TV Review: Fear the Walking Dead – Season 3, Episode 11

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Season 3, Episode 11: La Serpiente

PLOT: Representatives of Broke Jaw Ranch try to negotiate a water deal at Gonzalez Dam.

REVIEW: One of the greatest and most memorable zombies in the history of AMC’s The Walking Dead is the waterlogged ghoul discovered in a farm well back in the show’s second season. Not only was that zombie disgusting to look at from the start, but things got even worse, and more gross, when the characters tried to pull it out of the well. Its saturated body wasn’t up to the strain and it ended up splitting in half. In this third season episode of The Walking Dead’s companion series, Fear the Walking Dead has matched that zombie and taken things a step further.

The story of the water shortage at Broke Jaw Ranch continued this week, with Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) and Qaletaqa Walker (Michael Greyeyes) having Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) take them to Gonzalez Dam, which is already supplying water to survivors in the immediate area. To infiltrate the dam, Strand leads Madison and Walker into the sewer system… or attempts to. He’s not a very good leader. Eventually the group finds that a pipe they’ll need to traverse has been blocked by a bloated, rotting, waterlogged zombie who has gotten stuck in the pipe. Killing the zombie isn’t enough to take care of the problem, they still need to get through that pipe, and the thing is tightly wedged in there. And so Madison has to start hacking into the corpse with her hatchet, removing it piece-by-piece until the water is able to start flowing again.

The Walking Dead fans remember the well zombie all these years later, and the sewer zombie is likely to remain just as memorable for viewers of Fear the Walking Dead.

Once the trio reaches the dam, we get another reunion of characters who have been on separate paths for a long time, this time it’s Madison and Daniel Salazar (Ruben Blades). This isn’t as momentous as seeing Madison and Strand together again in the previous episode, and the great chemistry Madison and Strand have is again on display here, but it’s just good to see the show’s characters interacting once more.

Learning that his daughter Ofelia is still alive and living on Broke Jaw Ranch, Daniel is surprisingly ambivalent about whether or not he should go see her, as he’s concerned about the well-being of Gonzalez Dam leader Lola Guerrero (Lisandra Tena). It’s a noble thing Lola is doing, providing survivors around the dam with water, but things are starting to fall apart there. It makes sense – while the people are lucky they have this water supply, they resent someone else having control of it, and they’ll always want more than they’re given.

I like the Lola character a lot, and the same goes for fellow dam higher-up Efrain (Jesse Borrego). To this point, their story has had nothing to do with the storyline Madison and Walker have been going through, so it’s interesting to see these worlds collide, to watch Madison and Lola talk and get to know things about each other.

Past the first 15 minutes, La Serpiente was quite a dialogue heavy episode, as most of it concerns attempts at negotiating a water deal with the Gonzalez Dam people and Daniel discussing the Ofelia situation, but that didn’t bother me much because the early minutes had plenty of zombies. Plus, I was intrigued by the conversations being had at the dam. Besides, once you reach the heights of something like the sewer zombie scene, you have to come down for a little while after.

It is just a little while, as things picked up again at the end. A super gross zombie, an explosion, zombies walking while on fire, and solid dialogue exchanges all in one episode? La Serpiente was a winner.

BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: The sight of burning walkers is pretty cool, but this honor has got to go to the zombie found stuck in the sewer pipe. That’s not just the best zombie moment of the episode, that’s up there among the best zombie moments of the entire series.

GORY GLORY: Again, the sewer zombie. Madison chopping its head off and then hacking into the rest of its body.

FAVORITE SCENE: The answer to that is probably obvious at this point.

FINAL VERDICT: