I’m going to say this off the bat: the central premise of Season 5, the group’s desire to help people, was a great idea. It was unique when it comes to The Walking Dead universe where ‘survival at any cost’ has been the basis for many stories: ‘us or them’ and the inability to trust anyone you don’t know has dominated the storytelling. That idea is played out after 13 seasons of both shows. So the complete opposite approach is a novel change of pace. But I stress it was a great idea, not a good execution. As Morgan continuously says in Season 5, helping people shouldn’t be easy. And he’s right. Except it is easy. Up until the end of the season, the group lost or sacrificed absolutely nothing and everything worked out fine. In fact, all they did was gain people and resources and expand their influence. They are so well-off they can waste time painting trees.
A spoiler warning is in effect for Seasons 9 of The Walking Dead, and Season 5 of Fear The Walking Dead is in effect...but let's face it, there's nothing to spoil with S5 of Fear.
The Downward Trend From Good to WTF?!?
Season 3 of Fear was fantastic. After Season 3 and the news of Morgan going to Fear, my hopes for Season 4 were very high. But it was a mixed bag. The first half was pretty strong even with the ill-conceived exit of Clarke Family matriarch Madison. Nick’s death was shocking in a good way. The new characters of Al, John, June, and Charlie had a lot of promise. Morgan fit in with the new and old characters well. The Vultures were interesting villains who didn’t outstay their welcome. The John/June backstory episode is one of my favourite episodes of TWD or Fear. A lot of people complained about the washed out, earthy photography, but I thought it not only matched the new Western aesthetic, it also fit the overarching theme of grief that runs throughout the first 8 episodes.
The back-half of S4 was a step backwards though I understood why. With Nick and Madison gone and so many new characters, they had to try and form new character bonds and dynamics so they separated the characters and tried to force them. The problem is that few of those bonds still exist in Season 5. Morgan and John barely even talk. Charlie and Alicia were mostly separated. Luciana is just floating with no ties to anyone since Nick’s death. Morgan’s chumminess with Sarah is the only new dynamic that still seems to exist, if sparse. There was a greater bond to Strand and Madison having a drink than anything currently going in Fear currently.
So then we come to season 5 and the same issue that plagued the back half of S4 continues. The characters are still separated. Morgan and Alicia’s dynamic feels forced. Strand and Charlie too. Al’s biggest bond is with a one off character is the best episode of the season. Seeing Strand and Daniel Salazar together reminded us of how good the character dynamics in this show used to be…even when the plotting let it down, the characters worked well together. Charlie and Daniel actually have a natural bond and good chemistry, but we barely see any of it. Dwight seems to strike up friendships with John, June and Sarah yet they’re not developed. No one talks to Wendell.
The Walking Dead and Fear have always been shows about characters. These shows are always at their worst when characterization takes a back seat, like in Seasons 7/8 of TWD and Season 4b/5 of Fear. Audiences will forgive subpar plotting if they care about the characters.
What’s Your Motivation?
You could ask any character on Fear this question right now and they’d all have the same answer: to help people. Dwight had his own motivation: find Sherry. Two days with the cast and his answer is now “to help people”. Seasons 7/8 of TWD faltered because so many characters had the same motivations. Varied motivation creates conflicts of interest between characters, which creates drama, which creates tension, and, if it’s written semi-competently, creates good TV. Look at The Saviors in S8 of TWD. They all had their own motivations, beliefs, and goals, and that created conflict and tension that led to some solid TV…while all the good guys were boringly whittled down to “I need to kill Negan” for two seasons.
When you have a big cast with the same motivation, there is no conflict and there is no point to most dialogue, and then characters don’t feel like real people. The characters rarely (if at all) had disagreements on the correct way to go about to help people. The basic reason for the characters desire to help people was essentially the same too, to atone for things they’ve done. So we have a cast of soul searchers all doing the same thing. That’s boring.
Now, a story where Morgan's cult-like philosophy infects lost, hopeless people, strips away their individual identities, makes them 100% devoted to a cause, and then leads them to tragedy because of his own selfishness because Morgan is the unassuming villain of the season? That's interesting. And that's what happened. But it was unintentional so it's uninteresting.
Now imagine if some members of the group thought they should help Logan. Now we have a conflict of interest. Disagreements could build up and lead to mistakes, deaths, getting into messes they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten into. Will X betray Y? Is Y right or is X right? Are their goals just? Is this worth the risk? Is there a better way? What extreme lengths will they go to attain their goal? The reasons for not trusting Logan weren’t made clear. He continuously avoided killing the good guys and even found non-violent ways and attempted diplomacy to advance his own goals. That alone should’ve made some of the heroes think he’s not a villain. The inability to trust Logan put them under the thumb of Virginia. But does a single character have doubts and question if they’re doing the right thing the wrong way? Nope. Let’s just forget that siding with Logan and controlling the oil would’ve a) kept Virginia from becoming more powerful and b) given you a greater chance of resisting Virginia.
For characters that seem to do nothing but introspection they sure don’t ask many questions of themselves…
What Fear desperately lacks right now is characters with their own distinct motivations and goals. Their personalities now feel like mere different shades of the same, watered-down colour. Even the fucking villain has expressed the same motivation as everyone else: helping people. We get the sense Virginia is bad, but why? Because she killed Logan and his crew? She's done good, bad and the nonsensical. Her goals are muddled like the rest of characters. If they were clear, she’d be a more effective villain. The Vultures in Season 4 had clear motivations: form a blockade around a community, starve them out, take what’s left over – they justified their approach as being more moral than murder because they didn’t directly kill people. Moral gray areas should be TWD’s bread and butter and S5 of Fear utterly lacks it.
