Item: The Walking Dead
Rating: 9
Author: Cody Hamman

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Season 4, Episode 3: Good Out Here

PLOT: The Clark siblings, Luciana, and Strand work with Morgan and his traveling companions to survive after their vehicle runs off the road.

REVIEW: A show that used to feel to me like it was moving along at an achingly slow pace, Fear the Walking Dead is continuing to speed along this season – and I suppose the feeling that it’s moving quickly comes along with the fact that it’s basically telling the story of two seasons at once: the present day story, plus the flashbacks that fill in the gap caused by the two year (or around there) time jump that occurred between the season three finale and the season four premiere. It’s an interesting structure that certainly makes the show feel more lively than it ever has before.

If the fact that a character from The Walking Dead was moving over to its companion series in the show’s new season was a major selling point for you, Good Out Here is the episode you’ve been waiting for. Although The Walking Dead’s Morgan Jones (Lennie James) shared the screen with characters from Fear in the previous two episodes, he spends a great deal more time sharing the screen with them in this episode, and it’s the character of Nick Clark (Frank Dillane) that he hangs out with the most.

Nick isn’t exactly enthusiastic about the time he spends with Morgan, as it’s essentially a hostage situation: Nick, his sister Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), his girlfriend Luciana (Danay Garcia), and their pal Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) ambushed Morgan and his newfound friends Althea (Maggie Grace) and John (Garret Dillahunt), capturing them and taking control of Althea’s SWAT truck. After the truck crashes, the tables are turned and Nick ends up under Morgan’s care. Luckily for him, Morgan is a pretty relaxed captor, even freeing him of his bindings because he’s so confident in his bo staff skills. It is cool to see these characters from different shows interacting, and the scene in which Morgan demonstrates what he can do with his staff by easily knocking Nick around is exactly the sort of fun moment I would hope to have come out of a crossover like this.

Nick figures out how Morgan’s mind works, and we also start to figure out what Nick and his fellow returning Fear characters are doing out here on the road, carjacking people. They’re on a mission of vengeance against the group called The Vultures, who obviously did something terrible to them at the baseball diamond they had been using as a home. Here the flashbacks to the time between seasons were entirely focused on Nick and his mom Madison (Kim Dickens), who talks to him about her way of still looking for good in the world, even when living in a post-zombie-apocalypse world where other people are trying to take their stuff away. These flashbacks, the absence of Madison in the present day scenes, and the level of rage Nick reaches when he sees one of the Vultures out in the wild makes me very concerned that we’re going to see a flashback to Madison’s death at some point in a future episode. I’ve had my issues with Madison in the past, but I really don’t want to see her get killed off at this point. I can’t imagine Fear the Walking Dead without Madison Clark.

But hell, I really can’t imagine the show without the character who appears to die in the final moments (and interviews with showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg confirm that the character is dead, so there’s not going to be some miraculous save in the next episode). Apparently done at the actor’s request, this death was completely unexpected to me – downright shocking, in fact, because I thought this character was as important to this show as Rick Grimes is to The Walking Dead. If they didn’t own Fear the Walking Dead, they at least shared ownership with Kim Dickens. Now one has been killed off and the fate of the other remains unknown. What is this series going to be by the time this season is over? Or even by the halfway point of the season? (Please don’t just become The Morgan Jones Show.)

The death was made all the more shocking by its placement in the season. Kudos to the showrunners for dropping it into the third episode and not sticking to the predictable “major things only happen in premieres and finales” pattern of The Walking Dead.

I have no idea what these new showrunners are doing with Fear, I have no idea what to expect from the show going forward… and I’m enjoying that. This was a hell of an exit episode for a major character, and it worked in some nice emotional content for that character before offing them. Obviously this isn’t the last we’re going to see of this person, though, because they still have story to be filled in with the flashbacks. I’m thankful we still have more time to spend with them.

BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: It’s looking like Nick is about to get munched on by a zombie, until Morgan comes along with his staff and takes care of the zombie problem. A character from one show saves a character from another show!

GORY GLORY: A good number of zombies get taken out of the equation, especially in a cool action scene in which Alicia and Althea work together to thin out a herd of zombies that have surrounded the crashed SWAT truck. There’s nothing that special about the zombie kills, though. So I’ll give the “glory” nod to the painful impalement of Nick’s enemy in the El Camino.

FAVORITE SCENE: The comedic scene where Morgan shows Nick how good he is with his bo staff.

FINAL VERDICT: