So my hopes for an enjoyable and inventive fear the walking dead ride with Ashley Cardiff at the helm have been dashed.
This feels very much like last season with one standout John Dorie focused episode, a handful of passable ones, and some really quite bad ones making a less than satisfactory experience.
After praising Ashley big time for her contribution I'm now not sure why the Ashley Cardiff episode was so good. It could have been because of her, or it could have been because it was all about John Dorie and he's interesting enough to carry anything. She's certainly not pulling the rest of the episodes into shape as story editor.
What really happened this episode?
There was a whole lot of people sitting around all relaxed and having one to one conversations while there was a plane to build and a nuclear power station meltdown to get away from. Suddenly everyone except Alicia have attributed extreme!!!!!! caution and fear to nuke infected zombies, although no one has real world experience with what nuclear contamination does, and the FTWD line is well beyond the actual science danger of what a real nuke exposed person would pose should they touch you with their irradiated skin and blood. Wash that stuff off, don't swallow it.
We continue to see the parable our team (USA?) helping (we're bringing you democracy!!) people that don't want to be helped (most of the rest of the world now). Or maybe I'm giving the show too much credit as there's nothing to indicate anything deep and clever going on with the writing at this point.
Well we're back to bad acting, (those kids are terrible) situations and drama that don't make sense with previous narratives (the whole kids camp zombie over run and danger thing??? these kids know how to handle zombies, they enslaved hundreds of them as their security system, but suddenly they're helpless cos Alicia's around?) it just doesn't make sense. and they just let the zombies build up instead of standing at the fence and picking them off by poking a sharp stick into their heads. (do you really need to go full Alicia who expends far too much energy on each 'kill'?).
I get having to have 'threat' to push the narrative along but it's just lazy writing to do it so sloppily and expect your audience to swallow it.
Good to see the 10/10 reviewers still turning up strong cashing their pay cheques. You're the only thing keeping this train wreck going. You definitely earn your propaganda money.