At a key moment in this week's Fear the Walking Dead, Travis and his reluctant ally Daniel Salazar debate what to do with the corpse of a zombie they've killed. Daniel wants to burn the body to ensure that the infection doesn't spread; Travis wants to give the body a proper burial.
"I understand. You knew this man," says Daniel.
"Yeah, I did. He didn't deserve this," says Travis.
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The scene ends before Daniel can deliver the obvious retort: Deserve has nothing to do with it. And that's a key lesson of "The Dog," which is easily the best episode of Fear yet. We're starting to see just how unprepared our group of survivors is for the apocalypse that has landed on their doorstep.
The script for "The Dog" was written by Jack LoGiudice, who happens to be the co-writer of the original Walking Dead's third episode, which reunited Rick Grimes with his wife and son. "The Dog" follows a similar arc, bringing Travis and Madison together while hinting at the external pressures that could gradually erode their relationship.
"The Dog" picks up right where "So Close, Yet So Far" left off. Travis, his ex-wife Liza, and their son Chris have taken refuge from the anti-L.A.P.D. riots in the shuttered barbershop of Daniel Salazar. Across town, Madison and her children are sitting around, playing Monopoly, and waiting for Travis to return so they can all evacuate the city together. Despite his utter distaste for guns — which extends to refusing to let his son Chris learn how to load and fire one, despite his recent encounter with a zombie — Travis eventually manages to make it back, with his family and the Salazars in tow.
As usual for The Walking Dead, the episode's most chilling moments chronicled society's breakdown in painstaking detail. Seeking medical help for Griselda Salazar's foot, which is mangled as they flee the barbershop, Travis does what most rational U.S. citizens would do: Drive her to the hospital. But in these early days of the zombie apocalypse, the rules have flipped. The first wave of infected people — who were presumably brought to the hospital by their well-intentioned families and friends — have fully converted into zombies, killing off desperately needed medical professionals and cutting off access to desperately needed medical supplies.
None of this is depicted outright — it's merely implied in a few glimpses of heavily armed police officers confronting zombies in hospital gowns. But the larger story implied by that striking imagery made me wish, once again, that the creative team behind the Walking Dead franchise was willing to narrow its scope a little. You could easily set an entire season within the confines of a hospital — power down, no link to the outside world, and trapped with an ever-diminishing group of survivors.
Fear has a longer story to tell, and it's eager to move the pieces quickly enough to get there within this six-episode first season. That frenzied pacing is where I think "The Dog" makes its biggest narrative misstep: skipping through the long, sleepless night in which everybody holes up at the Clark household to reach the events of the morning after. This is the first time in the series we've had everybody together in one place, and the pressure cooker of the situation outside would have been an ideal chance to slow down, take a breath, and give the audience a chance to get to know these seemingly one-dimensional characters a little better,
Instead, we cut to the morning after so Fear can keep the plot moving right along. As our heroes confront a zombified neighbor, the military suddenly rolls in with guns blazing. We get an intriguing glimpse of how the government is responding to the crisis: killing the infected, taking a census of the survivors, and grilling everyone about whether they've been exposed to blood. It seems like a fairly efficient system.
But you don't need to know the future of the Walking Dead franchise to sense that the government isn't quite as prepared as it might seem. Near the end of "The Dog," Nick sees a plane wobbling unsteadily over the Los Angeles skyline. It's a potent, unsettling harbinger of the many greater disasters still to come. (Of course, if you saw AMC's triumphant announcement about the next Walking Dead spin-off — an upcoming 30-minute special about the effects of a zombie outbreak on an airplane — it's also a vaguely distracting piece of synergy.)
What kind of hope remains for those people? Daniel Salazar, who talks almost exclusively in grizzled aphorisms, delivers the key one in the middle of the episode: "Good people are the first ones to die." Seeing Travis at the end of the episode — standing in his driveway, surrounded by armed military personnel, naively assuring his family that everything is about to get better — it's hard to imagine him surviving another week, to say nothing of another year.
And that leads me to my ongoing hope for this series: That this first season of Fear the Walking Dead, like the first season of American Horror Story, is actually the first installment in an anthology series. With the possible exception of Madison, we've seen enough of this family to know that pretty much all of them are ridiculously unprepared to survive the zombie apocalypse. Killing each of them off in the season finale would do more than provide a grisly, shocking twist — it would allow the show to start over with a fresh set of characters in a new part of the world. Sure, we might miss Madison, Travis, and the rest — but in a world in which every ending is inevitably and invariably unhappy, how long can their story really continue?
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