Season 5, Episode 1: Here to Help
PLOT: Our heroes realize that helping people in the apocalyptic wasteland isn't an easy task, and clues reveal that a mysterious group from The Walking Dead is also lurking around in Fear the Walking Dead territory.
REVIEW: The worlds of Fear the Walking Dead and its companion series The Walking Dead continue to merge in the show's season 5 premiere. The Walking Dead's Morgan Jones (Lennie James) joined the series back in the season 4 premiere, having made his way from the Washington D.C. area, where The Walking Dead is set, all the way down to Fear's current location of Texas. And as it turns out, a group he was unknowingly neighbors with in D.C. also has members in Texas. If you've been wanting to know more about the mysterious people who flew Rick Grimes off of The Walking Dead in a helicopter, it looks like Fear is going to be giving us some information.
But the tease of that information isn't until the end of Here to Help. The best parts of the episode are right up front, beginning with a Morgan-narrated recap of season 4 that I found to be reminiscent of an '80s action show. "This world can surprise you, but it's hard to know who to trust. I've got things to make up for, same as everybody else. But if you're out there on your own, we can help you. Hang on. We're coming." Fear the Walking Dead is becoming The A-Team! If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire… Morgan Jones. I really hope they keep that intro for every episode this season.
Morgan and his new friends Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Victor Strand (Colman Domingo), Luciana (Danay Garcia), John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt), June (Jenna Elfman), Althea (Maggie Grace), Charlie (Alexa Nisenson), Sarah (Mo Collins), and Wendell (Daryl Mitchell) started running their "we can help you" mission out of an old denim factory at the end of season 4, and when we catch up with them some time later they reveal they've been having bad luck with it. That's a major understatement, and not just because they haven't been able to help anyone because everybody's dead, missing, or in hiding. Their luck is so bad that Here to Help begins with them crashing a plane.
That's good luck for the viewer, because that plane crash kicks off an action sequence that lasts for most of the episode's first 15 minutes. A whole lot of zombies get wiped out during that action sequence – and the zombie-killing starts with the first appearance of Alicia. With her brother and mother having been killed off last season, Alicia should be the most important character on this show now, and thankfully writers/showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg seem to realize that, because Alicia is given a great hero's entrance here, emerging from the smoke of the plane crash to start hacking into zombies with a broken propeller. Alicia has grown into such a badass zombie slayer that she isn't even slowed down by the fact that the propeller is slicing into her palms while she chops zombies with it.
The bad luck continues with the arrival of Matt Frewer as a man named Logan, who was co-owner of the denim factory back before the zombie apocalypse began. I'm a fan of Frewer, but his character's story is one of two problems I had with this episode. You see, Logan wants to take back his factory and kick out our little band of heroes. This goes beyond bad luck into the realm of the ridiculous. The events of Fear the Walking Dead are now taking place sometime between seasons 8 and 9 of The Walking Dead (and that show jumped ahead more than six years during season 9, so Fear is still straggling a good distance behind). We're several years into the apocalypse, and Logan is only just now wanting to move into his factory, right after Morgan and co. have moved in? This guy has the worst timing.
My other issue with the episode is that Luciana is badly injured during the plane crash. Of all characters, why Luciana? If watching people try to help an injured Luciana in a season premiere episode gives you déjà vu, it's because this already happened in the season 3 premiere. That girl can't catch a break.
The Logan story and Luciana's injuries seem like bad decisions to me, but Here to Help makes up for it with action and mystery. The mystery of fenced-off radiated areas, a roadblock of zombies that have been strung together with their guts, severed zombie heads hanging from trees, and a zombie wearing armor. With this armor-wearing zombie comes the tease of information about the group that took Rick, because in his pocket this zombie has items bearing the same symbol of interlocked circles that was on the helicopter Rick flew away in.
I'm very curious to see what Fear is going to tell us about those people. I'm not so curious to learn more about the new characters introduced in this episode, a trio of young siblings who have been surviving on their own. Cleanliness has not been a priority for them. I'm also not that curious to see how the Logan situation is going to play out, although I do love how Alicia reacts when he calls her "sweetheart". There are good things ahead, though. Daniel Salazar (Ruben Blades) is on his way back, and another Walking Dead character will be showing up soon. I was mostly impressed by Here to Help, and as of right now I'm looking forward to the rest of season 5 with great anticipation.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: The plane crash survivors work together to kick zombie ass throughout the episode's first 15 minutes.
GORY GLORY: The "guts as rope" addition to the zombie roadblock was pretty gross.
FAVORITE SCENE: Alicia emerges from the smoke with the plane propeller in hand.
FINAL VERDICT: