Fear The Walking Dead S04E03 “Good Out Here” review
Airing Mondays at 9pm on AMC on BT TV in the UK
Director: Dan Liu
Writers: Shintaro Shimosawa
Essential Plot Points:
- The crops fail in the Diamond and are burned.
- In present day, the truck runs off the road when Althea (Maggie Grace) tries to take it back.
- Morgan (Lennie James) and Nick (Frank Dillane) stay behind as the others go to fetch a tow vehicle. But Nick escapes and follows a car that speeds by.
- Nick kills the man who was Charlie’s guardian. In response, Charlie shoots Nick and he dies in the arms of his sister and friends.
Review:
The timeslip between the original Fear The Walking Dead and the more up-to-date timeline of The Walking Dead continues, and we’re back in the Diamond at the start of this episode. Its self-sufficiency now seems in danger as the crops fail, which is bad news given the circling vulture trucks that sit around the stadium demanding that the inhabitants give up everything they have.
Back in the present day, former journalist Althea airs our fears: what happened to you, who are you chasing and why? Not that the answers are forthcoming from Victor, Alicia, Nick and Luciana. As stated below in ‘The Bad’, the Clarks and their allies seem spectacularly awful at figuring out who they can trust and work with, so are not giving much away.
They’re also pretty bad at not simply following their current overriding impulses. OK, we know Nick is a former addict so has a problem with self control, but tussling with Morgan, leaving him in a vehicle attracting the dead and running after a fast-moving car on foot with just a hammer don’t seem like smart choices designed to get the right result.
Someone should have warned Morgan that given the chance to choose the smart option or the self-serving completely wrong option, the Clark family will always – and we mean always, based on the first three seasons of Fear The Walking Dead – go with the latter. However, this action at least makes us feel that maybe Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) is still alive and kicking, as that’s kind of impulse Nick would have if that was the case. Shame we don’t get any more forward movement on that storyline as a result of these actions.
What we do get is the perfect set up to a major rug pull, which the scriptwriters should be proud of. Morgan getting through to Nick, being the right man in the right place to pull him back from the brink, is key. But just as he’s on the verge of a breakthrough, Charlie comes along. If you saw Nick buying the farm this episode, congratulations, but that had the desired shock for us. Given the dual storylines, and those dips into the past, it won’t be the last we see of Dillane this season. But it’s still a bolt from the blue to lose the character from the very first scene of the first episode of this series, who has survived so much.
The Good:
- There’s some nice cinematography at the start as Nick clears the crops, shot like he’s taking down walkers one at a time.
- Does anyone else feel there’s a story behind the jagged piece of metallic fence post being used as a weapon? It seems like it’s in desperate need of an upgrade for killing walkers, which makes us feel there’s some history to it.
The Bad:
- Good people struggle to make it in the post-apocalyptic world, largely because they’re outnumbered by the bad. So when they meet others who are also clearly good – as Morgan, Althea and John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt) obviously are, because they untie their attackers – why don’t they work together? Why do they continue to make each other’s lives more difficult?
- With shows crossing over, are their memes doing the same? We know it fits with the theme of the episode, about still being able to find something good out in the world, but don’t look at the flowers, Nick.
Best Quotes:
Morgan to Nick, giving advice that’s never going to be taken:
“It’s not going to work out the way you think.”
Nick, on why he’s been staying in the Diamond and not leaving:
“You try to the right thing, you end up doing the worst. That’s why I stayed inside so long. It’s not because of what’s out here, it’s because of what being out here does to you.”
Review by Matt Chapman
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