The Walking Dead began with Sheriff Rick Grimes waking up from a coma and finding civilization as he knew it gone, victim of a zombie apocalypse. Every fan of the show has wondered at one time or another how the world could have turned to shit so fast. Fear The Walking Dead promises to tell that story.
Shot mostly on location in L.A., with palm trees substituting for the iconic Atlanta woods of Walking Dead, the pilot aired Sunday, August 23 at 9 p.m. on AMC. The series will continue for the next five weeks, to be followed by the season premier of The Walking Dead in October.
It wouldn't be part of the Walking Dead franchise without a couple of foreigners feigning American accents, so Fear stars Kiwi actor Cliff Curtis and Brit Frank Dillane as schoolteacher Travis Manawa and his hunky, heroin-addicted stepson Nick. Kim Dickens plays Madison, a caring assistant principal and the mom of this typically dysfunctional blended family. Alycia Debnam-Carey (big surprise, she's Australian) plays Nick's jaded teen sister, Alicia, and Lorenzo James Henrie portrays Travis' disaffected son from his first wife, still resentful of his parents' divorce. Lots of angst, lots of drama, and we haven't even gotten to the zombies yet.
The story starts when Nick wakes up in a post-drug stupor in a Venice Beach crash pad and discovers his girlfriend viciously munching on a corpse. Of course no one believes him in the hospital, assuming his nightmarish vision was just the drugs. But when an elderly patient in the adjoining bed dies of a heart attack, he's quickly whisked away by the attending physician. "This man has got to be taken downstairs NOW," he commands. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, a video of a highway stop between police and a rogue driver goes viral, and seems to show the driver being repeatedly shot by police and still coming back to life and attacking them. So yeah, people are dying and turning into zombies, but the police, the military, the hospitals and everyone else in control is covering it up, blaming the sudden disappearance of dozens of people on a flu epidemic.
Nick, desperate to find out if he really saw his dead girlfriend eating human flesh or was just hallucinating, escapes from the hospital and contacts his heroin dealer, Calvin, who masquerades as a clean cut boy-next-door type. Calvin has Nick's parents fooled when they come looking for their son, but when Nick meets with him at a diner and asks if his last dose was spiked with PCP, it's clear that this guy is a sociopath. Calvin takes Nick for a drive and tries to kill him, but Nick manages to wrestle the gun away and Matt gets shot in the chest instead.
When Nick brings his disbelieving parents to the scene to show them what he did, they find zombie Calvin lurching around trying to take a bite out of them. Nick runs him over with his parents' car but Calvin gets up again and keeps coming. Running over him a second time finally crushes his skull, but Travis, Madison, and Nick now know the truth.
With Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman involved with the writing, and directed by Adam Davidson (a veteran of TV's Community and several small indie films,) Fear The Walking Dead definitely gets off to a good start. The necessary exposition - who are these people and why should we care about them? - never bogs down the action, which moves along quite quickly. (Given that this is only a six episode season, the pace should remain brisk throughout.)
Press blurbs from AMC suggest that in the next few weeks, we'll see Madison and Travis pull their blended family together and struggle to survive one step ahead of the zombie apocalypse. With Kirkman at the helm, it's a good bet almost no one here is safe and the show will lose a featured actor or two every week.
The zombies here look a bit different, since they're all "fresh" kills and none of them has rotting flesh and filthy clothing. There also aren't that many of them (yet,) although zombies do tend to multiply faster than Tribbles, so I'm sure the makeup department will get busier week by week. But at least in these first two episodes, there's far less gore and violent death in Fear than a typical episode of Walking Dead.
But what really separates this prequel from Walking Dead is that here, we know more than the characters. The viewer knows civilization will fall, that no matter what the government, military or health officials try, all their plans will fail. We know the future, and it's unimaginably bleak.
The characters on Fear The Walking Dead are going to have figure that out themselves. Will fans care about their fate as much as Walking Dead fans have become invested in the survival of Rick and Carl and their dysfunctional blended family? Right now, Madison and Travis seem smart but bland, and Nick and Alicia comes across as downright unlikable (like, let's face it, most teenagers.) As the zombies multiply and society falls, it will be up to those actors as to whether we keep tuning in, or just wait for The Walking Dead to return in October.
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