Comic book and horror fans i've been known to cover entire film series during these difficult times and well I thought that i;d tackle something a little different and that's take on two pilot episodes from The Walking Dead franchise. I will admit right now the only reason i'm doing this is because the new spin off series The Walking Dead: World Beyond starts on Sunday and that show looks pretty good and so here is my review of the debut episode of Fear The Walking Dead simply called "Pilot" and yes i'm covering these episodes in the order upon which they are set and not the order in which they were released and since Fear The Walking Dead is set before The Walking Dead i'm starting with that enjoy the review guys and girls.
The plot of the episode is after witnessing his friend kill someone junkie Nick has try to convince his mother and her boyfriend that something evil has started and that something will consume the entire human population. In all honesty the plot to the episode is alot better then what I made it out to be since the episode does a good job of telling it's story as well as setting up the zombie threat which for me at least is a good thing since this is a zombie show and so it makes sense that the actual zombies are treated like an actual threat and don't freaking sing and freaking dance *cough cough* Disney.
Starring in the episode is Kim Dickens as Madison Clark , Cliff Curtis as Travis Manawa and Frank Dillane as Nicholas Clark. Also starring in the episode is Alycia Debnam-Carey as Alicia Clark , Elizabeth Rodriguez as Elizabeth Ortiz , Lorenzo James Henrie as Christopher Manawa , Maestro Harrell as Matt Sale , Scott Lawrence as Art Costa , Keith Powers as Calvin Jasper , Lincoln A. Castellanos as Tobias , Lynn Chen as A Nurse and Leon Thomas III as Russell.
Acting wise I feel that the episode does fair a little bit better but not by much and I say that because while the script is good dialog wise it's not so good character wise. The script doesn't give these actors that much to work with when it comes to there characters which means that the actors can only do so much in order to make the script work and while the actors do indeed do a solid job they can't be as good as they can be because the script doesn't allow them to be that good at least that's what I think anyways.
As mentioned this series is a prequel to main show however instead of featuring any of the main characters from the main show this show instead has a whole new set of characters. Which to me is the whole point of a prequel because now you have no idea if these characters are going to make it out of the episode alive or not because there not featured in this case even mentioned in the main show and so there's suspense and tension now there.
As to where exactly this fits into the shows timeline i'd say that it takes place slightly before , during and after Rick's coma. Of course this show would see a huge time jump for either season four or season five as such now the show runs currently with the main show with the events of both shows happening at pretty much the same time which for me just isn't that interesting yes it does open the door for possible crossovers but it also means that we don't get to see these characters learn that much about how this new world works or even how to kill zombies but there's a very freaking huge chance that they do learn how to kill zombie but i've just forgotten all about it.
As I said this show features an entire new cast of characters and what people forget about this show is that for some reason at least for this first season these new characters were pretty much hated by alot of people. Which is something that I just don't get yes this episode writes them pretty horribly but that doesn't mean that the characters themselves are bad Maddison for example is a caring mother who is willing to do whatever it takes to keep her kids safe this is something that we would see alot of during the characters time on the show.
We would also see the character of Nick learn to get of the drugs and learn his family is far more important then taking drugs. I'm not going to say that these are the best characters on TV because quite frankly there not but you can't fully judge a character of just one episode since in the case of this show you have eight episodes to get to know them and for there characters to be developed plus I think we can all agree that Maddison is the best character in this show and also one of the hottest females in The Walking Dead franchise.
One of the things that I feel that this episode doesn't do that well is explore the family's dynamic which considering that one of the big selling points of this show was that it features a blended family as the main cast is really something that they should have worked on. In fact we only get one scene with Travis's other family and that's not enough even more so when you take into account that his ex and his other son become main players in this first season with the son becoming a big player in the show's second season.
While not having Travis's ex wife and son be main players in this episode might not seem like a big deal it does become a big deal when you take into account that the ex wife dies at the end of this first season and we the audience are expected to care about her character. That sadly cannot happen because we don't have enough time to get to know her as a character and so when she does die it feels like she was just another character and not a fully developed character.
Rather understandably there aren't that many deaths in this episode I think in total there's about three maybe four. That being said alot of the zombie related deaths were pretty tame since there just the typical death that you'd expect to see in anything to do with zombies which while it does make sense since this is meant to be the start of the zombie apocalypse but at the same time I do expect the deaths to be creative at least.
Overall this wasn't a bad debut episode and I can see why this show is still going on because even from this episode I can tell that the series had alot of potential. Even tho this was a solid episode there was alot of bad things that are present in the episode and those things for me at least are very fundamental in making the show live up to the high standard of The Walking Dead as such this episode gets a 7.5 out of 10 from me.
All of the images that I used in this review were gathered from either Google Images , the official Fear The Walking Dead fandom wiki page or the official The Walking Dead fandom wiki page. I have to say that even tho there was amore of a verity of images seen in the official Fear The Walking Dead fandom wiki page I have to recommend that you use the official The Walking Dead fandom wiki page just because they are more high quality images on there then there is on the official Fear The Walking Dead fandom wiki page and as always we end this review as we always do with our true goddess Elvira wishing us all some very unpleasant dreams.
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