‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Season 6, Episode 3 Review: It’s Time To Nerf Walkie Talkies

Fear The Walking Dead continues to be better than it was last season and through most of Season 4, but its creators are having a hard time shedding some of their worst habits.

In Season 6, Episode 3—Alaska—we can really see how these habits continue to hold the show back, despite some improvements and a pretty good set-piece in the creepy zombie-filled building that Dwight and Al find themselves in. There’s also a very creepy embalmed zombie that almost gets the best of Al. The preserved corpse is one of the creepiest zombies I’ve seen in a long time.

A quick recap and we’ll get to the analysis.

Basically Dwight and Al are out scouting for the Pioneers. Virginia has sent them with body-cams so that they can record what they find and discover how people are dying and becoming zombies so that they can try to prevent it, or something. I don’t really get the point of this, and neither does Al, who quite succinctly points out that the reasons are always the same—things go to hell and everybody dies. Who cares?

They’re playing a game as they scour the dead—looking for someone with an Alaska driver’s license. It’s an old driving game she used to play with license plates. You’d find each state in order. Now they play it with corpses. They find one from Arizona and Al grimaces. “You got something against the Copper State?” Dwight asks. “Like twenty different things,” she replies. What’s that all about? As an Arizonan, I’d like to know…

In any case, Al hears some radio chatter between the CRM chick she met last season and had a brief romance with last season—Isabella—and after some prodding from Dwight spills at least some of the beans, though she fails to mention how dangerous the group Isabella belongs to is. Dwight convinces her to go the drop location she heard on the radio and they head to an office building where the chopper is apparently supposed to land soon.

The building is, of course, filled to the brim with walkers. And rats, it turns out—rats whose fleas have been spreading the bubonic plague to the residents of the building. Bubonic plague is bad news, with an incredibly high death rate unless treated by antibiotics.

They also find a spray-painted phrase on a wall inside the building: The end is the beginning. Apparently the people from the submarine were here. We’ll call them the Vandals.

They make their way up the stairs and find themselves blocked off by zombies held back only by a rickety furniture barricade. They rush through the door, slamming it shut and propping a nearby chair against the handle and then turn to find themselves at gunpoint. The people ask if they’re with “them”—the group who comes in the chopper. They reveal that one of their people went up to the roof and was shot by whoever was in the helicopter. This bothers Dwight, who feels betrayed that Al would leave out such an important detail.

After watching the footage Dwight and Al have been recording, the man and woman ask for their help. The rest of their community is either dead or deathly ill with the plague. Al freaks out when she realizes and tells Dwight that they have to leave before it’s too late. Virginia wouldn’t help these people anyways, and even if she would she’d probably be too late. They make good their escape.

Further up the building we discover that Dwight is infected with the plague, something he must have caught from a rat who was in his sleeping bag a few days earlier. What a strange coincidence that he’d get the plague and then they’d stumble on a building full of people who have the plague. It’s just one of many, but more on that later.

One thing leads to another and they’re once again confronted by the woman—Nora—from before. Nora is mad that they left everyone to die and notices immediately (somehow) that Dwight is infected, too. Still, she helps them get to the roof. When they reach the top floor, she reveals that she worked here and that she’s spent the entire apocalypse living here. It was only a week ago that they left this floor when everyone started dying. Apparently a lot of people were living up here, because there are quite a few zombies to contend with, and quite a few sick people downstairs.

I’ll interject here with an observation: These zombies all look like they’ve been dead for ages, but we’re supposed to believe they only started dying a week ago. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but in terms of continuity this is a big red flag. It used to be when someone turned they’d look mostly human. The rotten, hollowed out faces and emaciated frames only came with time. Now apparently you turn and are immediately as decrepit and wasted away as the zombies who turned years ago. Go figure.

They fight there way through these zombies and it’s an emotionally wrenching experience for Nora, who mentions that she hardly recognizes them anymore. This scene would have been a lot more effective if they left these fresh zombies looking more human.

Al gets to the roof but decides not to meet Isabella. Maybe the risk is just too great. Maybe she genuinely wants to protect her from the plague. Whatever the case, Isabella tells her that there’s some beer in the supply crates on the roof. It’s unclear if Isabella realizes this is Al or not, but she’s grateful for the warning.

I’m also going to just note here that this show’s obsession with beer—always in bottles, never in cans—is super weird. Beer is what saved them in Season 4 from the poison. One of the worst characters ever introduced in this show was a brewer. There was even that beer hot air balloon. But most beer, especially bottled beer, probably would have gone bad by now (as Dwight and Al discover earlier in the episode). Why not have characters find whiskey or vodka or tequila or some other liquor, which doesn’t go bad with time? Strand and Madison did just that back at the hotel in Mexico, but that was before the new showrunners took over and made it all about beer.

