hilarious that it's never a NASA guy or Chinese astronaut, etc. Always a cosmonaut. Zombie shows love cosmonauts!
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 2:25 PM on July 22, 2017 [1 favorite]
Hilarious that it's never a NASA guy or Chinese astronaut, etc. Always a cosmonaut. Zombie shows love cosmonauts!
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 2:25 PM on July 22, 2017 [1 favorite]
Oh, bit of a derail re: TWD's underlying philosophy that I wanted to share -
So, I've been watching the new TV show based on The Mist, which led me to go back and rewatch the 2007 movie based on The Mist to see how the two compare in various ways.
The first thing I noticed upon rewatch is that no less than 3 TWD alumni were in this first: they had Carol, (TEAM CAROL), Dale and Andrea. So I looked at the writing credits and saw that the script was an adaptation by Frank Darabont... of The Walking Dead.
I'm still watching, and this exchange happened, so I paused it to rush over here and share:
Darabont is, notably, not writing for Fear the Walking Dead.
I feel pretty vindicated in my observations about the flawed viewpoint of TWD over the years, with the author just laying it out right there.
posted by mordax at 1:11 AM on July 23, 2017 [1 favorite]
So, I've been watching the new TV show based on The Mist, which led me to go back and rewatch the 2007 movie based on The Mist to see how the two compare in various ways.
The first thing I noticed upon rewatch is that no less than 3 TWD alumni were in this first: they had Carol, (TEAM CAROL), Dale and Andrea. So I looked at the writing credits and saw that the script was an adaptation by Frank Darabont... of The Walking Dead.
I'm still watching, and this exchange happened, so I paused it to rush over here and share:
Amanda: You don't have much faith in humanity, do you?I ran a quick search, and that exchange does not appear to be in the original short story. (I don't remember it from it, but I read it a zillion years ago.)
Dan: None whatsoever.
Amanda: I can't accept that. People are basically good, decent. My God, David, we're a civilized society!
David: Sure, as long as the machines are workin', and you can dial 9-1-1, but you take those things away, you throw people in the dark, you scare the shit out of them, no more rules, you’ll see how primitive they get. You scare people badly enough, you can get 'em to do anything. They'll turn to whoever promises a solution, or whatever.
Amanda: Ollie, please, back me up here.
Ollie: I wish I could. As a species, we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?
Darabont is, notably, not writing for Fear the Walking Dead.
I feel pretty vindicated in my observations about the flawed viewpoint of TWD over the years, with the author just laying it out right there.
posted by mordax at 1:11 AM on July 23, 2017 [1 favorite]
Right? The Mist film adaptation is such a glorious fuck-you to any semblance of a happy ending, and I loved it and felt nauseated at the same time when we finished it.
Darabont also did The Green Mile. Dude is basically allergic to happy endings.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 1:57 PM on July 23, 2017 [1 favorite]
Darabont also did The Green Mile. Dude is basically allergic to happy endings.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 1:57 PM on July 23, 2017 [1 favorite]
He really is, heh. I respect that, but I think it works better in movies than television, since TV has to dance with 'this needs to both stand alone as a story and fit into a larger narrative arc.'
(I suspect writing for TV would be maddening.)
posted by mordax at 3:32 PM on July 23, 2017 [1 favorite]
(I suspect writing for TV would be maddening.)
posted by mordax at 3:32 PM on July 23, 2017 [1 favorite]
iUnlike TWD, which posits that every kind of shelter is necessarily impermanent, (existing only to be exploded by Rick as some kind of lesson about the futility of trying),
Huh? Rick has damaged none of the settlements they have attempted.
posted by agregoli at 11:57 AM on July 26, 2017
Huh? Rick has damaged none of the settlements they have attempted.
posted by agregoli at 11:57 AM on July 26, 2017
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Overall, I liked what they were trying to do, but the execution didn't really work that well. Some specifics:
* FtWD is still portraying a semi-functional society. This is largely why I'm still on board.
Unlike TWD, which posits that every kind of shelter is necessarily impermanent, (existing only to be exploded by Rick as some kind of lesson about the futility of trying), FtWD has a large number of makeshift communities with people engaged in various somewhat believable dilemmas. I like their focus on clean water in particular - that drives the Native Americans vs. the Ranchers as much as the unresolved murders did, and it's driving a lot of action in Mexico, and... that's actually exactly what I would expect in a post-apocalyptic world. Water rights are pretty contentious and complicated even in modern, mostly-functional times.
I like that. I find it to be a much better message than TWD's bleak take on the matter. None of these communities are developed a ton, but there's enough here to feel like, hey, people are scraping by in various ways in different places.
* I actually like the idea of people splitting a lot along racial lines, but the ranch stuff is pretty gross in practice.
It's my anecdotal, layperson's understanding that in prison gangs tend to break along racial lines more than anything else. In a lot of ways, I feel like a zombie apocalypse has some similarities to that kind of scenario: you have a lot of people who are no longer really in control of their own lives. They have to imprison themselves, (witness the whole prison plotline in TWD), remain hypervigilant, engage in routine violence and so on.
It's not prison, but there are some parallels. I find the idea that people would split racially a lot to be pretty reasonable. If there were a way to test it experimentally, that's where I'd put my shiny nickel.
That said, Madison's choices here are pretty bad. I get that Walker's people killed Travis, but they didn't know that there were third parties on the chopper, and having seen Troy in action, I don't see how she could blame them for shooting first. I also don't get why she would cozy up to the psycho when there are better alternatives to ally with back in the camp. (Namely: anybody but Troy.) Very little of her plotline worked for me on any level, and I'm only hedging in case I remember something that did later.
(I also thought it was an odd choice to drive home what a racist dirtbag Jeremiah was with Ofelia's flashback, right before having Madison go all-in with him anyway. I'm not really sure what they were getting at with all that.)
* I like the frank depiction of a relationship between Alicia and Jake.
No big drama around 'z0mg they had sex.' Their entire relationship worked okay for me, IIRC.
* Lots of time wasted on Nick/Jeremiah stuff.
I don't really know where they were going with that, or what they were doing with Nick at all lately.
* Fridging Travis was an odd choice.
I wonder if Cliff Curtis just wanted off the show. I didn't wonder enough to really dig, but it was pretty abrupt.
* Victor remains awesome, but disconnecting his plotline from the others didn't have enough payoff to warrant the diversion.
I get that Victor's letting us see more of the big picture - the cosmonaut was about as heavy handed as you can get with that - but keeping him so far from the main storyline was a drag on both plots. Also, much as I like Ruben Blades, having him survive the fire was a bit much.
So... hm. Yeah. I feel like there are more good ideas here than in TWD, but they're not really doing satisfying things with said ideas - pacing's off, message is inconsistent and so on. I wish they'd get it together a little better, because this is certainly closer to what I want out of long-form zombie fiction than TWD, and that's why I'm still checking in.
posted by mordax at 11:55 PM on July 21, 2017 [1 favorite]