There are a large majority of people that think that Fear the Walking Dead has gone downhill as a show ever since Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg became the showrunners for season 4. However, I actually feel like I’m in the minority, where I felt like season 4 was actually the best season of the show. I can appreciate that the show abandoned most of its original characters and concepts in favor of making it more similar to the regular Walking Dead show, but it felt really fresh to me. I loved all of the new characters, and to me the stories being told with them were so compelling. It felt like a reboot of a show I was never particularly into that much, and so I started to become excited to watch the show with season 4. Chambliss and Goldberg are still the showrunners for season 5, so you would think I’d love this season too, right? Well…yeah…no…

Season 5 of Fear the Walking Dead is one of the most baffling things I’ve ever watched. It suffers in so many ways, but I think the easiest way to talk about it is to break it into its two halves. The first half struggles in the sense that it’s a show that feels like it’s trying to find its identity and just go for crowd-pleasing moments. The cast find themselves on a new mission to help everyone they can, and this winds up leading them into some dangerous territory. From here, they start to come across some really crazy things.

I generally try to stay away from spoilers in my reviews, but I need to give some concrete examples to drive home my point here. The first half of this season alone features radioactive zombies, a group of kids creating a border by stringing together zombies by their guts, a character killing two zombies with one bullet by shooting it at a hatchet and splitting it in two, a “rock climber” zombie hanging off the side of a mountain, and a hot air balloon shaped like a giant beer bottle. I have never seen a show go off the rails so fast. At first I thought these new ideas were creative and entertaining, but it got to be a little much at some point, even for me. The things that happen in this season are absolutely bonkers, and not in a fun B-movie sort of way. It feels like a show flinging everything it can at a wall to see what sticks. It’s desperately flailing to find an identity, and it ends up falling flat on its face in the process.

Then, in the second half of the season, it actually tones down on these crazy antics for the most part and suffers even further. From here, the show loses any sense of identity it was starting to have in season 4 and becomes the most generic, cookie-cutter shell of a Walking Dead show it can be. The show does try to innovate by doing things like having two episodes that are in a home-video documentary style, but what happens is that the show just doesn’t innovate in its storytelling at all. It remains a stagnant story about a group of people surviving in the apocalypse, and it’s the most uninteresting form of this it can be.

I could forgive the shortcomings of this season if it just wasn’t SO. DAMN. BORING. Morgan’s personality/mission of “no killing, just helping people” has now started to bleed over into virtually every character on the show, to the point where no one really has their own distinct personality anymore. They’re all just a homogeneous unit, and not a very good one at that. The show kind of ran into the problem that a lot of Superman stories tend to. A lot of writers just don’t know how to make a saintly character compelling, since it’s usually a character’s flaws that make their stories interesting. However, that’s the thing…you CAN tell an interesting Superman story, you just have to handle it right. Morgan has worked as a character before, but it’s because he clashes with other people who think differently than him. This entire group is just focused on selflessly helping people, and while that’s an admirable trait, it doesn’t really lend itself to be a very interesting show about survival. I just felt like the writers hit a creative wall this season, and these characters are now just meandering along until the show ends. No real goal. No real identity or purpose. Just existing.

I honestly haven’t disliked a season of television as much as I did with season 5 of Fear the Walking Dead in a long time. It’s not like the show is a complete trainwreck or anything, and it does still have its moments. And as always, you can tell that people like the cast, the cinematographers, and the make-up artists are really giving it their all. It’s just that this season never gave me a reason to want to keep watching, to the point where I almost quit the show. It’s easily the worst season of either of The Walking Dead shows for me, and just a bad season of TV in general. While I felt like season 4 was taking the series in a new and interesting direction, season 5 does away with any of the goodwill I had and just squanders any interesting avenues that they could have taken these new characters down.

2/5