Fear the Walking Dead: Pilot

FWD - Pilot
The premiere episode of the spin-off series, Fear the Walking Dead, was titled Pilot.  Autopilot would have been more appropriate.  Zing!  The parent series, The Walking Dead, does one thing really well: zombie gore.  For five years, the creative genius behind the series’ practical effects have found new and creative ways to give audiences goose-flesh.  Where The Walking Dead tends to fall down a lot are areas like plot, pacing and character development.  The pilot episode of Fear the Walking Dead demonstrate what happens when the creators of The Walking Dead dedicate an hour and a half of television to all of their many weaknesses while barely teasing their strengths.

The pilot episode of The Walking Dead is generally considered the best of the series.  That episode dropped its characters and therefore the audience right into the apocalyptic action.  Our protagonist, Rick Grimes, wakes from a coma in a hospital right out of your worst zombie nightmare.  After witnessing a series of horrors, he escapes into an abandoned town and immediately we are dealing with life and death stakes.
The premise of Fear the Walking Dead is that we are finally going to get a look at all that stuff that the original series skipped while Rick Grimes was sleeping.  There is potential in that premise, but it’s a tough trick to pull off.  There’s a reason the original series skipped right to “the good stuff”.  The zombie apocalypse is inherently more interesting than what preceded it.
In theory, by getting to know the characters on the new show before their world is pulled out from under them, the audience should be more invested in their stories.  In practice, the pilot episode of Fear the Walking Dead spends 90 minutes introducing us to a dysfunctional and largely unsympathetic blended family.  They have fairly mundane problems that we know aren’t going to matter at all in a week or two.  So the stakes are non-existent for most of the episode.  Do we really need to get to know the lead character’s daughter’s boyfriend right before the world goes to hell?
That’s just one of many examples of characters or subplots that could have been trimmed or excised entirely.  At 90 minutes, the pilot episode is entirely too long.  It’s a bad sign when you start rooting for the zombies to take someone down so we can just get on with the apocalypse already.  It doesn’t help that most of these characters are not likable.  If they had all died in the final scene and we started the second episode with a new group, I would have considered that a good start.  Sadly, we’re going to be stuck with most of these characters for another 5 hours at least.
We’re introduced to the world of Fear the Walking Dead through Nick, the drug-addicted son of Madison – one half of the show’s central couple.  He wakes from a drug-fueled stupor in a church that doubles as a crack house.  In what proves to be the best scene of the episode by far, Nick stumbles through the church looking for his girlfriend.  Of course he finds her eating the entrails of one of the church’s unfortunate inhabitants.  It’s zombie 101 which is why it works.
Unfortunately, what follows is a lot of soap opera 101.  It’s not even especially compelling soap opera.  I’m pretty sure I could have turned on one of the networks and found a more compelling family drama without much effort.  Since Nick is a drug addict, the show is able to cast doubts on what he witnessed.  No one believes his story.  Even he wonders if he hallucinated the entire thing.
This sets up the opportunity for Travis, his mom’s boyfriend, to investigate the church.  Once again the show finds reasonably solid footing playing out horror cliches as Travis searches the creepy, blood-soaked church for clues.  He undersells the carnage when he tells his girlfriend that “something bad” happened at the church and she essentially blows him off so that we can repeat the scene with her present.  It’s like a rerun within the pilot!
Towards the end of the episode, Nick goes to visit his pusher.  He seems nice.  Friendly even.  So of course he plans to take Nick out to a remote location and shoot him in the head.  Even Nick isn’t dumb enough to fall for this scheme.  Of course it doesn’t help that his pusher actually flashes his gun while trying to get Nick out of the car.  As TV drug pushers go, this guy is a rank amateur!
The whole scene is a set-up to allow the main characters their first real zombie experience.  And since characters in zombie movies and TV shows live in a world where zombie movies and TV shows don’t exist, we get to watch them struggle with the concept of a zombie that won’t die no matter how many times you hit it with a car.  I don’t think I was meant to find the show’s final act as funny as I did.
As the focus of the show shifts from mundane issues of a blended family to the life and death issues of a zombie apocalypse, I expect the entertainment value of Fear the Walking Dead will improve just by nature of the fact that we’ll be getting more of “the good stuff”.  But the one thing I know for sure is that the pacing problems that regularly plague The Walking Dead are even more prevalent in the spin-off series.  This could be a long, slow slog to the apocalypse.

