‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Is Finally Over, Five Seasons Too Late

Updated 11.22.23 see updates below.

It’s the end of an era, folks. No more painting trees. No more making up for all the bad things we’ve done. No more writing scathing critiques about the worst show on TV.

I’ve been writing reviews of Fear The Walking Dead since it first aired back in August of 2015. I was 34 years old, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. My 16-year-old daughter was 8. Her little brother was 5. Trump had never been elected president and COVID-19, like the zombie virus itself, was still being cooked up in a lab somewhere (I jest! Too soon?)

Here’s my very first review of the show. I wrote, in that review, that I had “high hopes” for the show mostly because I immediately liked the characters. I was a bit lukewarm about it for the most part and thought it was a slow burn (I’ve since rewatched the finale and am astonished at just how much better it is than anything after Season 3). For the first two seasons, my opinion of the show went up and down and up and down like a seesaw, zigzagging as the show had its moments of greatness and its many, many moments of bizarre stupidity.

By the time Season 2 was over—airing a 2-part season finale kind of like yesterday’s 2-part series finale—I was annoyed by the direction the show had taken and by the weird decisions characters like Madison kept making. I argued that it suffered from Rapid Conflict Resolution Syndrome in my review of the finale. Too many conflicts were introduced and resolved too quickly in these first two seasons. Nothing had time to ferment and get interesting (something that changed in a very big way in Season 3, for the better).

I was actually quite critical of Season 2’s finale, but after a long discussion of its flaws I wrote:

The thing is, Fear The Walking Dead still manages to be enjoyable in spite of all this. Not enjoyable as in a really good show with characters we care about and a story that keeps us on the edge of our seats, but enjoyable in a visceral, immediate, unthinking sort of way. Another loud, slow zombie sneaks up on some group of unwitting survivors and kills them gruesomely. That's fun, even if it is dumb. Our characters do some really absurd thing or come up with some silly plan or other, and it results in a bloodbath, and that's fun, even if it doesn't make any sense.

Sounds kind of like how the show ended up when the new showrunners took over—though Goldberg and Chambliss amped up all of Fear’s inherent flaws to 11 and then some. It amped up the stupid to a point where you couldn’t enjoy it anymore unless you were hate-watching just to see how preposterous it would get.

I also called parts of the Season 2 finale, like Travis’s revenge killing of his son’s murderers, “terrific television” which I don’t think I ever said about the series when the new showrunners took over in Season 4 (or at least not after the first few episodes of Season 4, which I did enjoy).

But in a way, I think I might have doomed Fear with my Season 2 finale review. In it, I concluded that Season 3 should be the end of the show, and that they should start fresh in Season 4 with an all-new cast:

Season three should be the last season of this particular Fear The Walking Dead. Season four should start with a fresh batch of characters, right after the apocalypse breaks out, but in some other location.

What I had in mind was just wrapping up the Clark’s story and going to, I dunno, Alaska or something and beginning at Day 0 again and telling another story from another perspective about the early days of the outbreak.

Instead, we got a shockingly good Season 3 followed by, well, the end of this particular show and the beginning of something totally different, with a mostly new cast and the complete character assassination of all the remaining members of the original cast (either killed, fake-killed, or simply changed dramatically into little Morgan clones).

In my review of the Season 3 finale I said that this was how you bring back a show from the brink, and that the main show should follow Fear’s example. And then Season 4. And then everything went to hell, and for five long, incoherent, increasingly nonsensical and poorly written seasons the show continued its downward slide.

I didn’t think anything could be worse than the plane and the beer balloon in Season 5, but then they introduced the documentaries about helping people. Then nuclear warheads exploded over Texas and they stayed there fighting over an office building. And still, miraculously, Season 8 managed to be even worse, bringing back both Madison and Season 3’s devilishly wonderful Troy Otto—only to completely ruin both characters in the process (which I said would happen, many times!)

Now it’s over. And I’m not sure what to do with myself. I’ve been writing about this show for a quarter of my life almost and it’s over. The Walking Dead is over. There are these halfway decent, halfway anemic spinoffs, but they’re flashes in the pan and not that interesting really. Ah well. This is how life works. Things change. Everything ends. And by all accounts, this show should have been cancelled ages ago. It’s a miracle AMC let it live so long, a shambling husk of its former self, lacking the one thing that all zombies crave: Brains.

Next up: The Ones Who Live. I just can’t wait for that crackling non-existent chemistry between Rick and Michonne to, um, razzle dazzle us! (Both great characters but seriously, no chemistry—though I’ll take them over Dwight and Sherry any day of the week. I seriously don’t think anyone writing for TWD can do romance to save their lives).

Update

It’s funny. I talk about how this is the worst show on TV—or was at any rate—but when you dig a little bit deeper into the minds of Fear’s showrunners, you get a glimpse at just how much worse it could have been if they’d gotten their way at every turn.

I posted earlier about how we learned after the season finale that some of the characters who never showed up in Season 8 were officially still alive. The writers of this zombie apocalypse show couldn’t bring themselves to kill a single protagonist—even relatively minor ones who weren’t given a single shred of screen time all season!

