Fear The Walking Dead, Season One
The Complete First Season
It had to happen. There’s a whole world afflicted by the zombie disaster, but all we’ve seen of it has been in the State of Georgia (I think they pretend some of it is in Virginia) as Rick, Glenn, Daryl and Carol try to stay alive. And even what we’ve seen there was incomplete.
‘The Walking Dead’ used the same device as ‘Day of the Triffids’ — our hero wakes up (or has his bandages removed) to find the whole world entirely upended. For ‘The Walking Dead’, the gap was a period of weeks. There wasn’t the slightest hint of an impending zombification when Rick entered hospital unconscious, yet when he emerged, the forces of civilisation had already been vanquished.
‘Fear the Walking Dead’ relocates us to Los Angeles and covers the first few weeks from the first emergence of zombies. There are six episodes (as there were in the first season of TWD). We meet a number of people with complicated lives — he is split up from his wife and facing the uninterest of his son while he loves and lives with another woman whose son is a drug addict and...
You get the idea. The fundamental problem with this series is that we don’t actually see the advance of the zombies. We see how they start among certain drug-addled ‘communities’. There is an episode or two which includes some rather worrying encounters with a small number of these then-misunderstood crazies who look disturbingly like former friends and acquaintances.
Then our main group gets home, and as things look very dim, find the army coming to the rescue. Whew! (‘Whew’ for them, that is.)
But then we are faced with a couple of boring episodes kind-of playing with the implications of this soft military dictatorship, accompanied by a vaguely eugenic theme. If I recall correctly, there is only one zombie encounter in this section of two whole episodes.
Presumably society is collapsing in a wholesale way beyond the barrier fence surrounding this community. (I guess.)
What a pity. Our central characters are irritating, and the central interest — the critical period in which the zombies come to triumph — is almost entirely missing. Frustrating. The premise has so much potential and I absolutely love end-of-the-world stories. But there’s too little ending of the world here, and too many dreary bureaucratic tyrants rather than wholesome brain-eating zombies.
Still, we’ve moved from Georgia to LA. There’s enough inherent interest in the story to result in a second season (the first six episodes of which have IMDB scores relatively stable in the nearly eights out of tens). And perhaps the franchise is well enough entrenched to see it moving, CSI-like, beyond the shores of America. How about a London series, or a Sydney one? The story of the collapse of civilisation under the zombie onslaught has yet to be told.
The six episodes fit handily on two Blu-ray discs and each scores around 30Mbps of MPEG4 AVC video. The video is competently done, with a noticeable LA look: very slightly washed-out in the glare of the sun much of the time, but sharp and detailed and generally easy