Alycia Debnam-Carey made her directional debut with this week's episode of Fear TWD. The direction and visual storytelling is quite great, the camera work and cinematography are amazing, overall a gorgeous looking episode. It was a great directional debut, I did think there were too many cuts though. The sound editing and musical score is fantastic. The flaws from season 7A are still present, and the writing is extremely flawed. Some of the dialogue and motivations are stupid and very forced, I just don't get why almost all the characters has to be so mysterious and not upfront with things, it continues in every episode and it feels like the showrunners like that kind of writing, well I don't. Andrew Chambliss and Ian B. Goldberg and the staff writers are unfortunately unable to write good dialogue. They come out sounding wooden and unrealistic, then again, dialogue can be hard to write. But these guys are poor at it, Fear deserves better writing overall, like the quality it had in S1-3. But the dialogue was actually a little bit better than previous episodes.
Luciana and Wes test the limits of their patience when Daniel's worsening mental state ends up endangering them all. That's the premise of the episode and well I liked it, because of how the writers finally wrote Daniel the way he's supposed to be. It was unpredictable but I think showing Dwight and what the others were up to would have satisfied everyone. But I was satisfied and entertained throughout the episode. To explain Rubén Blades' performance in one word, fantastic. Danay Garcia was also quite great. The dialogue and writing the two actors got was better than what they've ever had during Andrew Chambliss and Ian B. Goldberg run.
"Ofelia" was surprisingly a good episode (for Season 7), it brought focus back on the characters of Luciana and Daniel, giving them an episode I can gladly say I liked. It still got a couple of flaws but overall a good episode. Daniel and Luciana are two characters that have gotten too little screen time, the showrunners tossing them aside like they don't mean anything, they justify that with this episode. I still strongly believe the individual stories/episodes don't work like they did in S6 when everyone was apart. As Fear used to be a serialized show and did it perfectly, I can't say the same with Andrew Chambliss and Ian B. Goldberg run. Though "Ofelia" is an episode many will like, for the bigger picture and story arc, it doesn't really deliver. But Daniel and Luciana's character arcs are developed further in this episode and they are two characters that truly matter in this civil war against Victor Strand, with both of them having known Strand for a long time and Daniel being the one who has a feud with the man. Finally the showrunners and writers got Daniel right, Luciana too. Wes was also great in this episode, finally. I want to get a criticism out of the way, something that the writers have continued to do, it's the radio broadcasts. They never learn and how they get captured always feels forced as they don't have any other ideas. If you put aside logic and realism, the plot works, sad to see the writers not doing any research. By now, I should have learned to keep my expectations low, but with no appearance of Alicia who should have been with Luciana and Daniel instead of Wes. But also no screen time for Victor Strand and his community, it makes this story arc feel one-dimensional. Season 3 is a good example of a storyline being full of depth and serialized drama, and the civil war in this season had the potential, sadly it never hit its potential and probably never will.
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