Season 5, Episode 6: The Little Prince
PLOT: The characters try to fix a plane so they can escape from an area where a nuclear power plant may be about to have another meltdown.
REVIEW: I feel like Thurman Merman in BAD SANTA when he peels open a new day on his messed-with, chocolate-dispensing advent calendar to find a piece of candy corn within. He expresses disappointment, and Billy Bob Thornton's character (who stuck the candy corn in there) says, "Well, they can't all be winners, can they?" That's the first thing that crossed my mind after watching the latest episode of AMC's Fear the Walking Dead – Billy Bob Thornton delivering the line, "Well, they can't all be winners, can they?" For me, this episode titled The Little Prince was not a winner. This was the least interesting episode of this season so far, in fact it feels like it was a total waste of 44 minutes.
From an opening sequence that features yet another maddening motivational speech from Morgan (Lennie James) – the zombies really need to tear this guy apart before I start projectile vomiting from all this cheese – to an ending that has goofy-looking shots of a couple characters who are meant to be flying high in a hot air balloon, The Little Prince is exceptionally lame.
What comes in between the annoying beginning and the laughable ending? A whole lot of conversations. There's good acting in the scenes, but I'm still not getting much out of these interactions. Most of them are not very interesting, many of them involve characters I just can't bring myself to care about. Morgan, Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), and Luciana (Danay Garcia) are very determined to take the group of filthy kids they stumbled across under their wings, but the kids aren't having it, and I'm fine with that. Go away, kids. Do your own thing and stop dragging down the show.
There's nothing really going on in this episode aside from the attempts to convince kid group leader Annie (Bailey Gavulic, who has a strong dramatic scene near the end) that she needs to stick with the main characters. She doesn't, so that's all a waste of time. John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt) and Dwight (Austin Amelio) go out searching for Dwight's missing wife Sherry, but when John finds out a major piece of information he keeps it from Dwight… so that's just set-up for something else down the line. Morgan has to deliver a piece of equipment to Grace (Karen David), a character we met a couple episodes back, and she leaves him behind so she can go try to stop another power plant meltdown on her own. She'll do that in a different episode, I guess. Not in this one. Meanwhile, people are drawing inspiration from the children's book this episode shares its title with as they try to fix a plane – but they can't finish the repairs in this episode. Nothing happens here, it's just setting the stage for things to happen in the future.
The only part of The Little Prince I cared about were the scenes involving John and Dwight's search for Sherry, and I was really bothered by the information John chooses to withhold from Dwight. This is the second episode in a row where one member of the group doesn't tell another member something they really need to know. Not only does the note John finds take the Dwight/Sherry situation in a direction I don't want it to go in, but it also seems really stupid for the Sherry character. Note by note, she has led Dwight from Washington D.C. to Texas, now after a bad experience with another person she wants Dwight to stop following her. After all this time, all this distance. It's not like they've been on a regular cross-country trip, she has been leading him through the zombie apocalypse. Now she gets worried about him following her through "all that death"? I think Negan-following, Denise-murdering Dwight can handle himself. So stop being wishy-washy, Sherry, and just let the guy catch up with you. Her telling him he should go his own way is not a resolution to their storyline, especially since John is keeping that under his hat. If this show is actually going to let the "Dwight searching for Sherry" thing get dragged on forever, I'm going to be pissed.
That's even more upset than I am over The Little Prince being such an empty episode. If you're a regular Fear the Walking Dead viewer who missed this episode, don't worry about it. There's only a few minutes of content that will actually mean anything for the next episode.
They can't all be winners, but even the losers aren't usually this dull. Did they really need to spin their wheels this much so early in the season?
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: The zombies were taking a break for most of this episode, but in the final moments there's a cool visual of the biggest "zombies tied together with their guts" roadblock yet.
GORY GLORY: That zombie roadblock is the most gross thing in the episode, but I'll also recognize the fact that Morgan replaces his irradiated staff with a mop handle and tries out his new weapon by sticking it through a zombie's head.
FAVORITE SCENE: While Sarah (Mo Collins) is working on a blood-coated plane propeller that was used to chop up a bunch of zombies, some kind of liquid drips down on her face. Collins gives an amusing delivery of the line, "That's oil. I hope."
FINAL VERDICT: