Season 3, Episode 3: TEOTWAWKI
PLOT: The Clark family settles in at a survivalist camp while Strand has a bad meeting with an old friend.
REVIEW: Last week, the two premiere night episodes of Fear the Walking Dead featured a good amount of action and the death of a major character, so if you're familiar with this series and its companion series The Walking Dead you probably knew what sort of episode to expect tonight. After the death of Travis, the second episode slowed things down a bit, and TEOTWAWKI continues the slow-down in the name of establishing characters, fleshing them out, and building the world of the show some more.
TEOTWAWKI stands for The End Of The World As We Know It, something Jeremiah Otto (Dayton Callie) has been preparing for for a long time. The Clark family – mother Madison (Kim Dickens), daughter Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), son Nick (Frank Dillane) – now find themselves guests in the Otto survivalist compound, which means we need to continue finding out more about how Jeremiah operates, and the characters need to come to some kind of conclusion about how they're going to handle being around Jeremiah's loose cannon son Troy (Daniel Sharman).
And that's what this episode was mostly about. The Clarks settling in at this new home while getting to know Jeremiah and trying to solve the Troy problem. These are important things to cover, but they didn't make for the most thrilling 44 minutes in Fear the Walking Dead history. Thankfully, Dayton Callie and Daniel Sharman are both excellent additions to the show's cast. I enjoy watching their performances, and I'm intrigued to see where things are going to go with them. I'm fairly certain this is all going to end up in death and tragedy, I don't trust Jeremiah and really don't trust Troy, but we'll see how it plays out.
TEOTWAWKI had some highlights, starting with the scene in which Madison barges into Jeremiah's office and demands that the man get his son under control, using some harsh language that was jarring to see spoken in the presence of an old man who presents himself as being such a devoted Christian. At least, it didn't seem like language that should be spoken in his presence until later, when we saw him getting pissy in an old video.
Another highlight was a night scene where Nick and Troy play a game of cat and mouse while we wonder if they're going to work out their problems by killing each other. The death of Troy would probably be a good thing for everyone else on this show, but this wouldn't be the wisest time for Nick to take him out. So they bond over the fact that they're both bugnuts crazy.
While everyone else is being serious, Alicia has some fun at the most unusual Bible study get-together I've ever been witness to, with one of the guests being a severed, still animated zombie head. I'm really not sure about severed zombie heads still being able to function, but it has been established as something that happens in the Walking Dead world, so I'll just go along with it. Personally, unless the living dead has been brought back by some of Herbert West's serum, I think a decapitation should put an end to them.
This episode also gave us a couple scenes with Victor Strand (Colman Domingo), once the most interesting character on the show. He has taken a tumble since those days, but I still like him, and don't like that he gets himself into a predicament. However, that predicament does allow for us to get the absolute best moment of the episode, a moment we've been waiting more than a year for.
Not seen since season two's mid-season finale, Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades) has returned! I've missed this guy, and I'm already excited to watch next week's episode, where hopefully we'll be catching up with him. Daniel needs to let us know where he's been, then he needs to head over to the Otto camp and find out where his daughter is.
TEOTWAWKI isn't the sort of episode any casual viewer is going to want to sit through, but if you're invested in following these characters it was a good dramatic chapter in the story.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: A character falls from a great height and I figure he's going to have a messy landing on the ground, perhaps surrounded by the mangled bodies of other unfortunate people. The guy does land on other bodies, but I didn't expect those corpses to be a pile of hungry zombies.
GORY GLORY: There wasn't much gore on display, but that unlucky fellow who landed on that pile of zombies became a buffet.
FAVORITE SCENE: Madison confronting Jeremiah about Troy. Kim Dickens rocked that scene.
FINAL VERDICT: