Fear the Walking Dead
AMC
I mean, I’ll hand it to them, I didn’t think they’d actually do it.
All season long, Fear the Walking Dead has been building up to a storyline about a crazy, post-apocalyptic cult trying to nuke what’s left of the rest of the world using warheads from a beached nuclear submarine.
Though Morgan and his gang stopped a majority of the missiles from going off, one with multiple warheads was in fact able to launch, and this week’s season finale was about the various, spread-out groups coming to terms with what they all thought was their imminent death.
Surprisingly, there was no reprieve, at least not in the way I was thinking. I figured Morgan would mash buttons until he happened across some sort of kill code to spike the missile in mid-air, or it would drop its warheads and they would be duds after a decade of zero maintenance. But none of that happened. The bombs dropped, and the nuclear mushroom clouds bloomed.
This did not, however, result in the entire cast being vaporized, the way logic, and science, would probably dictate.
The only confirmed deaths of the episode were cult leader Teddy and his submarine weapons tech, but both were shot before the bombs even hit. And then there was Dakota, who was quite literally three feet from safety but opted to get atomized by the bomb, ending probably what was one of the most bizarre character arcs in the show’s history, and that’s saying something.
Fear the Walking Dead
AMC
Everyone else…seems to be fine?
Strand assumed the high rise he was in was going to be destroyed, but the blast didn’t even so much as break the windows, which makes roughly zero sense.
June and John’s dad took shelter in Teddy’s secret bunker. Alicia has already been placed in an actual bunker, the only one that makes much sense for survival.
Dwight and Sherry were inside a storm cellar where they literally had to hold the door closed with a rope. Not exactly nuke-proof. But the most absurd development was probably Morgan and Grace taking shelter under a semi-truck out in the open.
I suppose the idea here is that we don’t know exactly how far away everyone is from the blast site, and apparently only Dakota’s group was close enough where anyone could actually be killed by the blast if they were still out in the open. Everyone else must have been very far away, but it was confirmed those were indeed nuclear blasts, which raises all kinds of questions about radiation poising, something Grace is already dying from, but you would have to assume it would affect everyone in the area. But radiation poisoning is kind of a TV mechanic where it can last for as long or as little as the plot demands, as we’ve already seen with Grace.
This was just…a bizarre episode. I actually thought it would have been a somewhat fitting finale if a nuclear blast just like wiped out the entire cast to end the series once and for all, but quite literally no one in the main group besides Dakota died, so now we move on from here with the full cast. In true Fear the Walking Dead tradition, the person that should be the lead of the show, Alicia, was given close to zero screen time in the entire finale, because of course.
No idea where the show goes from here. Unlike The Walking Dead, there is no fixed end date for Fear the Walking Dead as a series, and it stands to reason it will outlive the show that spawned it. Whether that’s a good thing is up for debate.
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