‘We killed him. We put him down. We had to’
Finally, the day we were all waiting for arrived: Chris, the most annoying character on television since the cancellation of the Teletubbies, is dead. But Chris’s fate was oddly unfulfilling, seen only in Travis’s imagination and clouded by Brandon and Derek, slimeballs to the end, and their lies about how Chris died. Only after coaxing by Travis’s fists do they confess that they shot him after his injury, just as they did their friend James, back on the farm. Chris’s death is ultimately a sad one, but the character also brought himself toward it by choosing crooks over his father.
Brandon and Derek’s villainy, unfortunately, turned cartoonish. The writers had a chance to make them interesting – to expand on how their youthful entitlement led them to a philosophy of perverse Darwinism. But with their racist prattle about “Mexcriment” and “border bandits”, the duo simply became stooges.
So when Travis kills the pair – a moment gory even by Walking Dead standards – there’s not much to feel besides a reaction to blood. Even the plotting was unrelentingly dull: from the moment Madison warned violence would cause exile, it was clear the rule would apply to someone she loved. That Travis would take revenge was nearly as grotesquely unsubtle as how The Walking Dead does violence.
And this week’s deaths were especially gross. No one really needed to see Travis cave Brandon’s head in with a boot, or a zombie rip a guy’s face off, or Nick dispatch an opponent by putting thumbs through his eye sockets, or Andreas try to hack into Oscar’s skull with a box cutter.
‘They’ll lose their faith’
Faith was the big theme of this episode and the second half of this season, and Nick and Marco’s plotline carried it forward. When Nick discovers the gang is going to murderously take power, he asks Luci and Alejandro to flee. They refuse – apparently on the premise that faith will save them from a dozen heavily armed men.
After Alejandro is exposed as a fraud, Luci still tries to fight for her home. We don’t know much about her history (or that of anyone in the colony), but her line “This is my home, like I’ve never known one” suggests crassly that most of these Mexican characters grew up in terrible conditions. This may have been true about Luci, but the show has never invested enough in her backstory to prove otherwise – a symptom of its biggest flaw. Fear the Walking Dead has fleshed out only a few characters to care about, unlike the original series, which at least tried to give life even to minor characters.
Madison has her own crisis of faith when Brandon and Derek show up and she realizes what probably happened to Chris. Strand convinces her not to tell Travis, for fear of how he will react, and argues that everyone needs faith to survive. The decision is disastrous, but it makes Strand’s point well.
‘We found this place. We’ll find another’
Speaking of faith, both Alicia and Nick think they can leave and find new homes, showing remarkable belief in a desolate world. So far, this show has shown them travelling from one stronghold to the next – boat, hacienda, hotel, colony. You’d think they would want to rest, rather than move on.
Alicia goes so far in her belief that she kills Andreas, and when Strand rescues her, Travis, and Madison from an unnamed assailant – who is literally and ironically wearing a red shirt – it’s Strand who stays behind. With his partner dead, his faith is spent.
“I had a chance to kill myself. I chose not to,” he tells Madison. “I wouldn’t die for him and I’m not going to die for any of you.”
It’s not clear how well the remaining hotel guests will treat Strand now that he’s let the crew escape, but he’s one of the most compelling characters left. Though Chris made for a degree of hate-watching, I don’t know that I want to watch this show if Strand isn’t on it.
‘If they follow you, there is a weight that comes’
Nick eventually convinces Alejandro and Luci to gather the people for a northward journey, and suddenly Nick seems to have messianic power over this cult of wanderers. Their faith is sadly misplaced. At the border, a militia group, apparently the same that discovered Ofelia wandering around the desert, opens fire on the refugees and hits Luci in the stomach. Hopefully the militia’s oddly disconnected storyline is not a political allegory about US treatment of migrants: Fear the Walking Dead, in all its violence and talk of justified killing, is not a good vehicle for that message.
And in a final irony, what Alejandro always preached eventually came true. When Marco and his crew celebrate their takeover of the colony, he moves the school bus away and lets the zombies loose. The dead invade to cleanse the living, as he always claimed.
It’s not quite clear how Marco immediately became a vampire when Alejandro was bitten days earlier and hadn’t turned, but whatever. He needed to survive long enough to tell Madison that Nick and the others were heading north – and to tell us all exactly where the cast will converge when season three kicks off.