Whatever. Al doesn’t meet her erstwhile girlfriend. And she finds more than just beer in the crates. They’re also filled with antibiotics, so if other people had just gone up to the roof at any point before now, preferably when the helicopter wasn’t around, they could have found their medicine easy as pie.

I’m calling this another overly convenient coincidence. Why is the CRM landing on this building and leaving valuable supplies laying about with nobody guarding them? Beer and antibiotics just free for the taking? They haven’t even bothered clearing and securing the building they’re routinely landing on? They just shoot the guy they see up there without bothering to ask if he has companions? And the only time anybody goes up there to investigate is while the helicopter is there? Yeah right. Over and over again. None of this is plausible.

Nor is it at all certain that late-stage bubonic plague could be effectively cured by antibiotics. Dwight would be in the clear since he’s only just showing symptoms, but the people downstairs with very advanced, knocking-on-heaven’s-door symptoms? They probably wouldn’t make it without an IV antibiotic course and proper medical care and even then chances aren’t great.

Of course, the most ghastly implausibility of all comes the next morning. Al’s walkie talkie crackles on and a woman’s voice is on the other end. She’s seen the flare that Al set off the night before to warn away the chopper. She wants to know if everyone is okay.

And yeah, it’s Sherry. Of course it’s Sherry. And of course Fear The Walking Dead reunites Dwight and Sherry after all this time with a fracking walkie talkie.

I’m sorry, I can’t handle it. Where are all these batteries coming from? They power the flashlights that are constantly in use. They power the cameras. They power the walkie talkies. Surely nobody is still manufacturing batteries. Sure, batteries last a long time so it’s possible they’ve found stockpiles, but even this consideration aside the use of walkie talkies is just absurd at this point. They can reach pretty much however far the writers need them to reach. Everybody has one. Everybody can magically get in touch with everyone else at any time (unless the writers decide that no, now they’re somehow out of range).

The sheer coincidence of Sherry and Dwight running into each other after all this time in the middle of nowhere Texas is already a ridiculous stretch of plausibility, but to have it occur via walkie talkie is just insulting. It’s honestly just about the most boring way to reunite two long-separated lovers that I can imagine. Imagine all the other ways this could have happened. For one, having Dwight find some sort of clue and use his intelligence and resourcefulness to track her down would have helped negate the sheer level of luck this version employed.

But then you could have had her . . . .

• . . . as part of a group of new bad guys, maybe the same group tagging all these walls with “the end is the beginning” and introduced a new conflict that way.
• . . . had her already with another man, having long ago given up on ever seeing Dwight again. Maybe she has a kid.
• . . . had them meet during some kind of conflict, where one or the other is somehow masked or disguised so they don’t recognize each other until it’s very nearly too late.
• . . . had him find her but she’s just been bitten. He kills the zombie but she’s going to die. Damn that would be almost too cruel.
• . . . not have them ever meet again because it’s just so absurdly unlikely after all this time.

I was also puzzled by the reunion scene itself. She knows it’s Dwight but she just stands there. He goes to meet her and starts running joyfully toward her and she just stands there waiting for him, not even walking to meet up with him like it’s just no big deal at all. What’s with that? The embrace was actually very nice and sweet and it’s a nice moment overall, but all of this coincidence and hokey walkie talkie BS cheapens it in a pretty big way.

I swear, this show could be so much better if they would just strip it of all the little conveniences that make the writing feel lazy and half-baked. No more walkie talkies, period. People can’t just radio each other all the time. Or at least not from such long distances. A walkie talkie can theoretically work for many miles, but as soon as you start introducing buildings, weather, hills and trees and so forth, that range is slashed to maybe just a couple of miles. The ones in this show apparently work across the entire state of Texas and beyond.

No more cameras. No more constant video-taping of everything. Make resources scarce, including things like batteries and flashlights. No super convenient supply boxes full of antibiotics on the roof. Scarcity is what makes survival shows interesting (and zombies are what make them scary).

I could go on but I’ll restrain myself.

In the brief scene with Morgan, Rachel and baby Morgan we see that he’s been bringing them supplies and making their home is operating base. He crafts a hybrid axe/spear that’s pretty cool, and basically represents the new Morgan—not content with his non-killing, non-violent ways anymore, but also not wholly embracing violence the way he once did. There’s duality here. He’s changed, and he’s worried his old pals won’t recognize him.

“I feel like I’ve been sixteen different people since this all started,” he tells Rachel, and we can’t help but agree. It’s time for Morgan to become whoever it is he needs to become, because too much change can start to feel forced, can give us mental whiplash, can make us unsure whether Morgan is a real character at all or just the imprint of whatever the showrunners and writers want him to be. I like this new Morgan. I hope he doesn’t devolve into madness or become a cloying do-gooder again.

What did you think of “Alaska?” Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.