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cinemarchaeologist
8 years ago

Your review is a lot better-written than mine (though parts of it do seem as if you read mine first 😉
The writers are avoiding the one potentially good story they have to tell in favor of the usual soap. And they avoided it like, well, the plague. Zombie-ism is becoming a rising problem yet no one spends any real time on the phenomenon. People go about their ordinary lives with seemingly little or no awareness that something very strange is happening. There’s no news. No real discussion.

cinemarchaeologist
8 years ago
Reply to  lebeau

It’s true–I do write mine just as you describe. Several people have been nagging me about whether I was going to write about it and I didn’t know for sure if I was going to do so until about 40 minutes after the end of last night’s ep. I just didn’t think I had anything to say about it. Dave Erickson, FTWD’s showrunner, came to the show fresh off that runaway AMC hit LOW WINTER SUN. He says the first season of the new show (which I think is supposed to run only 6 eps) will cover about 3 weeks… Read more »

cinemarchaeologist
8 years ago

I’m really surprised to hear your TWD articles don’t generate much traffic. They generate so much of my traffic that I’m driven to despair (if I could monetize it, I’d definitely be making money). I DO write about other things. Sometimes, the articles are even pretty good. Most of them don’t get a fraction of the attention of the TWD stuff though. A few have managed it, not many. My traffic is so tied to TWD that it goes way up every Sunday night, regardless of whether or not there’s even a new ep. :/

cinemarchaeologist
8 years ago

My traffic isn’t even close to yours but I’m over 400 hits on the FTWD article since it went up some time around 20 hours ago. That’s not great for one of my TWD articles but it’s easily my most hit-upon article today.

cinemarchaeologist
8 years ago

My biggest TWD article right now–which is also the single most hit-upon article on my site–is my piece on the geography of TWD from 2 years ago. I created a map to go along with it00give ’em a map, they’ll never stop looking. It’s currently approaching 10,000 hits. My season 2 wrap-up piece was a huge attention-getter too–I got over a thousand hits on it in the first hour it was up! It’s currently my #4 all-time hit-upon article. All of my TWD articles draw substantially more than your least-hit-upon one but your overall traffic puts mine to shame: your… Read more »

Tonia
Tonia
8 years ago

Your article thoughly summed up my thoughts on the episode. Too long with too much filler!

Carl
Carl
8 years ago

I had forgotten that the Walking Dead pilot was actually pretty good. Honestly that is the rare anomaly in TV series. Usually the pilot is one of the worst episodes in the series. So I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt for now, but by the end of this mini-season I want to see something that makes me want to tune in next year. The lack of walkers really made the story weaknesses stand out. Everything to do with the church after the first scene made no sense. The son tells them about what he saw and they pretty… Read more »

cinemarchaeologist
8 years ago
Reply to  Carl

You missed some things. The husband didn’t tell the wife about all the blood. That info, which wouldn’t, in any real-world situation, be withheld, was intentionally withheld here just so they could revisit the church later and burn through more screen-time. This is one of TWD’s long-running means of artificially inflating underwritten material.
Calvin was the junky son’s dealer pal; he was NOT Alicia’s boyfriend, whose name is Matt and looks nothing like him (except for being black).

