Monsters of Television

“It’ll break him.”

 

Upon finishing the season 1 finale of Fear the Walking Dead, I couldn’t help but to feel slightly disheartened.

Sure, there was a lot of heart-pumping action, a fright or two, more anti-authoritarian themes making our military out to be a giant collection of buffoons, and some haunting imagery. But as we flew over the ocean, I couldn’t help but to think this thing didn’t turn out nearly like I thought it would. Completely different actually. But I’m coming to terms with the fact that maybe what I thought this show was doing was in my own head, what I wished to be watching.

Instead, what I got was a thing that’s been proven to work against my preconceptions which is based on how much I like things that don’t really work. Confused by my vagary? Let me put it to you another way.

I wrote 11 things about this season finale, good and bad, to explain myself a little better.

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“Have you no respect for private property?”

 

If you were wondering when this occupation metaphor was going to tackle the chaos that ensues after the military pulls out of the destroyed wreckage to leave the local population to its own limited defenses, I think you have your answer now.

But I’m bored talking about how this show likens armed fundamentalists to mindless, shambling villains whose army can grow exponentially because their foot soldiers are easily converted by the contagion within us all. Even the torture scene is kind of dull and not only because they STILL don’t know what to do with Ofelia.

Sure, blah blah blah, they moved the plot forward and yadda yadda yadda it’s a major turning point not only for this series but the entire universe. Major character developments for Daniel and his compass pointing in the other direction than Travis who’s being stalwartly naive. Snore.

I’d much rather talk about how teens break stuff.

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“Liza. She did this.”

 

Ready to dig into another life-affirming, feel-good episode of Fear the Walking Dead?

I’m actually of two minds about this episode because “Not Fade Away” deals with a lot of interesting family drama within the context of this military occupation. But it’s also kind of dumb. In a lot of places.

So depending on how you went into the episode, the penultimate episode to the penultimate episode of the season either came off as intense or came off a little silly. Either way, you can’t deny that things are much different after what happened That Night. (PLL references everywhere!)

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“Good morning, Susan.”

 

This week’s episode is called “The Dog” and, while there was definitely a dog in it, it took me long time to piece together why this dog was the centerpiece of this episode. Nick seems to be the only one that friendly with this dog and then, when the time came for them to escape, they sacrificed the poor pup to Peter Dawson, eater of humans, hater of bounce houses.

I suppose this isn’t their dog (which I gathered because no one seems to even know this dog’s name) so what do they care if it survives Peter’s determined zombie-fueled massacre of the entire Cruz family in revenge on his neighbors daring to celebrate a birthday on the edge of apocalypse.

I’m assuming the episode title has more to do with the heavy-handed Jack London discussion from episode 1 than anything else. And it makes way more sense that the episode is titled based on something Travis did because Travis is the big star in this episode. For being the burdensome weight that might end up killing them all.

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Obviously, plenty of spoilers for both shows follow.

Post-apocalyptic survival has always been a great source of entertainment and storytelling and no two shows have garnered more buzz in the last year than AMC’s The Walking Dead and TNT’s Falling Skies. While the two programs give us very different looks at a very similar overall idea (scrounging for survival), the differences between the shows indicate one is clearly superior to the other.

AAAAAND FIGHT!

For starters, the shows treat action in very different ways. The Walking Dead is actually pretty boring when it comes to this point. For its six episode first season there is not a lot going on in terms of excitement. Is there peril? Sure, but there is not nearly enough ass-kicking, head-exploding action one would expect from the genre. Some will make the argument that AMC has made a “classy” zombie show. They weren’t looking to be all gore and scares, you know, things inherent of the genre. Yeah they kill a zombie every now and then and yeah there was that terrible (CG wise, not plot wise. Well…plot wise too) explosion in the finale, but I needed more! With Falling Skies, we get action left and right. Between the aliens (who we actually get to see. Take that, V!) and the mechs and the ships and the outlaw group there is plenty of stuff to shoot at, hide from and blow up.  The show is incredibly action-packed. When you’re fighting for survival it’s nice to see some actual fighting. And they did it in one-third the amount of episodes. Read more »

Man, I loved this episode.

With her son missing, Sarah and her partner Holder scour the town in search for him.  I loved the tense interplay between Sarah and Holder, the palpable fear on Sarah’s face as she faces the same horror as the Larsens, the sense that both these detectives are so damaged but trying so hard to return to “normal” relations with their respective families. During her 10 hour search for her missing son, Sarah must face not only fear of loss but also her inadequacies as a parent. Best moment? When Holder compares Sarah to an orphaned cat who has never been taught to hide her own feces.

Heres the rub.  Do you know what was the primary trouble with this episode? It wasn’t an episode of The Killing.

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I have a rather daring claim to make in my support for The Killing–do you think, perhaps, that the identity of Rosie’s murderer is sort of beside the point?  Yes, I know it is being marketed as a whodunnit (search online in Rosie’s room for clues!), but I am not sure that I care about who is the killer.  I can see why this claim should necessitate a huge critique against the program–shouldn’t they be making me care about the central plot point?  But I’m too busy being fascinated by excellent acting and deliberate storytelling.

In a podcast that should be going up very soon, the Monsters crew complained quite a bit about Game of Thrones, but we spent less time complaining about The Killing. To be honest, I don’t want to complain about The Killing. Despite my theory that HBO’s recent series seem to specialize in being a whole lotta fuss about nothing much (sorry, but Boardwalk Empire was super slow, with few characters I cared about (at all) until about half way through the season), similar claims could be made about The Killing. Yet for me, while I may not quite get HBO, but I sure as heck “get” AMC.

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