*Minor Spoilers*

Having just finished the 2 part finale earlier, I am maybe writing this review with a bit of rose tinted glasses, as I really did enjoy both episodes. It was exactly what you wanted from a Walking Dead show, be it the main series or this spin-off, and actually did keep me on the edge of my and engaged throughout the entirety of both episodes. The ending of the series left a lot to think on and contemplate who on earth might have survived to the next season. It is really anyone’s game!
But, while the finale 2 episodes might have been the best of the season, maybe even the entire series, we must remember how we came to this moment. It was not an easy road to traverse. Fear The Walking Dead is not always the most constant show. For every enjoyable episode, there are a large horde of dull and slow paced episodes that surround it. Granted they always try to make each episode have either some good old fashion zombie action, or a gunfight or similar thrown into the mix, but most of the episodes are drawn out and feature a lot of characters whose names we actually don’t know.
One of the biggest problems, and this is the case with a lot of shows that I watch, is that they have a midseason break and use this as an excuse to break the season down into two separate stories. While the stories are greatly linked, they are effectively their own entities and have their own revelations. Both series of The Walking Dead and this spin-off do this, and this season was no exception.


Feat The Walking Dead has always tried hard to keep up with its more popular cousin, which is strange as The Walking Dead are limited to sticking (as best as they can) to the source material, where as Fear doesn’t need to do this. It is free to do whatever they want and have it set in an already pre-existing world that has already been written for them. With that in mind, the stories that they have chosen to tell are not always the best. Sometimes the series can seem a little boring.
It is not how the spin-off was originally marketed. I thought that it was going to be a prequel, showing the earlier moments of the zombocalypse, dealing with the police and the army trying to hold back the large mass of shambling dead coming towards their barricades, or people trying to evacuate the city. (See: the intro to Resident Evil 3: Nemesis)
While the first few episodes did touch on this, slowly building up to this, and in actually quite a horror style that was really well done, it was too eager to create another The Walking Dead clone and so it skipped all that. In the middle of season 1, the words “Two Weeks Later” appear and suddenly all the epic fighting and slaughter has already happened, and now we find our main characters help up inside a camp/safe zone, with the rest of the city (including the majority of its inhabitants) in ruins.
I can understand that maybe my aspirations might have been a little too… expensive, but it could have been done on a more subtle scale, rather than large open war in the streets of Los Angeles. The series actually has gone the completely other way and set it in unknown locations, most of the time in Mexico, probably to keep the production cost down.

From then on the series took a strange journey from one location to the next, dramatically changing the story of whatever season they were on, and repeating the same cliché situations that you have encountered in The Walking Dead, and every other Zombie themed book, movie, game, and comic. Mainly the idea that humans are the worst enemy of all.
While it is not bad that they have done this, they are limited to what they can really do and it does make for some interesting moral choice situations, it is just that sometimes Fear acted as if it did not really know what to do with the situations it had created for its characters.

So that is my rough review of the first two seasons in a very basic form. It was watchable, and at times quite enjoyable, especially when some serious undead action took place, but overall it was a bit haphazard and often quite dull. However, maybe it was a means to an end and this has helped make the third season (at least parts of it) a lot better than previous ones, making it the best season of Fear since the show first stated.

So it begins with a really good, yet misleading episode. It picks up where the last season left off with everyone being captured by a group of mysterious American soldiers, hinting at the remnants of the US military.
I am not sure if this was intentional, or if they had a different idea in mind for their original plan for the third season, as this episode (well two technically as it was a two-parter) is completely different to the rest of the season.

Our slapdash group of survivors (mainly Madison and her dysfunctional family) are taken to a military base which appears to be run by two brothers in their twenties. One plays good cop and the other bad. The bad cop is doing strange experiments of killing people and seeing how long it takes for them to come back. This is something, that now thinking about it, no one ever mentions again and seem to forget of all the people that died under his order from this little experiment.
Anyway, shit naturally goes down and some horrible soldiers die, but the majority of the group (including Madison and her family) escape in either the jeeps, or on board of the helicopter.
As the helicopter flies away, another random group fire upon it, causing it to crash, and a major character is killed off, which really did come as a shock as that character was one of the more interesting and believable characters of the group.

