Fear the Walking Dead 2.2: Almost the Last Night of the World

Fear the Walking Dead is back on AMC for its second season, and up to its second episode, just on the air tonight.  As I said last year when I first began watching the first season, I like this series in some ways a lot more than The Walking Dead, as heretical as that might sound.  But the proximity of Fear to our normalcy, such as it is, makes it more compelling in some ways than the parent show, in which the world, or at least the East Coast of the US part of it, often seems like another planet.

Tonight's episode of FTHW continued the theme of this second season - to wit, the sea is no escape from either the infected, as they're called in this series, or humans already on the road to the pathology of the mind caused by the apocalyptic epidemic.  Indeed, in 2.2, we and our heroes learn there's no likely safe haven on shore, either, however far that might be from fallen LA.

The father of the family in the house on the shore is planning on doing a Jonestown on his wife, his kids, himself, as Nick sadly but aptly puts it.   What the father is planning is also reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's "The Last Night of the World" (in the 1969 movie, The Illustrated Man, screenplay by Howard B. Kreitsek, not in the original anthology), in which a scientist murders his children to spare them an horrific end of the world, only to wake the next morning with his wife to find the scientific predictions were wrong.

Of course, in Fear the Walking Dead, as in The Walking Dead, the end of the world is all too real. Still, it's a little early in both shows to murder your children to keep them from the infected, so the father in question in tonight's episode still deserved to be opposed.

As is also the case with both Walking Dead series, few rescue plans turn to be completely successful, and often are not at all.   The main takeaway of tonight's episode is Madison learning not only that you can't save everyone but you may well not be able to save anyone in this apocalypse aborning.

Strong stuff, and I'm looking forward to more.

And see also Fear the Walking Dead 1.1: Great Beginnings ... Fear TWD 1.2: Tobias Leads the Way ... Fear TWD Season 1 Finale: Water Water

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