Retrospective: When 'FearTWD' Was Better Than 'The Walking Dead'

I wrote this originally at the outset of Fear's third season.

Welcome back to diabolical on this fine Monday afternoon, oh my droogies. It’s time to take a walk down memory lane.

The following piece first appeared on my Forbes blog several episodes into the third season of Fear The Walking Dead, before that season really picked up and had some of its best episodes. Still, it was clear at this point that Fear was in a much better spot than the flagship series. The Walking Dead had just wrapped its seventh season and it was clearly the worst to-date.

As Fear’s star rose, TWD’s fell. And then AMC hired new showrunners for Season 4 and beyond and it’s never been the same since. Just when things were getting good, the zombie drama that avoided goofy conflicts and cartoon villains was saddled with the most outrageous possible contrivances imaginable, from the ethanol tanker fiasco to the beer balloon to not one but two plots centered around radiation sickness (one from a nuclear plant meltdown, the other from literal nuclear missiles going off). The list of nonsensical bullshit goes on and on and on in today’s Fear.

This post crossed my mind reading some comments on my review of the most recent episode of Fear The Walking Dead, which is focused on Daniel and his dementia. The current season is centered around Strand becoming an all-out villain. But if you go back to an episode like ‘100’ in Season 3 you can see just how badass Daniel used to be, and how Strand as a liar and a sneak was far more interesting than Strand as a tinpot dictator.

It certainly feels like I’m talking about a completely different show when I write of that episode, “If Daniel was in The Walking Dead, Negan would be dead already. That's one of the reasons I'm enjoying this show so much more than the original. It doesn't mess around. We aren't languishing in boring filler episodes while we wait to get to the action.”

My how times have changed!

Okay, onto the post . . . .

'Fear The Walking Dead' Is Now Officially Better Than 'The Walking Dead'

Following Sunday night's harrowing episode of Fear The Walking Dead, I've come to a conclusion: It's now hands down, without question, a better show than the original.

I know, I know...that's a controversial statement to make. In fact, if the rest of Fear's third season doesn't end up being as good as the first four episodes, I may even have to eat my hat.

But as of right now, every single episode of this season has been better than every single episode of The Walking Dead's seventh season. Here's a few reasons why.

The writing is much, much better.

I don't know what happened between Season 2 and Season 3 of Fear The Walking Dead. Maybe the writers read some of my scathing reviews like this analysis of everything wrong with the show, or my review of the disastrous season finale.

Or maybe not. One thing I do believe is that they didn't just listen to the sycophants and fanboys. Instead, some soul-searching took place and what emerged was a show that's simply leaps and bounds better than it was the past two seasons.

There's truly engaging dialogue now, that makes The Walking Dead's janky writing laughable by comparison. Recall Efrain and Daniel's conversation this past Sunday. Daniel wants forgiveness, and Efrain says (and I'm paraphrasing here) "I've got some good news and some bad news for you. The good news? There's nobody left to judge you. The bad news..." and he drifts off into an alcohol-induced sleep.

This is beautiful writing. We don't get the payoff, which we can all still imagine in our heads ("There's nobody left to forgive you") and it's kind of surprising and lovely that it's just left hanging. I honestly can't imagine anything like it coming out of The Walking Dead, which rarely feels so sincere.

Or take the scene with Troy and Nick out on the boar hunt. You think there's going to be some violent showdown, but Nick ends up just taking Troy's "science" diary and ripping the pages out as they tussle in the dark. At the end of it, Troy says "I think we can be friends now." It's nuts.

Then there was the stoner church group, with Alicia (and the audience) completely taken off guard by the revelation that instead of singing bible songs, they'd be passing around a bong and talking to a zombie head named Jeff (who's from my home town apparently!)

All of this is so much better than last season and anything coming out of The Walking Dead, I'm left a little stunned. I'm not sure I've ever seen a show turn itself around so thoroughly, let alone see a spinoff rise so far above its parent show in terms of pure writing quality.

The story is more realistic. No CGI tigers, Trash People, or Negan.

Part of this is also that the story feels more believable. Its characters are more realistic and less absurd. Yes, Madison and Rick share a few too many bad qualities (they're both poor leaders who think they're good leaders, basically) but other than that Fear The Walking Dead actually has more characters that I like than The Walking Dead does now, especially with the return of Salazar.

It's a shame Travis is dead, because as annoying as he's been in the past he really proved himself at the outset of the season. But still, we have a really interesting new cast of characters, especially in the Otto family and the new characters in Mexico like Efrain.

