Yep, season 3 is totally watchable by itself.
The best walking dead show on TV will be back on April 15th!
New cast additions look fantastic. :D
I just noticed that April 15th premiere date. UnDeath and Taxes jokes write themselves.
Very excited about the new cast additions. Maybe now we can finally move away from the family drama and into the wider world of survival, alliances and dangers that permeate the zombie apocalypse. The writers of FtWD have done a decent job at building Madison, Alicia and Nick into complex characters, but they’ve gone about as far as they can interacting with each other. Bringing all these new folks into the mix should provide some good storylines and opportunity for further building on all three, as well as Strand. Very curious to see how Strand and Morgan get along…
Looks like they are jumping ahead in time to align with the timeline of the Walking Dead too. I bailed on this show midway through the 2nd season, but am going to give it another shot because of Morgan’s addition and new showrunner, as well as disenchantment with the main series.
One disappointment from the trailer though - with the same production oversight as the main show now, they seem to have adopted the main show’s “playdough zombies” that have spongy heads that are easily penetrated by even smaller characters wielding any random knife. At least in the part of Fear the Walking Dead that I watched, the zombies seemed more realistically tough to kill and therefore scarier even individually (I don’t know if that aspect was maintained after I abandoned the show). It was also much better in the original show when Frank Darabont was showrunner. The average person would find it almost impossible to smash someone’s brain in, or even shoot it with a pistol at range. Zombies should be really scary because they are so hard to kill.
So the premiere for Season 4 was a mixed bag. The timeline of this show is now current with the one for TWD, as Morgan’s transition was shown as him travelling to Texas (I’m assuming that’s where they’re at, they never really said in the episode) from Virginia AFTER the final events of TWD’s season finale. I’m not a fan of this, as it means we lose some of the atmosphere from FTWD’s previous seasons where people were not that far removed from the initial apocalyptic events. It also means that quite a long period of time should have passed from the last time we saw Madison, Alicia, Strand, Nick, etc. and when we see them now.
On the other hand, I like both of the new characters introduced so far. Candy Cowboy seems simple, but there is something weird about his relationship to the woman he claims to be searching for. Reporter girl seems interesting, especially with her sweet ride. I have to wonder though, how the hell does she find diesel fuel and rounds for her machine guns two years after the apocalypse?
It looks like they’ll all be joining the family once the misunderstanding on the road gets cleared up. Who are the mysterious people planting flags all over the countryside, and what are they up to? There is a lot of potential in this season, I hope they don’t screw it up.
It is without question the better show. I very much liked the reporter and gunslinger, and Morgan being one of my fav’s from TWD is just extra icing on the zombie cake.
I like how they set them up at the end as the good guys , meeting up with the remaining FTWD cast who seem less than friendly right now. I wonder how long a time has passed since the Dam blew up? Maybe 2 or 3 years?
Episode 2 was great, love the flashback and then to present day. Still can’t get over how different Jenna Elfman looks. And the Vultures seem way more interesting than the Saviors ever were.
They really have a powerhouse cast going into this new season.
Well that was certainly unexpected.
Yeah episode 3 had a holy crap kinda ending, makes me really wonder if Madison is still alive.
Anyone else watching, I feel you guys are missing out of some of the best FtWD episodes everrrrrrr.
In terms of structure and pacing, tonight’s episode might actually be the best ever.
Re:Madison, I was just commenting to Mrs. tgb the same thing.
Thinking about it further, if Madison were alive, would they really bury Nick in the middle of nowhere without her in attendance?
My guess is they’re saving her death for either the mid-season or season finale.
I think you guys are probably right about Madison. The show hints that the El Camino jerk did something to piss off Nick, and Madison hasn’t featured yet in the current timeline. Of course this could also be purposeful misdirection.
I dunno…killing off Madison now, given all that’s already happened this season, would be going way out on the proverbial limb. Even with Morgan and the new characters to offset, the entire dynamic of the show would still change dramatically. On the other hand, it could be crazy enough to work, allowing the show to go in a new and interesting direction.
So the more I think about this, the more convinced I am that it is what they are doing. The way the most recent episode was shot, with most of it being flashback timeline, and now the previews I saw for the next episode, which appears to be Naomi and the Candy Cowboy flashback timeline, make me believe that a good portion of this season will be told from the past perspective. That makes a lot of sense, given that a ton of time would have passed between when we last saw these people and the time when Morgan would have joined them. It appears we will get to see a lot of what happened over that time, to both Madison’s family and the new characters, just as flashbacks.
They already revealed one death that hasn’t happened yet on screen, so that could be a predictor that others are in the works, including Madison. As mentioned above It also explains why she’s not with the group, why they aren’t taking Nick back to her, and why they are so keen on getting revenge on the Bus Brothers.
That said, a reveal like that wouldn’t happen until near the end of the season. I would imagine we will get episodes featuring the back story of Candy Cowboy and Naomi, then Al and her truck, maybe even the Bus Brothers themselves, then the final few episodes would be the fall of the stadium homestead (past) and revenge (present). All that would leave the show in a very odd position at the end of the season though. Half their main characters gone, what looks like half their new characters gone as well…where do you go from there?
I dunno, but like some of you mentioned earlier, it sure makes for a show that’s become more interesting than its sister series. It’s funny because for this show’s first two seasons I really didn’t find most of the characters likable.
Whats refreshing about this season is to see main characters meet each other for the first time.
The John and Laura (Naomi) episode was just fantastic.
I couldn’t disagree more. I thought it was a boring hour spent with two characters most people don’t care about. Plus it did nothing to advance the story.
As great as the previous episode was, this was horrid.
John is going to be a character going forward, at least for the foreseeable future, so it was good to get a look at what he was doing before joining the group and why he was out searching for Naomi/Laura. I kind of liked his river cabin setup with the ditch to slow down floaters who waded ashore. I did find it hard to believe neither of them realized the walker trapped in the car making the noise was the source of all their floater issues though. Seemed pretty obvious.
Naomi/Laura seemed like a female version of Morgan. Doesn’t want to get attached to people because she loses them, then finds John and connects with him, but leaves anyway because it hurts less than staying and risking that loss all over again.
I liked the episode as well. These are the sort of tales that I wish Walking Dead hadn’t gotten away from. There’s still too much goofiness, and John was the most tolerant creature on Earth to put up with how obnoxious and ungrateful Naomi was - it seemed a bit fantastical that he’d be such a Paladin, but I like him even more because of it.