Fear The Walking Dead has been pretty awful for a long time now, and I know that a lot of fans of the show think that I am unnecessarily harsh when it comes to my criticism of the show.
But every single episode of Season 8 has been the worst of the series. Spoilers follow.
I had a small hope—a small, stupid hope—that things would get better after Morgan’s departure at the midseason break. If anything, they’ve gotten worse. In the four episodes we’ve had so far, the show has not only become more inexplicably boneheaded than ever, it’s also come up with frankly offensive scenarios that had no business ever making their way to this series.
The first was the use of teen suicide as an act of redemption, when Charlie chose to take her own life rather than be used as a bargaining chip for Troy to use to find PADRE. The message here is a dangerous one. I’m not against using suicide in fiction, but it should be handled with care. Fear’s showrunners and writers use it as a cheap gimmick. A trigger warning at the beginning of the episode doesn’t give you a free hand to use teenage suicide in such a thoughtless way.
In the most recent episode, Madison and Daniel decide—without a moment’s hesitation—to murder a small child because she misled them about the location of Alicia’s corpse and because she saw a lighthouse that might help lead her father, Troy, to PADRE.
In the first half of the season, they killed off Dwight and Sherry’s kid by having a zombie head bite it for a science experiment. It seems the showrunners only add this many kids to have them killed—or to create fake tension with the threat of them dying.
On top of these insane plot points we have:
- The continued constant use of magical walkie-talkies that can reach anyone anywhere at anytime and can be used to track someone’s location with perfect accuracy.
- An endless parade of Mexican standoffs in which one group of heavily armed survivors walks up to another group of heavily armed survivors to engage in exposition-laden dialogue (often interrupted by a third group of heavily armed survivors popping up out of nowhere).
- No sense of geography. Texas and Georgia are apparently one small region that can be traversed with ease whether in a vehicle (all of which have gas and run perfectly) or on foot. The Sanctuary is basically five blocks from Fort Worth, TX.
- German.
- Constant “just in the nick of time” coincidences when a character will show up at the right time and location to either A) save someone or B) put someone in a tight spot. This often, but not always, occurs during a Mexican standoff.
- The lack of any sort of coherent or consistent character motives. One minute Daniel wants nothing to do with Madison, the next minute he’s helping her tie a child to a tree. Strand’s character is reinvented practically every episode.
- PADRE has become some kind of bizarre MacGuffin despite us never really being shown what makes it so special or why our heroes (let alone audiences) should care about it so much, why it’s so hard to find, or what the point of it is in the first place.
- Alicia has now become a sort of Zombie Jesus folk hero, spoken of by all and sundry as though she’s the second coming of Laurent. Despite appearing to die at the end of Season 7, or at least being on death’s door, she spent the intervening years saving puppies, curing cancer and doing various other good deeds to make up for all the bad things she’s done.
- All the actors are phoning it in. I’ve laughed out loud numerous times at moments that were absolutely not supposed to be funny. Madison roaring and lunging at Troy, then at Charlie, then almost at little Tracy, had me in stitches. Almost every line is either over the top or totally wooden depending on the actor. All the dialogue is terrible. None of the kids talk like kids.
- Daniel’s mental decay is gone, miraculously. Madison needs oxygen, but only when the plot demands it. Troy is back from the dead. There’s no consistency in the plot. The scripts all feel like first drafts. Lots of stuff happens but it all feels like filler. None of the episodes drive the plot forward. The time jump makes everything messy. Fast travel. Walkie-talkies. Make up for the bad things we’ve done. You know what it is. Brain shutting down in 3…2…1…
The list could go on and on and on.
So the real question is this: Why did AMC greenlight this crap? What on earth compelled the powers-that-be to allow this to go on air? It’s a stain not just on the reputation of The Walking Dead, but on AMC as a whole. I wouldn’t put this crap on the air. If I were in charge and I were handed these scripts, once I was done laughing I’d fire whoever wrote them. Then again, I would have fired these showrunners after Season 4. It boggles my mind that this show made it a full 8 seasons when so many better shows are cancelled every day.
I’ve sent a version of this question to AMC but have not heard back from them. But I’m genuinely curious what sort of madness has taken over to allow this truly abysmal nonsense to continue. I realize the series ends this coming weekend—so maybe at this point they just threw their hands up in the air and thought “Okay, who cares?”—but I don’t think Season 8 should have been allowed to move forward in its current state. As bad as every other season was, this one is worse. You’d think they couldn’t have gotten any worse than fighting over an office building in nuclear wasteland Texas, but you’d be wrong. AMC shouldn’t have even started production with scripts this bad.
But what do I know? I’m just a pterodactyl whose intentions are good. Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.
You can watch my latest video review of Fear The Walking Dead below:
Are you playing fun drinking games with this final season? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook
Read the full article here
