If any Walking Dead fans are wondering where all the zombies had disappeared lately, the third season of Fear the Walking Dead explains it in full.
They’ve all apparently done their own Great Migration (“Go West, young zombie!”), because the premiere episode of Fear the Walking Dead Sunday at 9 p.m. ET has long stretches that are wall-to-wall walkers.
And as that might suggest, Fear’s new season also ratchets up the action. Walking Dead fans who have complained about the pace of its first two seasons will very likely find the new one much more visceral.
Fear, of course, is the West Coast-based prequel to The Walking Dead. It started in a normal Los Angeles – insert your own joke here about what constitutes “normal” in LA – and has tracked the path of a few increasingly desperate survivors as the world around them has crumbled into zombie purgatory.
Season three picks up those survivors, the core of whom are Madison Clark (Kim Dickens, left), her partner Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis, left) and her two kids Nick (Frank Dillane) and Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey).
They’ve been torn apart both psychologically and physically, and naturally, they are now in terrible danger.
They’ve been rounded up by elements of a militant band that has walled itself in and figures the way to stay alive is to be very very selective about who else they allow to stay alive.
The leader of this group, Jeremiah Otto Sr. (Dayton Callie, left), isn’t nearly as one-dimensionally sadistic and psychotic as Negan back on The Walking Dead, which makes him a much more interesting character. It doesn’t mean one shouldn’t keep an eye on him.
He also has two sons, Troy (Daniel Sharman, top), who displays more the amorality of the fanatic than the glee of the bully, and Jake (Sam Underwood, top), who’s sporadically ambivalent about this whole deal.
In any case, the prospects are not encouraging for our nuclear family or the various people into whose company they have fallen as they have hunted for sanctuary.
In fact, it requires an almost superhero level of planning, luck, and timing for them to get out of the first episode alive.
Which is not to say that, given the whole premise of The Walking Dead, everyone does.
Because, in further keeping with the Walking Dead premise, it’s not enough that everywhere you turn, you are pursued by packs of ill-clad, badly groomed dead people that literally want to eat you alive.
You’re in even greater danger from your fellow living humans, who see you as their competition for the increasingly shrinking supply of defensible land and essential resources.
Fear also quickly reminds us that, not surprisingly, even decent people can lose their moral compass under these circumstances.
Nick, who back in the pre-zombie apocalypse world was a junkie, warns Alicia that despite Madison’s efforts to keep the family intact, they might not be pleased with what he’s capable of doing in this new era.
Travis, the straightest of arrows, has morphed before viewers’ eyes into almost a wild animal.
Other returning veterans of the zombie wars include Victor Strand (Colman Domingo, above), who has an interesting adventure in a Mexican village that takes several turns we perhaps would not have predicted.
But the key takeaways from the third season’s first episodes are more zombies and more action. Tough on the characters, good for the viewers.