Carl
Carl
8 years ago

Ahh, you are right about the drug dealer and the boyfriend being different people, Different enough that I should have been paying better attention admittedly, but the boyfriend scenes are pretty much all before the drug dealer scenes and I thought them going to the parent’s house meant that of the boyfriend since they were on seemingly friendly terms. I’m sure I would have figured it out by episode 2 if they were keeping them around. By the way, Travis most certainly did mention the blood. In the parking lot scene he said something really bad happened then said “there’s… Read more »

Craig Hansen
Craig Hansen
8 years ago

I was disappointed by this pilot episode, finding it too dull and (at 90 minutes) too long. It felt like the extended episode was more of a business decision (more commericial time to sell!) than a storymaking decision. With the exception of maybe the drug addict, I found the characters uninteresting. At times things didn’t make much sense, either. Almost any rational person, upon falling into a pool of blood at the crack house, would have went straight to the cops. So why didn’t Travis, I kept asking myself throughout the episode. Because the writers didn’t want him to was… Read more »

Craig Hansen
Craig Hansen
8 years ago
Reply to  lebeau

Authorities trying to keep the sudden zombie outbreak secret before it got out of control? Ok, I can buy that. At least it’s a reasonable explanation that works for me. It’s not the first time I’ve had to make allowances in order to enjoy Walking Dead. Only now I’m going to have to do it twice as often!

cinemarchaeologist
8 years ago
Reply to  Craig Hansen

No, that’s not a reasonable explanation in any way, shape, form or fashion. An outbreak in 5 states featuring zombies, an illness so bad it has decimated half the school and no one is reporting on it or even talking about it? AND the excuse is that authorities, including medical professionals and law enforcement officials from the local sheriff to the federal government involved in some sort of cover-up? It’s just bad writing. Make that HORRENDOUS writing, and there’s no way around that.

brokencandy
brokencandy
8 years ago

I think the original series is a lot smarter than you give it credit for. For one thing, it lends a distinct frisson of realism to fantastical scenario and makes suspension of disbelief easy. It develops the characters rather unevenly, some developed extremely well while others languish as window dressing, but it does lend people with believably reactions and plausible motivations. It gives just the right amount of exposition without wasting time, and poses meaningful questions about what the building blocks of human nature are, whether or core is essentially good or bad, and what will rise up to the… Read more »

cinemarchaeologist
8 years ago
Reply to  lebeau

As these are points I’ve been making for years, I’d not only agree with you, I’d state the case even more strongly. I don’t really know what show brokencandy is watching, but it’s a LOT better show than TWD. “The right amount of exposition without wasting time”? TWD is the show where every substantive event is followed by three eps worth of the characters rehashing that substantive event over and over again. “Believable reactions and plausible motivations”? This is the show where a disease that kills in record time hits the prison, Hershel suggests raiding a veterinary pharmacy, a mission… Read more »

brokencandy
brokencandy
8 years ago
Reply to  lebeau

Yeah, if one likes something and another person just doesn’t see it that way, there’s not a lot to be done for it. TWD has largely received a very positive critical reaction, but also has it’s share of detractors. I may often feel very much like people are watching two different shows…same show, different mind. (I for one cannot comprehend the negative critical reaction to ‘Death to Smoochy’ for instance, nor the praise for ‘Suspiria’ or Roger Ebert’s defense of the second cut of ‘The Brown Bunny’, but what can you do?) If you don’t see the value, you probably… Read more »

brokencandy
brokencandy
8 years ago
Reply to  lebeau

“Worse” doesn’t apply if I don’t think the original series is in any way bad. Television shows are not important enough to invest endless patience in them if you have no interest in any of the characters or the plot. I just watched the second episode, and I feel it improved somewhat, but I still feel no investment in the characters and mild interest at best in the storyline. It’s an “I’ll watch it if I have nothing better to do” kind of thing. I’m still predicting it won’t have anywhere near the fandom cult of the original series (and… Read more »

brokencandy
brokencandy
8 years ago
Reply to  lebeau

I think the panic would have happened a lot earlier than it did in the show. We all know how quickly viral videos travel and how quickly tabloid media pounces on them. It would be all over the media and people would be tossing around their own conspiracy theories already. Everyone would have had some inkling, even if very distorted, after one or two cases. Millions of people die every day, and we already know that everyone is already infected, so there would be dozens to hundreds of cell phone videos out there by this time, and media coverage would… Read more »

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