Fear the Walking Dead 4.10 Review – ‘Close Your Eyes’

Tonight on Fear the Walking Dead, we’re right back into one of the staples of the Walking Dead-verse: a bottle episode!

The plot: Focused entirely on Alicia and Charlie, this episode sees these two locked up in a house together while the hurricane rages on outside. Alicia starts out angry, nihilistic, and driven purely by the need to survive, while Charlie struggles with guilt and grief so overwhelming, she’s become suicidal. Despite telling Charlie, when she discovers her, that she’s probably going to kill her, Alicia never can bring herself to do so, driven too much by wanting to emulate her mother, Madison. The two come to an uneasy truce, culminating in both of them reaching epiphanies when they’re trapped in the basement as it steadily fills with water: Charlie doesn’t want to die, but fears becoming a walker more, and Alicia can’t bring herself to kill Charlie, even when the girl is literally begging her. In the end, they escape, but all of their former friends are MIA when they go to look for them.

The lasting, embittered anger of Alicia and Luciana has been around since the first half of the season, and while I can see why they feel that way, I have to admit I’ve been over it since about the time it started. Mostly because it’s been very clear that Charlie is a kid, maybe thirteen years old at the most, who is terrified and clinging to the only sure thing she knows to survive, and has been manipulated by those same people who are allowing her to survive. The Vultures quite clearly set this girl up to be their mole and their weapon, and it feels outright hypocritical of Alicia and Luciana to not see that. Not to mention that they are taking out on Charlie things that were overwhelmingly not her fault, but the fault of everyone from Mel and Ennis, to the rest of the Vultures, to, quite frankly, Madison and the other people in the stadium. Even considering the two things that Charlie did do–spy on them and report back to the Vultures, and shooting Nick, both Alicia and Luciana have done things that lead to others being in danger, hurt, or killed, because they were foolish or believed in the wrong people before. And they are both much older than Charlie when they did those things. They have far fewer excuses for what they did, yet here they are, judging this kid for no less than what they’ve done.

Now, I do agree with Alicia in that Charlie is old enough to know what she’s done. But she is definitely not old enough to be treated the way she’s been treated by Luciana and Alicia, much less for so long, when she is visibly struggling with the guilt. When Alicia practically revels in telling Charlie she can never, ever make up for what she’s done, that’s she garbage, she’s gone much too far. She continues to push it a little too far later on, even as she’s also very slowly coming around to accepting that she can’t and won’t ever kill Charlie. Most of it is pure nihilism after the initial bout of insults, though. Alicia’s one attempt to save someone at the mill last episode failed, she’s walked away from everyone, she’s got no reason to think the world is any good or that it can get any better.

We learn that Charlie has every reason to feel the same, however. She’s also lost everyone: her parents, whom she saw die and turn; the Vultures, who did care for her and keep her alive, twisted as they may have been; Nick, who genuinely cared for her but whom she killed nonetheless; and she’s had her role in what happened to him and the rest of the people at the stadium drilled into her relentlessly by Alicia, Luciana, and Strand. It’s horrifying to see it’s driven her to try and kill herself, but it’s not shocking. What Charlie needs is some compassion, empathy, understanding–forgiveness. Also serious therapy, but believe it or not, the other three are easier to come by in her world. Her attempts at dealing with what she’s feeling all speak to her youth, too: looking at pictures of a happy family, trying to picture her own that way but being unable to, reading books to try and escape. Staying silent because nothing she says will be acceptable or good enough.

But in an extreme world, only the extremes will do, and it takes nearly dying together to bring these two to an understanding, of one another and of what they each fear, what they each truly can and cannot abide. Alicia has a strong streak of hopelessness in her now, but she still has her mother’s moral compass deep within her. Granted, Madison’s moral compass was always a little wonky, but it did generally include not killing guilt-wracked tweens. Charlie doesn’t want to die, not by her own hand or anyone else’s, but what she truly can’t accept is the idea of becoming a walker after seeing her parents death. Alicia isn’t wrong when she tells Charlie she can’t give her what she needs, no messages of hope or forgiveness, but she also won’t let the girl die, and that’s something, at least.

For this reason, these two setting out together in the end is an unlikely pairing. Since Alicia doesn’t seem to have any intention of hanging around to look for people who may very well be dead, I’m curious where she’s going to head with Charlie. I’m hoping she’ll head East, figuring on finding the community Morgan told them about. In fact, I’m hoping that’s where they all end up heading, since the bait was dropped in the last episode with him asking all of them to come with him. I also hope, however, that we aren’t going to get a bottle episode for every group to show what they were all doing during the storm, but I suspect that’s going to be how they stretch out the back half of this season. FTWD and TWD generally do good bottle episodes, but I feel like they’ve been relied on a little too much of late. And after the first half of the season felt especially stretched out too far, I’d rather have the plot move forward more quickly than that.

Other Thoughts:
– The effect of looking out a glass pane at the storm for the opening titles was cool…until the ‘wind’ blew away some of the letters. A little too cheesy.
– Remember when this show had a filter other than blue? Seeing those flashback scenes mostly made me wish the rest of the episode did. I know in the first half of last season they used the ‘depressing’ filter to more clearly define the past and present sequences, but I would love some color to come back into this show.
– I hope we don’t have to go through the same steps of forgiveness–or at least, acceptance–when Luciana and Strand eventually see Charlie again.
– That walker falling and freeing them from the basement was a little too convenient for my tastes.
– AMC, update your episode image gallery quicker, would you?

6.0

The final score: review Average

The 411

FTWD generally does good bottle episodes, but that also means that by now, I've got a higher standard for them. This one did not elevate the focused storytelling of this style of episode, and Alicia's misplaced anger and hatred for Charlie has gone on too long and comes on way too strong. She (and others) are blaming a thirteen-year-old girl (maybe younger) for the full breadth of actions taken by adults much older than her who manipulated her and essentially held her own survival over her head. Alicia spends much of this episode as, frankly, a bully who drives a child to want to kill herself, and she only barely manages to stop Charlie in time. She comes around eventually on not killing the girl herself, but let's just say I'm hoping Charlie doesn't have to deal with Alicia one-on-one for too much longer.