This is a difficult episode to review, because Fear the Walking Dead didn’t exactly give the audience a lot to work with in its short first season.  Or rather, it gave the audience a lot of things to work with, changing and shifting apparent focus and theme a few times in the space of six episodes.  But this comes after a wildly divisive season finale from the original series, and there were a lot of people willing to give this spinoff another look, if only to wash the palette clean.

And the first act or so seemed to get things off to a wild start: a horde of zombies, some inventive zombie killing, and napalm.  The problem is that the episode gave us that and then descended into narrative slow motion.  I’m all for character drama, but as I’ve said to quite a few people after watching this episode, one actually has to care about the characters before wanting to see them sitting around eating dinner in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. 

The big issue continues to be the relative lack of psychological collapse up to this point.  The whole conceit of this spinoff was the notion that the writers would explore the effects of the early days of the zombie onslaught, how society would collapse, how these “folks next door” would end up dealing with the familiar world around us crumbling.  Instead they breezed right by that, and characters Travis and Maddie are already dealing with things with a level of stoicism that just doesn’t ring true.

It might help if the younger characters were freaking out a little more, which might explain why Travis and Maddie were keeping up a stiff upper lip.  But they seem to be more or less equally calm.  The only one doing anything of real interest is Alicia, and that’s because she’s being remarkably naive.  Only a fool would start giving away details of one’s position over the radio in the middle of the end of civilization, so this doesn’t say anything good about Alicia’s long-term survival prospects.

By the way, remember when Nick was going through serious withdrawal and could barely function?  Now he’s seeming awfully well-adjusted and useful, giving out advice on wound management and going a nice job of dealing with the novel threat of water zombies (Swimmers?  Treaders?), which sounded a lot more interesting in theory than in execution.  But when did Nick become so capable?

The breakout character continues to be Strand, who doesn’t get nearly enough to do in this episode.  He had the right attitude and the right ideas from the moment he showed up last season, so why he doesn’t push harder against the uselessness of his tag-alongs, I don’t know.  Unless he likes to keep zombie-fodder around for those times that you just need someone to be a human shield, it’s hard for me to see the potential in many of these characters that Strand seems to see.

Despite all of that, the hint that there is something very dangerous looming for the next episode gives me hope that this was merely the calm before the storm.  But for that to matter, the writers need to make these characters a lot more interesting.  Otherwise, the various trials they encounter are going to be less than involving, and this show is going to continue to be a pale imitation of the original.