“It doesn’t matter how you die. You come back. We all come back.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
This week saw Fear the Walking Dead reach its first season finale, and (finally) show some action. And some zombies. You know, more than one at a time. Continue reading “Fear the Walking Dead: Season 1, Episode 6 – The Good Man”
“The game is changed. We return to the old rules.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”, as WB Yeats writes in his apocalyptic poem The Second Coming. In this penultimate ep of Fear the Walking Dead, we see that process in action, as even the Gestapo-like National Guard start to crumble and run, while the understaffed ‘hospital’ is seen to resemble the sort of battlefield infirmary you might have seen in the Civil War, complete with prison stockade. Continue reading “Fear the Walking Dead: Season 1, Episode 5 – Cobalt”
“We’re safe inside the fence. Outside, everything’s dead. Everything’s gone.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
As a neophyte, fledgling series coasting on the coat tails of its phenomenally successful parent series, Fear the Walking Dead has thus far been wildly uneven in terms of tone, style and pacing. And yet episode 4 feels like the first time the show has properly realised its USP. It’s the most unsettling ep yet – despite the fact that, for the first time in the run, there wasn’t a single zombie to be seen. Continue reading “Fear the Walking Dead: Season 1, Episode 4 – Not Fade Away”
“She’s not sick. She’s dead.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Fear the Walking Dead continues to get pacier in this third instalment, though there’s still a fair bit of the soap opera that pretty much dominated the pilot episode to the exclusion of most everything else. Like the second episode, this one follows the quasi-real time approach (with a significant gap in the middle) which is apparently going to be the show’s style – a nice way to extend a narrative that logically would be over pretty quickly otherwise. Continue reading “Fear the Walking Dead: Season 1, Episode 3 – The Dog”
“When civilisation ends, it ends fast.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Civilisation may be ending fast, but there was still fairly little plot advancement in this second ep of AMC’s cash cow spinoff Fear the Walking Dead. And yet, despite that fact, this was a much tauter, pacier instalment than the pilot, due in no small part to being told almost entirely in real time. Like 24, but with zombies. Continue reading “Fear the Walking Dead: Season 1, Episode 2 – So Close, Yet So Far”
“She was eating them!”
(SPOILER ALERT!)
There’s a fundamental problem with prequels, which is that you know how they’re going to end. Along the way, you often have to contort your story to make it fit with the pre-existing outcomes (“have the protocol droid’s memory wiped”). Of course, knowing broadly how a story will end doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyable – otherwise nobody would have gone to see Titanic (SPOILER – the ship sinks). The challenge is to get your audience invested in the characters living through what you already know is going to happen, and hopefully show some spectacle along the way. Continue reading “Fear the Walking Dead: Season 1, Episode 1 – Pilot”
“I’ve seen the army of the dead. I’ve seen the White Walkers. And they’re coming for us. For all the living.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Holy crap. If you’ve been waiting for the standard epic battle usually provided in ep9 of each season of Game of Thrones, well… it came early. And if you’ve also been missing The Walking Dead, this should have more than filled the void. Continue reading “Game of Thrones: Season 5, Episode 8 – Hardhome”
“Rick just wants his family to live. He wants all of you to live. Who he is, is who you’re going to be. If you’re lucky.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
So, I wasn’t quite accurate last week when I referred to this season finale of The Walking Dead as “double length”. AMC’s bold assertion of a “90 minute season finale” actually referred to the timeslot in which it was broadcast, with its attendant commercials. In actual fact, this ep ran for nearly 65 minutes, about half again as long as the usual 42ish. The show’s done this before, but not since the season two opener; here, though, it wasn’t to provide big budget Walker spectacle but to give some quite complex character drama room to breathe, which it did very well. Continue reading “The Walking Dead: Season 5, Episode 16 – Conquer”
“People die now, Deanna. They do. There’s times like this, when you can decide who and when – or it can be decided for you.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
After last week’s high drama, this week’s ep of The Walking Dead was a slower paced affair. But while it may not have been packed with action, the tension has never been higher between our gang and the sheltered residents of Alexandria. It hung palpably in the air, just waiting for the inevitable explosion; and when the balloon finally went up, it was no surprise that it was Rick who was the spark that lit the fuse. Continue reading “The Walking Dead: Season 5, Episode 15 – Try”
“You wanted a future. You need us for that.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
After a slowish (but still interesting) couple of weeks to ease Rick and the gang (and the audience) into its new setting, this week The Walking Dead went back to full throttle. The uneasy relationship between the newcomers and the established Alexandrians shows no sign of getting any better, with the suspicion now coming from the other side. Meanwhile, we got back to some meaty Walker action with two expeditions outside the wall that didn’t go entirely as planned, leading to some dramatic consequences. Continue reading “The Walking Dead: Season 5, Episode 14 – Spend”
Simon’s Incoherent Blog 