Compare this motley cast of survivalists and Mexican jesters with The Walking Dead. There we have the clown Negan who everybody fears but nobody just kills. As I said in my review of "100" if Daniel Salazar was in The Walking Dead, Negan would have already met his maker.

Then there's the utterly stupid and ridiculous Trash People who speak like they time-traveled back from The Planet of the Apes and the Kingdom with its Shakespearean goofiness and a CGI tiger. This is all the more absurd stuff that's simply changed the fundamentals of that show, but there are other more insidious problems at work.

The characters we've grown to care about on The Walking Dead have all suffered at the hands of bad writing. Daryl rarely spoke in Season 7 and when he did you wished he wouldn't. Carol is playing a long game of pity party that's grown entirely unbearable. Maggie is hardly present at all in the show, but when she is we also have to suffer Gregory. Jesus was badly miscast and is simply hard to watch. The list goes on.

Bad writing and a less and less plausible world have made The Walking Dead a pale shadow of what it once was. Meanwhile, Fear has come out the gates with a gritty, realistic, and surprisingly dark opening salvo in its third season.

The conflict is believable and surprising, with no clear villains.

Dante was a bad guy, obviously, but more of a bump in the road than a super villain who is going to occupy two (or more) seasons of the show. I did complain last season about what I called "Rapid Conflict Resolution Syndrome" in which any good conflict that arose was resolved too quickly. I suppose I could apply this to Dante, but I'm not going to simply because Daniel's badass take-down of the thug lord was so satisfying.

The real conflict, I suspect, is going to play out with the Otto family. Last season we saw what happened to Ofelia Salazar. She was shot at in the desert and then presumably captured by Jeremiah Otto (though we didn't know who he was at the time.) "Welcome to America," he says to her, and that's the very last thing we see of her.

Does this mean that they've killed her? Or is she Jeremiah's prisoner? That's a creepy thought. Or maybe none of that's true, and Jeremiah helped her and she simply left of her own accord. We don't know because the Otto family is neither clearly good nor clearly evil. Troy is crazy but I'm not certain it's maliciousness so much as it's a genuine mental instability at work. Jake is obviously a good guy, but he's the only obvious good guy of the three. Jeremiah, meanwhile, is like an even more complex Governor.

Unlike Negan, the Governor had redeeming qualities. There was a real human with a really twisted moral compass in there, and that's how he was able to seduce followers. Jeremiah is even more difficult to button down. In the video Madison watches of him haranguing his wife and younger child, he comes across as a real monster. But when he speaks with Madison about it afterward he doesn't try to make excuses. He admits to both his and his ex-wife's drinking problems. He seems incredibly human, with both a more compassionate side and a hard edge that makes him dangerous.

Basically, he's like any good villain. He's not just a monster, he's a person who we can empathize with.

It's also quite possible that he's much, much worse than we suspect. Could it be that he killed his ex-wife? And what about Jake's mother? What happened to her? What about Ofelia? All I know is that I'm curious and eager to uncover more of the mystery. There's really no comparison with Negan. He's just a bad clown with a bat, constantly jabbering on and swaying his hips. We're supposed to be afraid of him, but he wears it all out there on his sleeve. Put a bullet in him already and be done with it.

Season 3 puts 'Fear' into Fear The Walking Dead.

There's been some genuinely frightening moments this season, like the wall zombie that pulls Troy's goon in through the hole after all those rats pour out. That kind of zombie scare is exactly what this show (and The Walking Dead) need more of. Not absurd zombies coming out of nowhere and loudly sneaking up on hardened survivors.

This element of fear, combined with actual surprises (like Travis's death) and mystery (like where Ofelia is and Jeremiah's true nature) are all adding up to create a truly great season of television.

Sure, it has its flaws still. I still find Madison an irritating leader, though her spoon-in-the-eye trick earned her some major brownie points. Even in Sunday night's episode there were some hard to figure moments, like how the bad guys even knew water was being stolen in the first place. But I can look past a lot of this when the rest of the story is so compelling.

Ultimately, if you're not watching Season 3 of Fear the Walking Dead you're missing out. While I spent virtually the entirety of The Walking Dead's last season rolling my eyes and shaking my head at just how bad it had become, I've spent this season of Fear on the edge of my seat, excited to see what happens next.

I really, really hope we aren't let down.¹

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1. We weren’t letdown for the remainder of Season 3 which was filled with gripping character drama, complex characters and a compelling arc and ended with a crazy cliffhanger. Of course, we were letdown eventually, about five episodes into Season 4 which actually started out really strong before falling apart completely. I feel genuinely bad for all the actors who had to go from Season 3 quality to the shambles this show is now.