Fear The Walking Dead Review: Episode 201 ‘Monster’

Season two of Fear The Walking Dead starts off with a literal bang, as the LA skyline is on fire. The military has obviously proceeded with Operation Cobalt, the subsequent evacuation of all military personnel from the LA Safe zone and then bombing it off the map. Travis and Madison are on shore, as they watch a speedboat containing Strand, Nick, and Alicia head towards Strands massive yacht. The infected are all around, spilling through Strands home, and onto the shore, rapidly closing in on Travis and Madison. This creates a solid sense of tension as they have to deal with the walkers, waiting for the speedboat to return, and Christopher’s defiance as he sat at the rear of the shore, refusing to leave his mom behind.

The opening sequence set the tone for the episode perfectly, but it also let a tremendous gap in the story. When we last left the group, they had just arrived at Strands house, and had only just found out about his boat. When the season resumed, they were evacuating to said boat, without any build up to that moment. We’re just dropped into the episode left wondering what the dynamic between the group has been, but of course we’ll know how it will be.

Once the group gets onboard Strand’s boat, the extra baller Abigail. This boat has everything that the group could need to survive for quite some time. That makes it the perfect temporary home, and the perfect honey pot for those who may want to take what the group has. As we’ve consistently seen on The Walking Dead, anything that feels too good to be true, usually is and most of the time, the survivors are more dangerous than the walkers. The “boat siege” scenario was teased heavily in this episode as Alicia carried on a naively teenage conversation with someone on the other end of a radio, signaling for help.

Meanwhile, tensions between Christopher and Travis start to boil over as Chris tries to cope with the loss of his mother. Things get a little heated between the two, resulting in Chris eventually punching Travis for shooting his mother (She’d been bitten, and was going to turn). Between this conflict, we see Madison interact with just about everyone, trying to get a feel for what she should expect next. Alicia’s radio conversations are the focus of the second half of the episode, each conversation getting more and more inquisitive.

The things that this episode did really good, were largely overshadowed by all the weird things that seemed to go wrong. From an obviously grieving Chris jumping off the boat “to go for a swim” to Alicia’s unbelievable misstep of trusting a complete stranger, left me wanting a bit more character development. Christopher seems primed to play the role of grieving teen who’ll never truly get over his mom’s death and will eventually get himself or one of the others killed. Nick will continually make terrible decisions because hey, that’s what junkies do, and Alicia will apparently be the one to constantly put the group in peril due to her wanting to quell the hurt in her teenage heart.

All of these dynamics were on full display this episode, and at times I found myself wanting to see Strand throw everyone overboard. The build in this episode was a really slow burn which I’ve become used to as a Walking Dead fan, but this was a little too slow, and worse yet, it built into a wildly predictable conclusion. If the entire season ends up like this, we may be in for a long wait for October.