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Fear the Walking Dead 4.09 Review – ‘People Like Us’
Loading...Welcome back to Season 4 of Fear the Walking Dead! I hope you’ve all had a great summer and better weather than our group of survivors have tonight. Let’s see what they’ve been up over the break, shall we?
The plot! It looks like about as much has passed for the characters as for us, mostly made clear by how far John’s healing has come along. He, June, and a very silent Charlie are living in a bus by the river, with Morgan in a truck next door. Down the road, in a sprawling estate, are the dysfunctional remnants of the original cast– a drunk Strand, a despondent Luciana, and a very lost Alicia. Althea and her van also still linger in the area, but when Morgan says he wants her to drive him back to Alexandria, she’s ready for it. Everyone else, however, makes a hard pass on the offer to join him. From there, the episode is largely about showing us where everyone is mentally and emotionally while dropping hints about the upcoming tornado/hurricane/big storm that’s going to seriously complicate everything in the episodes to come. Morgan helps Alicia try to help someone trapped at a lumber mill, but they’re too late. John tries to get Charlie to open up, but she runs away. Charlie tries to return a book, and is scared off by the still-angry Luciana, who is otherwise only interested in working her way through the previous resident’s extensive vinyl collection. June and Althea investigate the sudden influx of walkers in the river and June confesses her fear of losing John’s love if they return to his cabin. And Strand is basically just drunk and aimless.
Morgan’s broaching of the question of going to Alexandria is one that this show had to tackle at some point, and I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad thing that they’ve gotten to it so quickly. Because, really, why wouldn’t most or all of them go? Now, the reasons they come up with currently make enough sense to work for now. John is the only one with a real alternative, and he’s kind of clinging to the memory of that idyllic time when he fell in love with Laura/June back at his cabin. And it’s true that he lived there before everything went to hell, so it is home for him. Basically, though he’s probably the most level-headed and emotionally sound person here, he’s not ready to let go of that romantic notion just yet. June will go wherever he goes (and hope he won’t stop loving her, which, I’m with Al on this one, she’ll be fine), and Charlie…well, she’s literally not saying anything, so it looks like she’s sticking with the two people who are agreeable to taking care of her for now.
Strand and Luciana being all too ready to wallow in their misery also fits. Strand has often vacillated between extremes, and without a plan, a target, a person to provide him with structure, he’s floundering once more after losing his best friend as well as someone he looked up to as a leader. Madison helped him forgive himself and find the better version of himself when he was lost before. Now, Strand has no one to look to for that anymore. Luciana has lost Nick, whom she loved dearly, and is similarly rudderless without him–not to mention still angry that Charlie is alive while he’s gone. Their malaise is almost amusingly normal, actually–one just sitting around getting drunk, one just sitting around listening to music,living in a house so huge they literally go for weeks without seeing one another or Alicia! It feels like it’s almost a tiny slice of commentary on consumerism, but it’s done in such a normal, standard way that that feels like more of a by-product of their situation than not. Mostly I think their states go to show how people can resort easily to old comforts and habits when they’re grieving and lost. These two are not at their best, we know why, and they currently lack anything to motivate them past it.
Alicia, on the other hand, refuses to sit still for fear of stagnating or losing purpose, or just plain having to deal with her own loss and grief. She’s fixated on trying to be better, to be as good as her mom was, and so when she finds a chance to maybe save someone, she is determined to do it. While Alicia is very capable, it’s a good thing Morgan was along for this trip, though, as she could’ve been hurt or turned going in as heedlessly as she was. What I found most interesting here is that when Morgan tried to tell her that Luciana and Strand need her, she turned that back on him and told him that they need him. But here he is, rushing to leave them. While Morgan and Alicia have not been close on-screen so far, they have been through some intense stuff together, and he is the one who talked her down from killing June. Though they aren’t close, hearing he’s leaving is clearly affecting Alicia. She’s still never truly been without her family, not like she is now. Even when she left the ranch by choice, she knew Madison and Nick were still there. Now, they’re gone and never coming back. The one who stepped in where they once would have in the moment when it counted was Morgan. So his leaving is still significant for her.
By the end of the episode, the bad weather has forced everyone into unlikely and uncomfortable pairings, and naturally Morgan’s departure is delayed. I’m interested to see how these pairings work out, and curious how long this big storm is going to plague the characters. I hope it’s not somehow stretched over the entire half-season, though. I also hope that by the end, whatever the answers to the question of “Who’s going to Alexandria?”, they make as much sense as they do right now. Because the promise of a solid and fair set of communities, where they have an in since they know Morgan, is a hard one to turn down. I would hate to see some forced reasons for why they aren’t going to go, especially Morgan.
Other Thoughts:
– While I’ve never been in a tornado personally, those effects of the walkers being pulled into the air were not this show’s best work by a long shot. Yikes.
