I'm genuinely shocked. This was actually a halfway decent episode - something Fear hasn't delivered since - well, gosh... I can't even remember when.
The episode starts with Morgan Jones (Lennie James) returning to his home of King County, Georgia. He was followed here by Grace and Mo, who stole a PADRE truck to find him. Morgan's reason for returning is to finally kill Duane (his son, who was bitten and turned many, many years before) and lay him to rest. Why he has only just now decided to do this isn't really explained but I think that's fine because the episode uses this situation as a way to not only tie up loose ends for his character, but it also further develops and moves this character along in a mostly satisfying way.
Lennie James carries this episode on his shoulders and does wonders to remind us all why we fell in love with Morgan Jones in the first place. He's a great actor who has been given such terrible material to work with for so long that I almost forgot how good he could be. It's refreshing to see him really own a scene in a dramatic way. Once you look past Lennie James though, this episode kind of falls apart for a myriad of different reasons.
It's previously been established that PADRE is near the coast of Louisiana - exactly where isn't known yet, but that's the ballpark area for sure, that much is been well established. The issue with this is that King County has been established to be at the southwest border of Georgia, near to Alabama. This puts Kings County a *MINIMUM* of 300 miles away from PADRE. That's quite a distance to travel on foot, which is apparently what Morgan did since we don't see him with a vehicle or a horse. Even if he didn't go on foot though, it's still quite a distance, representing at least a 5 hour drive in the best of conditions - likely much longer now that we're more than a decade into a zombie apocalypse, gasoline is extremely scarce, and roads and bridges haven't been maintained. The idea that he just took a little detour out here to take care of this situation is more than a little silly and there are some additional absurdities as the episode progresses...
Starting with Dwight and Sherry along with two unnamed PADRE folks (who I'll call Tweety Bird and Woodstock to keep with their naming scheme) showing up. The reason this is absurd is because Grace and Mo drove there in a truck - and as I said, that's about a 5 hour drive in the best of conditions - but Dwight, Sherry, Tweety Bird and Woodstock all got there on horseback. Now here's the thing... even an endurance trained horse is only going to travel about 100 miles per *DAY* and can only do that about two days in a row before needing 24-48 hours of recovery (your average trail horse will do about 50-60 miles per day, making this even more absurd to think about - so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and just assume they had endurance trained horses in tip-top shape). That means it would have taken Dwight and crew a *MINIMUM* of 4 days to reach King County. Morgan, Grace, and Mo would have been there and gone long before Dwight and crew ever showed up. This is not even anywhere within the realm of possibility as it's portrayed in the show.
Furthermore, it's explained that Dwight and Sherry were able to find Morgan because they heard a transmission that contained coordinates to Kings County. It was revealed that this transmission was sent by Mo, pretending to be Morgan, in order to convince Grace to go there to meet with Morgan... the problem with all this is that Mo had absolutely no idea where Morgan was going so she'd have had no way to send a message with accurate coordinates like this. They try to hand wave this away by calling back to some writing back at the boat house that mentioned Kings County in an earlier episode. The problem with that is that if you think about it for more than half a second you realize the entire thing is contrived nonsense. But, you know, whatever... this is Fear and it almost never makes sense, so let's just try to get past it and move on, shall we?
Things start to get even sillier though... Dwight and Sherry's son, Finch, is revealed to be doing just fine now despite having been bitten just a couple episodes ago - this is because June was able to engineer some kind of cure for walker bites. You see, in the Fear universe this makes total sense because June used to be an ICU nurse prior to the outbreak and as we all know ICU nurses are *great* virologists and vaccine researchers - especially in a post-apocalypse where resources and medical equipment are in extremely scarce supply. It's almost as if all the ICU nurses pre-outbreak weren't even *trying* to solve the problem seeing as a single woman who hasn't really practiced medicine in any meaningful way for 10+ years has been able to engineer a cure within a matter of days from the back of a train car. Makes you wonder how the walkers seemingly decimated the entire planet to begin with.
There some more contrived absurdities throughout the episode but those are the bigger ones. I'd keep going but I've written movie reviews shorter than this so it's time to wrap up.
Overall, this episode is realistically only maybe a 5/10 but I'm giving it a 6/10 because Lennie James delivers a good performance that reminds me why I liked him so much all those years ago. By Fear standards, that's an absolutely glowing rating as far as I'm concerned.
