Fear the Walking Dead: Travis < Daniel

Gee - With a title like that, I wonder what
show this could be a spinoff for!
"Used to be, we were monkeys, right? And in the woods, in the jungle, everything's green. So, in order to not get eaten by panthers and bears and the like, we had to be able to see them, you know, in the grass and trees and such. Predators."  - Molly Solverson, Fargo, S01E04




AMC is a peculiar network. Though they seemed to have no idea how to actually run a television network, those choosing the shows struck gold when they picked out a crop of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and a little later, The Walking Dead. Frank Darabont's groundbreaking new horror show exploded out of the relatively empty AMC schedule. Suddenly, people had a new watercooler show. Who died this week? Where will Rick and his group go next? Who is this new villain? What's more dangerous, the zombies or the people? Despite multiple show-runner changes and difficult writing decisions, The Walking Dead became the number one cable drama without a clear second front runner. With nearly sixteen million viewers per episode, TWD became a phenom.

During this same transitional phase, AMC's other big hit, this one more among critics than viewers, Breaking Bad, went off the air. With Mad Men ending only a year later, AMC had to start planning for the future. Yes, they had TWD, but this only took up a portion of the yearly schedule, leaving an abundance of room for new shows. And, due to this hole in schedule, new shows did indeed crop up. Turn: Washington's Spies, Halt and Catch Fire, and Humans all appeared on the network, bringing some quality programming but certainly no new smash hit. Thus, something that had been in the works for some time, a Breaking Bad spinoff was developed, and Better Call Saul was born, the shockingly good show premiering in the winter of 2015. With the revival of a franchise and the hopes of ratings spiking again, it was time to put this spinoff theory to a test, creating the spin-off of all spin-offs, and using The Walking Dead's success to create the creatively titled FEAR The Walking Dead. Now that the first season has finished airing, it's time to examine how exactly the test worked. Did AMC repeat the greatness of Better Call Saul or were we left with a show trying to soak up ratings in the off-season of its mother program?

The Acme of Spinoffs
The answer isn't so simple. It would be difficult to merely caption Fear the Walking Dead as "good" or "bad" the way we could when Better Call Saul came out. Certainly it is not in the same realm of quality. At the same time, never would I call FTWD a ratings-sponge, delivering zombie carnage episode after episode to appease gore-fanatics. Instead, though the title may seem like a cheap knockoff, FTWD truly did try to create its own story, completely detached from the original. We began at the outbreak of the zombie apocalypse on the other side of America, starting the outbreak from Los Angeles and telling the story of an extended family trying to survive the start of the end of the world.

To begin, we have our main characters: Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) and Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis), a couple in their forties who each have their own families. Madison has two kids, a heroin addict son named Nick (played by Frank Dillane, son of the late, great, Stannis Baratheon) and a disillusioned high school girl named Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey.) Travis has only one son, Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie,) though he also has an ex-wife, Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez.) There are inherent problems in the family, from the kids having to accept their new step-parents to Nick being an addict to Travis's conflict with his ex. However, once all of them come together, they become a frayed family unit, our basic layout for the major players of the show. At the start of the rioting and craziness, the family runs into the Salazar family, two older Mexicans and their daughter. The mother, Grizelda, immediately has a broken foot, dooming her in the eyes of the show, while the father, Daniel, played by the great Ruben Blades, and the daughter, Ofelia, (Mercedes Mason,) become major players in the series.

With a large starting cast, the stage was set for the action to start. However, to establish all of these familiar relationships and conflicts, there needed to be set-up, and a lot of it. For the first four episodes, we got tons of time with our characters, giving us insight into exactly how each relationship worked. This would have been great, only as we got to know our characters better, many of them turned out to be a bit less interesting than one would hope. Travis was a bore and a nuisance in the apocalyptic setting, Alicia seemed to have nothing to offer other than scoffing at her parents and looking pretty, Chris brought absolutely nothing to any scene he was in, and as great as Kim Dickens is, her character always felt a little overlooked with the copious amount of Travis plot going on alongside her. Nick should have been interesting, yet for multiple episodes his plot involved trying to find a way to get a buzz instead of doing anything important to the plot.

The weak-link of both the show and the family
However, especially when contrasted against the lameness of so much of the cast, this only made Ruben Blades stand out more. As the mystery shrouded Daniel Salazar, Blades portrayed a family man, yet a man that had a past so strewn with death and war that should the worst come to worst, he would be prepared. He was unafraid to torture a soldier to find out where his wife had been taken, to set 2,000 walkers loose from a stadium after learning of the army's plans to flee the city, and to kill who needed to be killed in order for he and his family to survive. His slow yet threatening way of speaking, his monologues about his past as a war torturer, and his small yet threatening demeanor stood out among the waves of mediocre characterization.

As the episodes went on, intrigue was added to raw character development though. In only a week and a half, LA had been abandoned, and the military began to take over the city, yet with the zombies coming more and more, the entire area was soon to be left for dead. Though it was nice to see the timeline moving along, it felt a bit strange that everything would go so fast. In only a week, the outbreak of zombies in LA left the entire city aflame and abandoned. First of all, I see no way that a zombie outbreak could ever happen due to the fast that they walk about as fast as I do after getting out of bed, but moreover, since this is the setting of the show, wouldn't everything travel a bit slower? I mean, Rick Grimes wakes up in the original series roughly a year after the outbreak and then Atlanta had become anarchy. Yet in the new series, it seems that the shit has hit the fan in only a week or two, meaning that Rick slept through some 351 days of zombie apocalypse without a single walker picking up on the delicious piece of human meat sleeping in a hospital bed.

Daniel Salazar, no relation to the
Salamancas
Nevertheless, once FTWD picked up, the show gained intrigue. There was a very real possibility that some of out characters could be killed off, and as the world broke down more day by day, we began to wonder where our group could go to avoid walkers, and better yet, to avoid the increasingly corrupt military. Along the way, we're introduced to Victor Strand, an enigmatic man in the local containment facility who seems to be prepared for the oncoming madness. In the mile-a-minute season finale, the family is reunited and led out of trouble by Mr. Strand, taking them to his enormous beach house overlooking his enormous yacht on which he plans to live in the future. This leaves us with the possibility of a Walking Dead at sea second season, or better, yet, another spinoff about Victor Strand fighting zombie pirates. I personally like the second option better.

In an overall sense, Fear the Walking Dead didn't really disappoint, but at the same time, it didn't exactly wow me either. The show certainly gave its best shot at developing characters audiences cared about while carrying out a slow-burn plot in a satisfying manner, yet when push came to shove and a character was killed off, the emotional impact wasn't so great that all the time spent developing her was worth it. Sure, we saw minor character arcs completed, such as Travis shooting his ex-wife after she learned she had been bitten, thus overcoming his violence-phobia, and sure, we saw the kids adjust to a changing world during their formative years, but nothing aside from some Strand intrigue and some Salazar badassery really became must-watch TV.

With all that being said though, I appreciate the effort made by FTWD. It didn't take the easy way out, giving stupid zombie violence for episodes and episodes. Instead of giving the shlock horror show that many expected, FTWD really did its best to make real characters and stand alone from The Walking Dead itself. In that sense, it did succeed. Fear The Walking Dead does not need to be so closely named after The Walking Dead, as it is its own animal. Whether or not said animal is any stroke of genius has yet to be determined once a full season is released, but at the very least, we were treated to a fully original show, one that can hopefully develop and grow into greatness.

And hey - of the three post-apocalyptic shows to air Sunday Night (The Leftovers, The Strain, and Fear the Walking Dead,) it isn't the worst one!

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