In the fourth episode of Fear the Walking Dead, “Not Fade Away,” the military has rolled into town. The show has jumped ahead to the ninth day of the zombie apocalypse, robbing viewers of the opportunity to witness the fall of Los Angeles. Last we saw, it was mired in looters and rioters, and now a city of 3.8 million people has been completely decimated. All who remain are those in fenced-in safe zones, like the suburban East L.A. community where Travis (Cliff Curtis) and Madison (Kim Dickens) are holed up. Outside, it’s a ghost town full of tumbleweeds and corpses with bullet holes in their heads.
The decision to skip ahead was probably a wise one on showrunner Dave Erickson’s part, even if it did deprive the series of the opportunity to quickly add to the onscreen death count with scenes of mass casualties and zombie hordes. The series, after all, had nearly ground to a halt in the first three episodes, rotating through generic zombie-movie tropes and tedious games of Monopoly as it zeroed in on the first human threat of the show: The military.
Now, we’re finally getting somewhere.
This is where The Walking Dead has been so successful: Narrowing the scope to an isolated enclave, like the prison, Woodbury, or Alexandria. It allows the show to focus less on the zombies and more on those who threaten or control the safe zones, although Fear the Walking Dead has the added element of a citizenry within the community being oblivious to what’s going on outside.
“Everybody is dead,” Lt. Moyers (Jamie McShane) — the series’ most amusing and droll character, so far — tells them. “You guys are the lucky ones! So relax, count your blessings, and be nice, so I don’t have to shoot you.” Is that a joke? A threat? or both?
Considering the circumstances, those inside the safe zone are remarkably calm. Travis goes on runs, there are arguments over what color to repaint a door, and Nick (Frank Dillane) hangs out in the pool when he’s not stealing morphine from sick neighbors. These people aren’t acting like the world has fallen down around them.
Indeed, Travis — always the optimist — suggests that it’s only a matter of time before things return to normal, except for the millions of people who are dead outside the safe zone. (Travis really needs to wake up and smell the zombie flesh). It’s Madison — league leader so far in dumb decisions — who grows a spine and sneaks outside of the fence (leaving a human-sized hole in it along the way… typical Maddie). There, she discovers something as terrifying as the zombies themselves: Streets full of dead bodies. The military has been picking them off, without any concern for whether they’re infected or not. The military seems to have made a calculated decision to protect those inside the safe zones by killing hundreds of thousands of innocent, uninfected, and otherwise harmless people outside of them.
It’s a ruthless, but arguably necessary gambit. However, it leaves viewers wondering how far the military will go. They’ve essentially instituted martial law, but, as far as we know, there are no leaders providing commands. The National Guard may have simply elected themselves as leaders, and there’s obviously no one left to check their power except the zombies. In fact, zombies overrunning the safe zone may be the only way that Travis and Madison, et. al, can escape from under their thumb.
In the meantime, the military continues to engage in some shady business. They’re removing anyone who poses a risk outside of the safe zone, whether they’re infected or not. What they’re doing with them in the “hospital” 15 minutes away remains a mystery, although Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades) seems to have a clue.
“When I was young, these men from the government came to our town,” Daniel tells Madison. “They took people away. My father… went to speak to the captain to ask, ‘When will they return?’ … ‘Don’t worry, they always come home.’ And they did. I was standing in the river, fishing… and they found them. All of them. All at once. All around me. In the water.”
Salazar is also the only one who seems to understand the motives of the military. “Men do these things not because of evil, they do evil because of fear.” These “things,” it appears, include removing Nick and Griselda (Patricia Reyes Spindola) from the community, because their conditions pose a threat. The military clearly knows that people who die automatically return as zombies, and a drug addict and a woman with a badly infected foot are at risk. It would take only an overdose for Nick to start spreading the virus within the safe zone.
More menacing, perhaps, is that the military is seeking out anyone still alive outside the safe zones, and rather than bringing them into the the fenced-in communities, it’s clear from the harrowing final scene that they’re hunting them down and killing them in cold blood.
Now we have to wonder, who is the bigger threat? The Walking Dead‘s The Governor, who was evil for evil’s sake? Or Lt. Moyers, who commits evil acts out of fear? My money is on Moyers. Better the devil you know than the devil you believe to be your savior.
Maybe this is the reality check Travis has needed to mobilize his family, save Nick, and leave his ex-wife behind and let her discover for herself the real menace with which they’re dealing.