The episode starts with Morgan Jones (Lennie James) returning to his home of King County, Georgia. He was followed here by Grace and Mo, who stole a PADRE truck to find him. Morgan's reason for returning is to finally kill Duane (his son, who was bitten and turned many, many years before) and lay him to rest. Why he has only just now decided to do this isn't really explained but I think that's fine because the episode uses this situation as a way to not only tie up loose ends for his character, but it also further develops and moves this character along in a mostly satisfying way.
Lennie James carries this episode on his shoulders and does wonders to remind us all why we fell in love with Morgan Jones in the first place. He's a great actor who has been given such terrible material to work with for so long that I almost forgot how good he could be. It's refreshing to see him really own a scene in a dramatic way. Once you look past Lennie James though, this episode kind of falls apart for a myriad of different reasons.
It's previously been established that PADRE is near the coast of Louisiana - exactly where isn't known yet, but that's the ballpark area for sure, that much is been well established. The issue with this is that King County has been established to be at the southwest border of Georgia, near to Alabama. This puts Kings County a *MINIMUM* of 300 miles away from PADRE. That's quite a distance to travel on foot, which is apparently what Morgan did since we don't see him with a vehicle or a horse. Even if he didn't go on foot though, it's still quite a distance, representing at least a 5 hour drive in the best of conditions - likely much longer now that we're more than a decade into a zombie apocalypse, gasoline is extremely scarce, and roads and bridges haven't been maintained. The idea that he just took a little detour out here to take care of this situation is more than a little silly and there are some additional absurdities as the episode progresses...
Starting with Dwight and Sherry along with two unnamed PADRE folks (who I'll call Tweety Bird and Woodstock to keep with their naming scheme) showing up. The reason this is absurd is because Grace and Mo drove there in a truck - and as I said, that's about a 5 hour drive in the best of conditions - but Dwight, Sherry, Tweety Bird and Woodstock all got there on horseback. Now here's the thing... even an endurance trained horse is only going to travel about 100 miles per *DAY* and can only do that about two days in a row before needing 24-48 hours of recovery (your average trail horse will do about 50-60 miles per day, making this even more absurd to think about - so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and just assume they had endurance trained horses in tip-top shape). That means it would have taken Dwight and crew a *MINIMUM* of 4 days to reach King County. Morgan, Grace, and Mo would have been there and gone long before Dwight and crew ever showed up. This is not even anywhere within the realm of possibility as it's portrayed in the show.
Furthermore, it's explained that Dwight and Sherry were able to find Morgan because they heard a transmission that contained coordinates to Kings County. It was revealed that this transmission was sent by Mo, pretending to be Morgan, in order to convince Grace to go there to meet with Morgan... the problem with all this is that Mo had absolutely no idea where Morgan was going so she'd have had no way to send a message with accurate coordinates like this. They try to hand wave this away by calling back to some writing back at the boat house that mentioned Kings County in an earlier episode. The problem with that is that if you think about it for more than half a second you realize the entire thing is contrived nonsense. But, you know, whatever... this is Fear and it almost never makes sense, so let's just try to get past it and move on, shall we?
Things start to get even sillier though... Dwight and Sherry's son, Finch, is revealed to be doing just fine now despite having been bitten just a couple episodes ago - this is because June was able to engineer some kind of cure for walker bites. You see, in the Fear universe this makes total sense because June used to be an ICU nurse prior to the outbreak and as we all know ICU nurses are *great* virologists and vaccine researchers - especially in a post-apocalypse where resources and medical equipment are in extremely scarce supply. It's almost as if all the ICU nurses pre-outbreak weren't even *trying* to solve the problem seeing as a single woman who hasn't really practiced medicine in any meaningful way for 10+ years has been able to engineer a cure within a matter of days from the back of a train car. Makes you wonder how the walkers seemingly decimated the entire planet to begin with.
There some more contrived absurdities throughout the episode but those are the bigger ones. I'd keep going but I've written movie reviews shorter than this so it's time to wrap up.
Overall, this episode is realistically only maybe a 5/10 but I'm giving it a 6/10 because Lennie James delivers a good performance that reminds me why I liked him so much all those years ago. By Fear standards, that's an absolutely glowing rating as far as I'm concerned.