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

#SFWApro

Blindspot 1.1: Good to See - Or, Coronet Blue meets The Illustrated Man

Good to see Blindspot begin on NBC last night - in fact, it was excellent.  Coronet Blue, the 1960s CBS summer replacement series fragment starring Frank Converse about a guy who washes up in New York with no memory and saying the words "coronet blue" was always one of my favorites, as is Ray Bradbury's 1951 anthology The Illustrated Man, about a vagrant whose tattoos each tell a magical, science fictional story.

Blindspot has elements of both, as well as Sullivan Stapleton (from Strike Back), an Australian with a great American accent, who plays Kurt, the lead FBI guy, whose name is tattooed on Jane Doe's the amnesiac's back.  She's played by Jaimie Alexander, who does well in her role, too.   The debut was fast-moving, and revealed enough important information to give hope for a compelling series.

Not enough information, being kept too much in the dark, is a pitfall with these kinds of shows, which Blindspot avoided.   We now know that Jane was/is some kind of Navy Seal - even though the Seals don't officially - yet - take women, though as FBI leader Bethany aptly remarks, maybe that's just their public stance.  And there's an evil guy with a beard afoot - who's apparently behind Jane's condition - though who knows for sure if he's entirely evil (and here Blindspot connects a little with NBC's other strange crime hit that begins with a B, Blacklist).

Back to The Illustrated Man, it looks as if given episodes of Blindspot might well be devoted to clues contained in the tattoos, which will be deciphered in series as the series progresses.  That's a good way of keep the stories fresh, as the underlying plot unfolds.

So I'm up for watching Blindspot.  I gotta say, though, that I liked Blacklist much better at the beginning than as the series went on, and I'm hoping Blindspot can avoid this kind of running out of tension and steam.

 
no tattoos, but pretty strange