Well, from that same interview with Ian Goldberg and Andrew Chambliss, we are given one of the most outrageous episode ideas I’ve ever heard, perhaps even more ludicrous than beer balloons and all the rest. When asked what the “craziest idea” they ever had was, here’s what Chambliss told Entertainment Weekly:

We talked very seriously about doing a Milo and Otis style episode where Skidmark was with Wendell's dog — who he mentions in an earlier season — and we see two animals survive the apocalypse for an episode. And we talked about it, and then we talked to our line producer about it. He basically threatened to quit if we even pursued that idea.

The funniest part about this is that they were going to do it until their line producer threatened to quit over it.

The interviewer, clearly a little baffled by this, replies: “Now, they wouldn't have been actually talking like Milo and Otis, right?”

To which Goldberg responds: “There might've been a Look Who's Talking style voiceover. The other one that we talked very seriously about doing was a live episode.”

A voiceover for Skidmark and his dog companion. In the hands of capable showrunners, this might actually be fun in the way a random musical episode in a show that’s not normally a musical is fun. But can you imagine listening to Skidmark talk about making up for all the bad things he’s done?

The live episode is also a pretty crazy idea, and the interviewer simply replies: “Wait, what?”

Quoth Goldberg:

We would shoot it tailor made for one location, that we would shoot like a live show. I think our idea was to do it in an abandoned TV studio, and it was about our characters sending out a broadcast. I think we talked about it in season 5, and it would've aired live on AMC and been shot that way with no cuts.

Um . . . a broadcast? So basically those bad documentaries from Season 5 but as a live broadcast in the apocalypse after all broadcasts were effectively extinct?

Chambliss adds:

Part of the challenge of it was that we would've been airing the season after our entire crew had wrapped. So it would've been very difficult to get the cast and the crew together, and we never quite landed on the creative that felt right for it. Although, if I recall, it was going to be an Al-centric story — a journalist broadcasting.

Ah, an AI-centric story. So these scripts really were written by AI! (Just kidding, that’s Al as in Althea, but I had to say it).

But the real kicker? Chambliss concludes: “It may have morphed into the documentary episode we did in season 5. Some of the ideas might've made it over there.”

Step away from the ledge, Tom. This documentary isn’t worth dying for you idiot!

Oy vey. I can’t even with these guys.

Update #2

It’s the day before Thanksgiving and I thought it might be nice to update this post one more time with some of the things I’m grateful for when it comes to Fear The Walking Dead. Here’s a list.

• I’m grateful for the first three seasons that introduced us to a new perspective on the zombie apocalypse. We were given some excellent characters like Travis, Nick, Alicia, Strand, Daniel, Troy and plenty of others. I was genuinely invested in these characters and what would happen to them, and looked forward immensely to the day when this show would cross over with The Walking Dead. That never really happened (unless you count Morgan and Dwight, which isn’t what I had in mind) but it was a nice dream while it lasted.
• After the first couple of episodes that took place at the dawn of the apocalypse, the show didn’t really find its stride until Season 3, but man oh man what a great season that was! The conflict was so juicy. We had an old feud between the Otto family and Broke Jaw Ranch and the Native American tribe on the Black Hat Reservation led by Qaletaqa Walker. I suppose this is a particularly relevant conflict on Thanksgiving, but it was also just a very human story about people with old divisions ultimately fighting over a scarce resource: Water.
• That was also what made Season 3 so great. Scarcity in the apocalypse! What a thought! The dam, the feud, the very real and very dire need for water to survive. All the chaos and conflict that bubbled up out of that was all so grounded, even with larger-than-life characters like Troy keeping things interesting. Then we were introduced to the new villain, Proctor John (also the name of a king in the Tad Williams books I’m reading) who had tons of potential. At one point, this show really was every bit as good as The Walking Dead at its best.
• That didn’t last, but there are still some things I’m grateful for in the later years. John Dorie was a great new character that I loved even when he was doing ridiculous things like splitting a bullet on an ax blade to kill two walkers at once. I don’t like where they took his character but I’m grateful we got him for a while at least.
• I’m grateful that I got to review this show for so long, right up until the end, even if it was a complete disaster for most of its final five seasons. It was still fun to write about and talk about on my YouTube channel and it was really nice to have such passionate readers and followers to discuss it with.
• I’m grateful for the sheer number of times someone said to me some version of “Your review is more entertaining than the show!” or “I don’t watch the show anymore but I still read your reviews to see what’s going on each week.” That feels good and I genuinely appreciate it!
• The important thing is the friends we met along the way. That’s the cliche I’m getting at, heh.
• I’m grateful that this show set a new standard in bad television. It’s genuinely one of the funniest most entertaining accidental comedies out there if you watch it with the right mindset. Nothing about it makes sense. Nobody acts like a real person. It goes in the most bizarre direction imaginable and then reverses course at the drop of a pin. It’s so filled with wild coincidences and implausible shenanigans that you just have to marvel sometimes. I’m grateful I stuck through it to the bitter, stupid end.
• I’m grateful Skidmark made it, and that they didn’t bring back Tobias. Oh and I’m grateful that Frank Dillane and Cliff Curtis got out while the getting was good.

Have a lovely Thanksgiving, everyone.

You can read my review of the FTWD series finale right here. Watch my video review below:

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