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‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Season 6, Episode 5 Review: The Worst Episode Of The Season So Far

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This article is more than 3 years old.

Well that was a pretty terrible episode of Fear The Walking Dead. Not terrible in the way so many episodes last season were terrible, but it’s inching into that zone.

One big reason that this season continues to drag, even as it improves over last season, is the villain. Ginny is just not a terrifying figure. Her organization isn’t particularly scary compared to various other nefarious factions we’ve met in all of these shows.

And like the main show, I’m just sort of burnt out on all these factions constantly warring with one another. In the main show, once our heroes arrived at Alexandria everything started to go downhill. Largely this was due to the expanded cast size and scope of the world itself. Alexandria was joined by Hilltop, Oceanside and the Kingdom. There were Wolves and Saviors and then Whisperers to contend with.

Over on Fear we went from a pretty interesting and much more organic dispute over water rights between a largely white survivor settlement and a Native American tribe (factions that were grounded in the real world and made sense) to a parade of cartoon villains like the group that “besieged” the stadium, the crazy black lady who poisoned people, Logan’s group of “are they really bad guys or what?” and finally Ginny’s Pioneers who somehow weren’t around for any of the earlier stuff but are now everywhere and can find you no matter where you go. Oh, and there’s the people looking for the key Morgan has who spray-paint “The End Is The Beginning” here and sundry.

Top all this off with Sherry’s new group of rebels. They wear scary masks that could have been used in a much more interesting way but are just to conceal their identities from Ginny’s Rangers. Sherry has taken up with these people and fails to mention it to Dwight, instead letting them abduct him and drag him back to their HQ.

What follows is a whole bunch of maudlin, melodramatic tripe. If you were hoping for an interesting reunion, or maybe just a happy one, between Dwight and Sherry I’m sorry to say you will be disappointed. Sherry basically doesn’t seem to care about Dwight at all. She starts it all off by essentially lying to him, puts him in enormous danger and then cuts him out when they go to assassinate Ginny. When he goes to stop her later, she gets angry and starts crying and hitting him, yelling “why do you have to always make it so hard!?”

What the hell, Sherry. Dwight just followed you across the country and finally found you and this is how you treat him? Ultimately she tells him to just go. It’s more important to her to kill Ginny than it is to be with her estranged husband. She feels guilt over not taking down Negan when she had the chance. She worries that Dwight will turn into the man he was when he worked for Negan.

In other words, this is another great example of people in Fear not acting like actual people. If they actually love each other, they’re not going to let this stupid group of cowboy villains come between that. And nobody in the real world speaks about other people as if they’re “going to become the man you were” blah blah blah. Give me a break. This whole “I’m going to stop you from changing into something horrible” crap is just as bad as Morgan’s insistence last season that everyone make up for the bad things they’ve done to somehow redeem themselves.

It’s all so blatant and over-the-top. In the real world, people simply don’t talk like this. They don’t explicitly tell one another that they need to save themselves from reverting back into something they used to be (while also mentioning how they now remind them of how they used to be even further back in time).

So Dwight only reunites with Sherry for a hot minute before things go south and they’re ripped apart again. I’m not sure they even get to have sex—this show, and really The Walking Dead in general, have something like an allergic reaction to sex and romance. The former is barely even hinted at and the latter is always foiled and dashed for stupid reasons. Like when Al met the CRM chick and they just kissed and didn’t actually go all the way. Why? Here we are in a zombie apocalypse where physical intimacy is incredibly limited thanks to a dearth of potential partners. I don’t think people are going to show much restraint when the opportunity arises.

Morgan shows up, of course, because Texas is a tiny state where it’s super easy to run into people and walkie talkies can reach every corner of it (but also you need a plane to reach certain areas for some reason). He wants the Masked Marauders to cool their heels and not try to take out Ginny right away because they have people who might be retaliated against (though why this would be the case if masked bandits killed her is beyond me). Dwight is really gung-ho about carrying out the murder until Sherry has him locked up with Al and Morgan and then he has his change of heart and goes to stop her. Character motivations flip like coins in this show.

In the end, Ginny isn’t killed and our star-crossed lovers are once again at odds. I’m left feeling like Sherry would have rather never been found, though whether that’s because it’s the truth or because the show is badly fumbling this whole thing is less certain.

The one thing I liked about this episode was Morgan admitting that he tried to get everyone to do what he thought was the right thing before and that wasn’t okay. Of course, I’m going to blame that entire approach on the bad writing rather than on Morgan himself. For some reason they thought having everyone turn into a mini Morgan last season was a good idea. And we still have characters bringing up watching their little PSA at a gas station this season, which just brings back the bad memories.

We’re not at that level of horrible but this episode felt incredibly weak, even weaker than episode 3 which was the first real low point of Season 6. Dwight and Sherry’s reunion is a letdown. The conflict continues to feel contrived. Ginny continues to only loom large for the characters in the show while audiences scratch their heads and wonder what the big deal is. I’m sick of all the factions. I’m tired of the setting. The plot feels like it’s treading water at best, and the season, while an improvement overall, still feels wildly uneven.

P.S. I forgot to talk about the scene where they take back Al’s SWAT van. The plan is apparently to ride it down with horses and then climb in and overpower the driver. Somehow horses manage to keep up with the armored vehicle despite it being, you know, a vehicle that can do at least twice the speed of a horse. The driver uses the machine guns to try to shoot the riders even though they’re too close to the van to actually be in the line of fire. He could have easily just run over them by pulling hard to the left. It’s an utterly ludicrous scene that made no sense whatsoever.

What did you think? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.

You can find my reviews of past episodes in Season 6 below:

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