People Were Stunned By The Jaw-Dropping ‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Midseason Finale

Spoilers

We’ll have a full accounting of the two-hour midseason finale of Fear the Walking Dead in the morning, as well as an assessment of the first half of the third season, but let’s first take a moment to reflect on that ending. Whatever else one might want to say about this series — and opinion is mixed, to say the least — that was a killer midseason finale, and not an easy one to pull off. The degree of difficulty here was high: We spent the better part of six episodes getting to know Jeremiah Otto, and while there has always been a creepy racist subtext to his motivations, the writers nevertheless had to convince us to hate him enough to not only want to see him die, but celebrate it. Midway through the finale, however, there was very little doubt among our minds that we wanted the Clarks to switch sides.

Celebrate is exactly what I did when Nick popped out behind Madison and shot Jeremiah Otto between the eyes. Jeremiah’s death was a long-time coming, and for those of us who felt increasingly uneasy about how he came upon Broke Jaw Ranch, that ending was completely satisfying. There are a lot of moral gray areas on this show, as Madison and Walker have demonstrated, but when it comes to bigotry, there’s only good guys and racists.

Twitter could not agree more.

At first, everyone was like, ‘Is Madison gonna kill Jeremiah?’

https://twitter.com/pthalocyanine/status/884246471012478976

https://twitter.com/alycified/status/884246919517659138

And then she tried to convince Jeremiah to kill himself.

But he refused, and threw his own sons under the bus.

Madison, finally, lifted her gun to pull the trigger, but out of nowhere, Nick pulls out the pistol that Otto gave him and puts a bullet square between Jeremiah’s eyes.

https://twitter.com/xadorealycia/status/884247648236179457

https://twitter.com/Mastodon_70/status/884247352063733760

And then the episode ends with a strange, rock/gothic version of “Stand by Me” as Madison delivers Walker Jeremiah’s head. The reception to that song was … mixed.

https://twitter.com/charmcity1973/status/884247950364463104

However, the reception to the midseason finale, as a whole, was very positive.

https://twitter.com/Jessebellr/status/884248620157083650