'Fear the Walking Dead' recap: You're on your own
Spoiler alert! The following contains spoilers for Sunday night's episode of Fear the Walking Dead.
Fear the Walking Dead has had a rocky season -- straddling the line between striking out on its own as an original zombie outbreak television show, and paying homage to its mother show, The Walking Dead. I've had my doubts and hopes that it could break out of that shadow all season, and while I'm not sure if this episode did that, it was still a darn good episode.
The slow build-up of the family drama, the military conspiracy plotline and the awful torture scene led us to this: A riveting, bloody and edge-of-your-seats action-filled episode that was essentially what a good zombie show should be. And despite the doom-and-gloom that this entire franchise is built upon, we got a wonderfully poignant moment of quiet at the end which lifted up the entire season.
Each for our own
All is quiet on the western front, as the camera pans over a burning Los Angeles and Madison and Travis pack up their kids to flee the compound and head east. While they temporarily struggle over killing Andy and warning their neighbors about the soldiers' abandonment, they quickly put aside any moral qualms and head toward the hospital to retrieve Griselda, Nick and Liza.
At the hospital, Daniel Salazar casually strolls in front of a horde of zombies he just loosed from the arena, distracting the soldiers on guard and letting the rest of the group -- barring Chris and Alicia -- slip into the compound for their rescue mission. But because setting a bunch of zombies loose is always the best idea, everything does not go according to plan.
I know that Daniel Salazar is the resident BA that we're all conditioned to worship because he can get stuff done, but I do not like Daniel. His incredibly selfish and narrow "save yourself" mentality endangered the lives of everyone in the hospital and even his own daughter in the end. Yes, Travis setting Andy free was probably not a good idea, but that level of brutal torture for information he was probably going to give them anyway (did you see the way he was with Ophelia?) would drive any man mad.
What we lost
Daniel's loosing of the zombies turns out to put the entire hospital at risk. Though it did cancel out that whole "Oh no, are they going to make it to Liza in time?!" plot twist, it also doomed the rest of the patients. The government helicopters see the breakout of the zombies and cancel their evacuation, the zombies break through the weak chain-link fence and kill even more hapless soldiers, and the patients and inmates are all doomed to certain death. See where your one cool moment of the episode leads to, Daniel?
Liza is frantically running through the chaos, deciding against evacuating with the soldiers and running back in to save either Nick or Dr. Exner instead. But he seems to be doing just fine with Victor Strand, that impressively-dressed, even more impressively-voiced rich man who took him under his wing last episode. The two of them use their bribed key to escape the prison, leaving all the others behind, but running into a horde of zombies instead. They're cornered in a hallway behind a locked door, where, incidentally, Nick sees Travis and Madison. All their efforts to break down the door are futile, until Liza stumbles in and opens it with her key card -- also letting the ever-approaching zombies in as well. They're attacked again in the kitchen, where miraculously no one dies, but Liza and Madison do get a couple close calls. Stuck in the hospital and surrounded by a growing number of zombies, they run to the medical bay to find a desolate Dr. Exner, who tells them the way out.
Dr. Exner is this show's severely underrated character. It turns out that she actually does seem to want to save people, and is not just a government lackey. But her attempts are all for nothing, because Daniel's setting loose of the zombies lead to the calling off of the hospital's pending evacuation, and Dr. Exner, like the good captain that she is, goes down with her ship.
A world on fire
The group arrive in the parking garage to find the SUV gone (Remember? Chris and Alicia had another one of their mini subplots where they were assaulted by fleeing soldiers). And to make matters worse, a freed Andy comes up behind them with a gun cocked at Daniel, shooting a freshly mourning Ophelia and snapping something in the group's last vestige of a moral compass, Travis. And with that, the finale finally succeeds in breaking all our characters. Travis beats Andy to a bloody pulp and they leave him for dead as they drive to Strand's inexplicably still-running mansion.
The western front goes quiet again, as the group drive (that whole car setback was only temporary) past straggling zombies in the deserted LA roads. All seems well at Strand's house as Nick philosophizes, Ophelia turns out to not be too badly injured and Strand has a well-stocked boat all ready for them.
But no zombie show can end without a bittersweet note. Liza had been hiding a zombie scratch from the kitchen scuffle -- and she at least has the sense to do something about it. Madison follows her as she wanders off to the rocky coast, and she pleads with Madison to do it for her. Of course, Travis walks in on them and ends up doing it himself, finally shedding his "good man" status. It's a sad, quiet and almost poignant moment for a zombie show that prides itself in gore and shock moments. But hey, where else are you gonna get a view like this?