It turns out that the soldiers belong to a farm/community on the boarder which is run by a bit of a racist drunken revolutionary type (the brothers are naturally his sons). Madison and co amazingly worm their way into the community and each become quite influential given their short time there.
They learn that another group (the ones who shot down the helicopter) of modern day native Americans have said that the farmland belongs to the ancestors of their leader and is planning war against them. We see some of their life as well as they are joined by a character who left in the middle of season 2.
This story deals with the farm trying to survive with not enough water, the bad brother being a bit of a loose cannon, the leader’s drinking problems (as well as his racism), and just genuinely trying to survive during some really harsh conditions, all the while a looming threat is coming and Madison and her family try to avoid this at all costs, with the outcome actually being far more surprising than I originally would have thought.

This story runs parallel with Strand (the black guy who seems to know every shady person in Mexico) as he tries to befriend a community at a dam, who is “selling” water, lead by a sadistic crime lord… who is quickly dispatched by Daniel (the old Hispanic barber / ex-special forces badass who everyone thought was dead), as that is what he does; he shows up, thinks he knows better, and kills everyone of importance. Daniel, who at this point thinks his daughter is also dead and so now has nothing to lose, helps an uninteresting character rule the new dam community and giving the water back to the people, while at the same time trying to kill Strand as he cannot be trusted at all.


The two stories come to their own conclusions at the midseason break and when we returned in September, the new stories, at the same locations begin.
I cannot really go into much of this without giving away the first half of the season, but the two stories eventually intertwine and we are given the finale which is the big clash of everything coming together.
Strangely a new group emerge right near the end, with their own Negan-esc character, and pose a threat for no other reason than to make the finale an epic battle. While it does seem a little out of the blue, it did make for some enjoyable viewing. Stuff like this has happened throughout the show, but this was one of the first time that what they threw at us actually managed to stick.
As I mentioned before, the events that unfolded in the finale make me wonder who will be left to pick up the pieces. They have left it open in a way that a number of characters could have been killed off, or no one was.

Some characters are inconsistent in their actions and morals from one season to the next, and it does make us not really root for any of them. Last season Nick was heading towards a strange relationship with the dead where he doesn’t want to kill them because they are just little lost souls, but then in this season, the gloves are off and he has just become another zombie killing machine. So a complete 180 degrees. Alicia seems to sleep with someone in each season, so it is funny to see that she is still going strong. And Madison swaps between trying to keep her children safe, saying that they are her everything and she will do whatever she wants to protect them, to letting them go almost instantaneously after only just getting them back. It all feels a bit all over the place.
Annoyingly the best character of this season is killed off rather poorly in the first part of the finale episode, which was a bad decision given that the character did have a lot of potential and was already working on a path of redemption from being rather evil in the first part of the second half of the season (… what? No, that sentence did make sense)


Overall, while this was the most enjoyable season of the show, it still suffered from pacing issues and some really uninteresting moments and/or characters. It is good that they have hit a firm reset right at the end, allowing them to go in whatever direction they want, but it is a shame that the show felt the need to do this, rather than having a really gripping story that they could have continued over multiple seasons. We will have to wait until next year until we find the answers. Until then we have the new season of The Walking Dead coming in a few weeks to keep us occupied until then.
If you are a fan of the other series, or the zombie/survival genre in general, then check it out. There are a lot worse things than Fear the Walking Dead season 3… other things being the previous seasons of this show and a few of the episodes in the middle.
It was solid and yearns to be so much more, but sometimes it does fall a little flat with a few eye rolling clichés and dull moments.
Thankfully this show is not yet at the stage where we have to destroy the brain and leave the remains in the rear view mirror as we drive away towards survival, but at times it feels like it could just as easily be. The writers will need to be careful for season 4, before Fear The Walking Dead becomes nothing more than a stumbling husk of what could have been.

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