Season 5, Episode 9: Channel 4
PLOT: Cameras are rolling as Morgan and his team of do-gooders try to help a woman whose house is surrounded by land mines.
REVIEW: Viewers will often catch nods to classic George A. Romero films like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, DAWN OF THE DEAD, and DAY OF THE DEAD in the Walking Dead shows on AMC. When Frank Darabont started The Walking Dead nine years ago, he said the first zombie glimpsed in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD served as the template for how the show would be presenting zombies. The first episode of The Walking Dead featured one of the most direct NIGHT references ever: there was a character named Duane Jones, which was also the name of the actor who played the character Ben in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Duane was the son of Morgan Jones (Lennie James), who has gone on to become one of the lead characters on the spin-off Fear the Walking Dead, and all this time down the line we may have reached the first Walking Dead episode that pays homage to Romero's fifth "Dead" film, DIARY OF THE DEAD.
Like DIARY OF THE DEAD, the season 5 mid-season premiere of Fear the Walking Dead is presented in the "found footage" style, as almost the entire episode is a documentary that has been cut together as a way to promote the helpful endeavors Morgan and his team of fellow zombie apocalypse survivors are up to. We've seen Althea (Maggie Grace) conducting interviews before, but this time around her interviews are interspersed with some "day in the life" action that Althea has shot, with Luciana (Danay Garcia) operating a second camera. The team is now leaving copies of the resulting documentary in locations around the Texas countryside, hoping people will watch it and contact them seeking help and a place in the community they're building.
This episode reminded me not only of DIARY OF THE DEAD, but also of The Office. It was kind of jarring to put on the latest episode of Fear the Walking Dead and see that it was a post-apocalypse documentary shot and cut together by a bunch of do-gooders. It works for a single episode. Channel 4 walks a fine line and ends up being entertaining more often than cringe-inducingly cheesy, but its cheesiness does occasionally cause some cringing and I wouldn't want to see this style employed ever again.
While I'm not always on board with their storytelling decisions or the way they have handled some characters, showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian B. Goldberg, along with their writers, have proven capable of crafting interesting zombie action sequences since taking over Fear last season, and that holds true again in Channel 4. Morgan and his pals get word that a woman who's hiding in a boarded-up house with her asthmatic child may need their assistance, and when they arrive at her property they find that the front yard is full of land mines. That makes our heroes understandably hesitant to cross the yard, which is how this scenario takes most of the episode to play out, but zombies aren't so cautious. So we are treated to the sight of a bunch of zombies being taken out by land mines.
The sight of zombies blowing up is the best thing Channel 4 has to offer, because there isn't much going on with the characters here. We just get to hear them talk about their world views and why they want to help people. While there are some fun moments, like John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt) mentioning that he tried caviar and thought it tasted like bait, or Daniel Salazar (Ruben Blades) trying to convince Dwight (Austin Amelio) to let him give him a haircut, this episode will really work best for viewers who are tuning in to Fear for the first time, as it serves as an introduction to the show's characters.
If the situation with Logan (Matt Frewer) at the end of the mid-season finale got you excited to see what was going to happen next with him, you might be let down by how little Logan there is in this episode. And if you want to see the badass zombie killer version of Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) you'll be really bummed out, because now she's going down the disappointing path of becoming such a pacifist that she won't even kill zombies anymore. Morgan is a bad influence on her. I do get why she would be reluctant to kill zombies now, killing an irradiated zombie recently made her afraid she could have radiation poisoning, but I don't want to see Alicia declining to dispatch flesh-eaters when it's necessary. Morgan is teaching her aikido now, and I hope that she'll be using her new martial arts skills to kick more zombie ass in the future.
Channel 4 gets the second half of Fear the Walking Dead season 5 started in a serviceable, watchable way. Hopefully the remaining seven episodes will be more substantial.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: Zombies set off multiple explosions while trying to get to a house surrounded by land mines.
GORY GLORY: For an episode full of zombies being blown to bits, the gore level in this one was surprisingly low. There is some blood splatter around, and some zombies also get stabbed through the head.
FAVORITE SCENE: Morgan finds himself standing on a land mine. I would have loved the scene even if more if Morgan had actually been blown up.
FINAL VERDICT: