by Thom Yee

Fear the Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC

2×02: “We All Fall Down”

After escaping from their mysterious, yet-to-be-revealed-but-no-doubt-still-a-factor-in-this-story pursuers by sticking near the coastline, our heroes spot the errant lights of a house and head in-land to investigate. Finding a family, the Gearys, whose patriarch, former park ranger George, is determined to maintain their spot for as long as they can, our heroes gather vital information and new insight on the state of their new world. And get most of the Gearys killed. It’s not usually hard to tell when people are doomed on this show. I mean, there are all sorts of outside-narrative, inside-baseball ways of telling if actors will be sticking around, especially following casting news, but you can usually just tell if a newcomer is long or short for this world, and this family definitely wasn’t right, at least not right enough to be added to the cast. It’s not that they were overtly weird or perverse, but you just knew they wouldn’t have fit. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

Why I’m Watching… Fear the Walking Dead season 2

There was a time long ago (last fall) that I dared to call Fear the Walking Dead a show I enjoyed more than The Walking Dead.  It was a time before the great herding of zombie gulch, the Wolves’ attack on Alexandria, Carol setting everybody on fire, and the solidification of The Walking Dead as less a show but a legend, and thus, in retrospect… it may have been a foolish statement to make. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

The Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC

6×16: “Last Day on Earth”

There’s a certain type of dread you might feel when you’ve become invested, a dread of inevitability, when you’re reading something you’ve already read several times before and you know that something bad is coming, but you keep hoping that somehow this time will turn out different. We’ve known for some time now that Jeffrey Dean Morgan was cast as Negan for this season of The Walking Dead, and with that knowledge I was especially terrified as the season progressed to the point we comicbook readers knew it was getting to, both for what Negan represents for the series, and for how far an actor like Jeffrey Dean Morgan would go with Negan. He’s going to change everything. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

The Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC

6×15: “East”

Between the bikers blown up on the road, Paula’s group and the back up they called in that all got trapped in that burning room, the guys who got shot from Dwight’s group, and the d*ckheads Carol shot in this episode, Rick and co. have probably picked off at least twenty-five Saviors, and that’s not even counting the massacre at the Saviors’ satellite compound. This entire season we’ve been waiting for the Saviors to launch their (counter)attack on Alexandria, but considering that there are really only eight or nine truly dangerous people in the town — all from Rick’s original group — if the Saviors ever got serious, if they only managed to build up a kill count even a third of the size that Rick and co. have against them, Alexandria would probably be all out of heroes already. It’s not a big group of fighters in Alexandria. And it’s probably going to get smaller very soon. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

The Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC

6×14: “Twice as Far”

That was not the person I was expecting to get a crossbow bolt through the eye.  But I definitely was expecting someone to.

At times like these, I’m reminded of an earlier moment in The Walking Dead, way back in season three when Rick and co. first discovered the prison and decided that one of the best people to send into the forbidding, unlit, pitch-black darkness of the prison interior corridors was Hershel, the only elderly person in the group and the only one with medical experience. And that’s how he lost his leg. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

The Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC

6×13: “The Same Boat”

Along with drowning to death, I’ve always thought that some of the worst ways to die would be being burned to death and being eaten alive. And boy did we get a lot of both this episode.

In the aftermath of the raid on the Saviors’ satellite compound, a small group of Saviors that escaped manage to capture Carol and Maggie and take them to one of their safe houses to bargain for the return of one of their own and to buy time to gather more Saviour troops to counterattack Rick and co. And in so doing they signed their own death warrants. I don’t think anyone seriously believed that Carol and Maggie were ever in any real trouble this episode, either when we met their captors, after we travelled to their captors’ safe house, and especially not when we realized that we’d be spending an entire episode following just this one story. At first it was a little disheartening to realize that this was going to be a bottle episode of The Walking Dead, but once things settled in and we got a sense of where the episode was going, it was kind of nice to have an episode just for the girls. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

The Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC

6×11: “Knots Untie”

Whaaat happened to all my favourite characters?

Why did we spend so much time with Morgan early in the season for him to just disappear now?

What is Carol doing? She’s the first one you send out if people might need to be killed!

Does Aaron even have a job in Alexandria anymore?

Well, at least I haven’t seen Tara in a while.

“Knots Untie” gave me a lot of bad feelings, and if you’ve been paying any attention at all during the course of this series, or really any serialized dramatic fiction, you should have some pretty bad feelings too.

Continue reading →