Fear the Walking Dead returns from its midseason break on Sunday with a strong episode that also suggests the weaknesses of the series. Titled "Grotesque," most of the hour follows young Nick (Frank Dillane) as he inches across Mexico, smeared in blood and separated from his mother, Madison (Kim Dickens), and sister, Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey). The hour, written by Kate Barnow and directed by Dan Sackheim, is a clever addition to barren-landscape pop culture ranging from No Country for Old Men to The Last Man on Earth.
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Nick struggles, he starves, he tries everything imaginable to slake his thirst (two words: cactus, urine), and he encounters - what else? - a bunch of zombies. There are also a few desert-trek-inspired flashbacks that fill us in on some of Nick's family history and his drug-addicted past. Nick doesn't talk much, since he's alone a lot of the time, and that's always a blessing in the Walking Dead franchise, where any dialogue between two characters can lead, without warning, to gusty windiness.
Which indeed occurs in the following week's episode, as we rejoin more of the show's characters. The tendency of Dead characters - both here and in the flagship show, The Walking Dead - to turn any conversation into a monologue or an opportunity to impart something that sounds like hard-won wisdom but, upon examination, dissolves into banality, returns with a vengeance. One I'm-not-spoiling-anything character to another: "The past - it will make you sick." A bit later, this overripe line: "What if your friend just became lunch for no reason?"
The series is adding a spiritual element to the zombie apocalypse with the notion - expressed by a rather mysterious pharmacist - that those who have survived thus far are somehow chosen to endure.
Recently, I was flipping channels and came upon Gone Girl and got sucked in once again by director David Fincher's film based on Gillian Flynn's novel. The two performances I enjoy most in that movie are by Carrie Coon (as Ben Affleck's tart-as-a-lemon twin sister) and Kim Dickens (as the flinty cop investigating the crime). I thought about Dickens as I watched the midseason premiere of Fear the Walking Dead, glad as always that she must be making a handsome salary laboring in this franchise, but wondering whether she finds it as tedious as a performer as I do as a viewer. Dickens's Madison does a lot of squinting into the distance on Fear the Walking Dead, as though her character is always looking for a way out. I can identify.
Fear the Walking Dead airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. on AMC.
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