For a separate piece I have been working on, I have been reflecting back on the past eight seasons of The Walking Dead and the past four of Fear the Walking Dead, and while it may seem obvious, it is nevertheless striking that in the 12 seasons between the two series, easily the best storylines have uniformly originated in the pages of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead graphic novels. After this week’s Fear the Walking Dead finale, which was frankly pretty lousy, it struck me that it probably won’t matter what characters the series brings in, what showrunners are leading the operation, nor where the series is set. It starts with the story, and through four seasons, Fear just can’t compete with the tales from Robert Kirkman’s comic books.
Granted, Fear has managed to create a few solid characters (Madison, Alicia, John Dorie, and Strand), but it’s never managed to write a truly compelling arc. The first season, which tracked the outbreak in Los Angeles, was a bust; the second season, which moved to the ocean and later Mexico, never worked, either, and while the third season is the series’ most successful, it was probably the season most like The Walking Dead (with a The Governor-like villain and its giant zombie horde). The fourth season, meanwhile, started out incredibly promising — in fact, the season’s first three episodes is the best three-episode stretch of the series — but it faltered after the death of Madison, and the back eight ultimately fell on its face.
A huge reason for its failure was the use of a hurricane as a plot device to separate the characters and a villain in The Filthy Woman who officially goes down as the worst villain in the history of The Walking Dead universe. In fact, except when she had Al’s vehicle, she proved to be an almost laughably weak antagonist with a boring backstory and illogical motivations.
To reiterate, The Filthy Woman lost her husband because nobody would stop and provide him aid, so The Filthy Woman decides to … kill everyone who tries to help anyone else. She is not menacing. All she has going for her is the element of surprise, and the only reason she manages to survive as long as she has had nothing to do with her competence and everything to do with the compassion that Morgan and others have shown for her. There have been several points over the last few episodes when it would have been easy to kill her (Alicia could have; Althea had a gun trained on her; and obviously, Morgan had several opportunities), but Morgan insisted upon trying to save her. No antagonist has ever managed to stick around so long simply because the protagonists didn’t feel like killing her.
Ultimately, The Filthy Woman — a villain who manages to kill zero major characters this season (the only cast member to die in the back eight was Jimbo via zombie bite) — ends up dying not because Morgan kills her, but because Morgan lets her die. Fear doesn’t even give us the satisfaction of seeing her death. She dies offscreen.
Honestly, last week’s episode worked far better as a season finale, while this week’s episode feels more like an afterthought, a tacked-on epilogue to the season. At the end of last week’s episode, everyone had regrouped save for Althea, and the Filthy Woman had inexplicably escaped their captivity (no reasonable explanation was ever given). This week, all they have to do is find Althea and deal with The Filthy Lady. Recovering Althea proves to be exceptionally easy. She escapes the hospital using a freight elevator, finds a local news van with which to escape (although, she is inexplicably driving a police car in the very next scene), and confronts The Filthy Lady, who she could have easily shot and killed on the spot. Instead, Althea lets The Filthy Woman knock her unconscious, and despite being left outside a hospital that had been overrun by zombies only hours before, Morgan and Co. double back to the hospital and find Althea knocked out and lying on the ground apparently otherwise unscathed.
With that out of the way, all that’s left to do for the remainder of an episode that has no business running 18 minutes long is to deal with The Filthy Woman. It would have been easy if everyone had simply decided to pack up and drive to Virginia. Instead, Morgan feels he has to be the hero, so he decides to track The Filthy Woman down not to kill her, but to save her.
The Filthy Woman has no interest in being saved, and yet, Morgan still insists upon picking her up, putting her in the back of a police car, and bringing her back to the group, the very same group of people she had just tried to kill. It made zero sense. Through some harebrained contrivance, she manages to wreck the police car. The reason? Not to kill Morgan, but to prevent him from helping his friends. That’s her only motivation. Ultimately, however, the Filthy Woman tries to force Morgan to kill her, but Morgan refuses. In the end, he decides to stop trying to save her and let her die of the shotgun blast she suffered several episodes ago.
Meanwhile, somehow the episode manages to get worse, because back at that truck stop with electricity and hot coffee in Mississippi, the entire rest of the cast ends up drinking water that had been spiked by The Filthy Woman with antifreeze. It takes Morgan a great deal of time before he can inform them, via walkie talkie, that they have ingested antifreeze, but once they realize it, June notes that the only cure is ethanol. Fortunately, there is an ethanol truck out in the parking lot, but they still have to fight their way through a small horde of zombies to get to it. Alas, Althea uses her armored vehicle to mow down the horde, and in doing so, she punctures the ethanol truck with bullet holes and all the liquid spills out.
I should note here, however, that Strand takes a large container to the tanker to collect the ethanol. He is also standing next to the ethanol truck when all the ethanol begins spilling out of the bullet holes. All the zombies are dead, so there is absolutely no reason he can’t use that same container to collect the ethanol spilling out of the bullet holes. It is an entire tanker full of it! It probably takes hours to drain.
Alas, he did not. Everyone goes back inside and resigns themselves to death. However, Morgan — who has suffered a leg wound that makes it difficult for him to walk — manages to hobble for miles and miles and miles, find a car, and drive to wherever Jimbo had stashed a truck full of his beer. He collects the truck and drives it to the truck stop before everyone dies of antifreeze poisoning.
The antidote to antifreeze? Jimbo’s beer.
Yes, Auggie’s ale.
Now look: I’m not one to get too terribly nitpicky, but it would take a lot of beer to act as an antidote to antifreeze. I read somewhere that a medium-sized dog who accidentally drinks antifreeze would have to drink 8 shots of vodka every four to six hours to counter its effects. Assuming that the average beer contains about the same amount of alcohol as a shot of vodka, that means that Charlie — about twice the size of a medium-sized dog — would have to drink 16 beers every four to six hours. It might save her from antifreeze poisoning, but she would die of alcohol poisoning.
Nevertheless, it works. They all drink a ton of Jimbo’s beer and survive, so now they’re off to Alexandria as previously planned, right? Wrong, because Fear throws us a curveball. Instead of going back to Virginia, Morgan decides that he’d prefer to stick around and restart Polar Bear’s operation, working out of a denim factory. That’s right: It looks like next season, they’re going to turn a denim factory into a new community that provides boxes of life-saving materials to strangers. Basically, they’re going to become the Goodwill of the apocalypse.
At this point, the best thing that could happen to Fear is if Robert Kirkman starts writing Fear the Walking Dead comics so that the writers can lift his stories, because the back half of this season was a dog, and it’s become increasingly clear that the only person well equipped to write for The Walking Dead universe is the guy who created The Walking Dead universe.