No Fear of Consequences
There are no consequences to any choices in this show anymore. And when there are, they aren’t treated as consequences or they’re immediately resolved. The finale actually saw some consequences as their quest ended in defeat, the characters are split up and taken into Virginia’s system, and Morgan is left for dead. But it was too little too late.
There were never any consequences for helping people. It turns out Grace doesn’t even have cancer as a consequence of her work around the nuke plant and Alicia didn’t get sick despite the radioactive blood getting on her while saving the kids. The plane crashes as they go to help someone and, while getting free of that situation, manage to help like 20 people at zero cost, and they fix the plane and escape. People can say what they want about Carl’s death in S8, but his trying to help Siddiq had a consequence: he was bitten and he died. In S9 the Highwaymen tried to save the people who Alpha captured and they were killed. Look at the strife helping one girl, Lydia, wrought on TWD. In this world, helping people should be a risk with dire consequences.
Losing something significant whether a person, a place, or supplies is an easy way to cause conflict. The characters lost their place after Logan lured them away, but then he just gave it back. Whatever supplies they lost wasn’t made to be a big deal. It should’ve been. This season should’ve been filled with moral quandaries and tough calls.
Maybe the heroes help person X, but in doing so they lose all their medicine and someone gets hurt and dies because they lost the medicine. Maybe they saved person X, but person Y died doing so and everyone is worse off now. Maybe while person Y is injured, they’re forced with a moral conundrum: help some stranger or find medicine to save person Y. Maybe a character they help is actually bad and kills someone or steals their stuff (like what happened in S9 of TWD with Michonne’s old friend Jocelin).
Now we have characters facing adversity, which causes them to question themselves, others and either regress or grow as characters. We see in the finale Strand may have struck a deal with Virginia out of self-preservation: that’s regression of character for Strand. But then he said ‘we can do more damage from the inside’, erasing almost any hanging doubts about Strand’s allegiance that could’ve created intrigue.
We got something like that at the end with Morgan putting the convoy in a difficult place because they went off to get medicine for Grace…but they ruined that because Morgan wasn’t painted as selfish because several people agreed with him and even helped him: no “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” conflict here. In fact, putting the entire convoy (including like 20 children) in danger, getting someone killed, and losing all their resources was painted as something “noble” and an example of “making the tough call”. WTF? The tough call would’ve been choosing not to risk everyone and everything for one person.
Morgan being shot at the end should have been depicted as a justified consequence of his selfishness of putting his feelings for Grace over the whole group, but it’s not. Virginia should’ve have told Morgan she did it because he’s a bad leader, because he’s selfish and irresponsible and he just isn’t fit for her future. That would make sense and lend consequences to Morgan’s motivations, and it would also give a clearer picture of Virginia’s character and her goals, not to mention weight to the entire conceit of the season. Instead that’s merely kind of (maybe?) implied. Alas, there’s nothing there, but a cliffhanger with all the wrong questions.
How to Fix This Show
If Season 6 is going to rebound off this extremely poorly executed season, then the showrunners need to address these glaring mistakes. We need distinct character motivations that cause conflict. We need consequences to actions. We need strong character dynamics that let us care about the characters so that when mistakes are made, we can worry about what happens to these people so we can easily despise or praise them for their actions. We need tangible stakes beyond upholding some naïve ideological endeavor.
The finale of S5 finally gave us a taste of some of those things, but not nearly enough after an entire season’s buildup. We saw clear negative consequences for the heroes’ choices, their philosophy, and their stubbornness, but none of it is explicitly or even subtly painted as the heroes creating this mess for themselves (which they did). No, it’s all Virginia’s fault in their minds, I’m sure.
This was the big problem with All Out War in S7/8 of TWD. In season six the good guys stormed Negan’s compound in the dead of night; the good guys murdered people in their sleep; the good guys executed people and burned people alive; the good guys agreed to do all this to get half of Hilltop’s stuff (the same deal The Saviors made that made them the bad guys) which was made because the good guys were acting in conceited self-interest. And then when Negan kills two people (when he’d intended to only kill one) the good guys are like “FUCK THIS GUY HE IS SO EVIL” even though the death of Abraham was a consequence of their actions and motivations and Glenn’s death was a direct consequence of Daryl’s actions. Being under Negan’s thumb is their punishment for their ill-conceived bravado.
But none of the heroes question that maybe, just maybe, their subjugation is their own fault. Nope, just blind hatred with zero self-reflection. Daryl began showing guilt and responsibility for Glenn’s death to Maggie and then Maggie was all, “It ain’t your fault” and Daryl was like “You’re right…fuck that other guy!”
It was all a mess.
Most importantly, Fear The Walking Dead needs to kill some characters. The cast keeps growing, the characters keep getting less distinct in every way, their stories duller, and it’s gotten so bad that they could kill almost any character and no one would really care. In the past 24 episodes, the only characters they killed were antagonists Martha and Logan (and his nameless, mostly speechless crew), beer brewer Jimbo, and moronic Tom. That’s it. And no one cared about them. The show is literally toothless now. TWD has never had a stretch like this with so few deaths shown. Even when fans joked about how only minor characters died, at least they died, usually a handful every season. I think the showrunners are gun-shy since the backlash to Carl, Nick, and Madison’s deaths all in the same year.
Realistically, they could’ve told this same story in a far stronger way with simple changes and by paying attention to character and action/consequences. Fixing this show is simple, they just need to get the fundamental of storytelling right. But I’m starting to fear (pun intended) that these showrunners can’t do the simplest things. And that’s truly something to fear for anyone who wants this show to be good.