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The families flee Los Angeles on Strand’s yacht and find yet more danger at sea.
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Season premiere tonight, and it looks like the writers are sending them out to sea sooner rather than later. Cliff Curtis, Dave Erickson and Hozier are on Talking Dead. I still dislike the title, but at least the show is it’s own thing so the thread isn’t going to devolve into arguments about the comics. 
I think they should start a “Fear the Walking Dead” comic.
Ah crap; according to the Story Sync I’m most like Alicia. :smack: So far she seems like the weakest character on the show. On the plus side the boat’s pretty cool; there’s even a 360 on the site. Also did I miss who survived Flight 462? 
Weren’t we supposed to find out tonight?
OK, that sucked. Forty minutes of painful inaction, wondering what kind of boat runs along without moving anywhere. Because if it were moving, the fishermen would be trolling (in the most original sense) and not bottom fishing with weights and dead shrimp. The unreality spikes during the ridiculous swimming scene. Why are they drifting aimlessly when Strand is so paranoid about getting near other people? And he’s on the bridge, the highest point on the boat and with the best visibility, while his boat (“HIS boat!”) drifts into a war zone. Then, even more inexplicably, when he belatedly realizes the danger, he doesn’t push the throttles to the firewall but instead makes silly palaver and lets his useless guests get back aboard. Oh, and just by the way, and I’ll look back to confirm, but – when the boys went swimming, the dinghy was not visible but when Travis (Travis?) wanted to go rescue the Olympic swimmers who had somehow managed to swim a hundred yards away in their street clothes, the dink is right there. More unreality.
I’ll take lousy writing, boring inaction, and unrealistic character development for five hundred, Alex! And to think we waited months for this!
OK, I take back the part about the dink not being visible. I missed it. Still begs the question of why they’re drifting around when they’re supposed to be motoring to San Diego. So I don’t take back anything else. Shitty episode.
On “Talking” they showed that they built the boat in a huge infinity tank beside the ocean. So that answers the question of why the boat didn’t look like it was going anywhere. It wasn’t.
This whole show makes me feel the way I felt when that one guy goes into the basement during the slasher movie, notices the lights don’t work for some reason, and decides to go fumble around down there anyway.
I get the impression the producer does not read or watch zombie fiction in any way, and is unaware of how lame and DONE TO DEATH, if you’ll pardon the pun, everything in this show IS. Including the idea that civilization will collapse completely in only three weeks; we’re from “children playing on the playground” to “murder all strangers” in a surprisingly short span of time.
randwill, I’m willing to accept cinematic devices intended to fool the viewer. A jungle scene doesn’t have to be shot in a jungle, and an ocean going yacht doesn’t have to be shot in/on a real ocean. I once shot a scene of a wooden porch attached to a house, all of which was mocked up on a sound stage. I know how such things work. But a yacht under way is different from a yacht with engines at idle. The former is moving in a direction determined by the position of the rudder and where the bow is pointing. The later is moving too, but the actual direction of travel has no necessary relationship to the bow or the rudder. It’s drifting, moving with the water that supports it, with some influence from the wind. Even a sim boat has to remain true to these facts, for verisimilitude. That’s not my issue.
Abigail is sometimes under way as evidenced by views of the throttles being advanced. A destination has been stated, although in a general way. The implication is that they’re going somewhere. But some scenes clearly require the boat to be at anchor or adrift, like the fishing scene. There’s been no mention of anchoring so I’ll go with drifting. But I’ve operated boats up to 65 feet in the ocean. Drifting just isn’t common. The sea is rarely that flat, and drifting usually includes uncomfortable rolling. And the drift could very well be taking you away from your destination. So unless you’re broken down, or deliberately drift fishing, yachtsmen almost never drift their boats on the ocean. If you’re running to your destination, then you’re under way, manning the helm, and holding course. When you get there, you tie up to the dock or drop the anchor. You don’t drift around indecisively in between. The ocean isn’t that friendly a place even for a fair sized yacht. The whole “I’m not sure where we’re going, or how soon I want to get there, so I’ll just run at speed, then dawdle some, then drift aimlessly for a while, then repeat, at random” screams UNREAL to any mariner.
And all the boat time, running or drifting, was boring! there wasn’t enough angst to hold my attention, the characters are beyond any empathy from me, and I keep hoping Strand goes postal and begins eliminating them, or they all get hit by meteors, or something so maybe we can get some replacements we can care about.
It was OK. But they are already violating the first rule of the ZA-- never go anywhere alone!!! And after the figured out that genius girl was giving out vital info to potential enemies, they do… nothing? NOTHING? Confiscate the mother-fucking radio from the mother fucking teenager!!
Dreadful. Stupid characters who I couldn’t give a crap less about. I watched last season and it was bad but I thought maybe they could get their act together the second season. I guess not.
Trawling.
I liked Strand’s longshoreman’s cap. This guy is probably going to be the biggest clothes-horse of the ZA.
The inconsistencies don’t bother me so much, to me it makes the show seem something like a daytime soap opera. It kind of reminds me of CHiPs, entertaining but silly. Could be more entertaining I guess, but it is interesting that the authorities decided to just bomb LA into oblivion, for one.
Interesting too that it takes place in the part of the ZA where there are still relatively a lot of living people around. That probably won’t last too long, but yeah, it seems like the descent into universal piracy, with bait radio broadcasts and all, has set in so quickly. I guess we are supposed to believe that both Strand and whoever is chasing him are early adopters of the new reality, almost to the point that they are prescient. But hey, another cheesy TV device to apply to main character development.
No chance of these threads not devolving into tedious whine-fests, though, just like the main series. Seriously, folks; if you hate it that much, there’s a vast range of other things to watch. Yes, it has flaws, and they’re not going away. If you can’t accept that, do not watch.
I’ll keep watching because I’m capable of enjoying the shows as dumb entertainment. Not everything is going to be great, and things can be enjoyed despite their flaws.
Now, as to the actual content - I found the funeral pretty dull, I was quite pleased when Chris tipped his dead mum over the side. I tend to agree with Strand’s reasoning, he’s being the most sensible so far. That includes his approval of Nick - as I said last season, Nick is an interesting character. Having known a number of (ex) smack addicts, including a couple of relatives, I can see how an ex junkie could be a valuable person to have on your team: every junkie has plenty of experience doing terrible things, they are not going to freeze up on you when things get messy. They tend to be pragmatic.
Which would also be true of Daniel Salazar. So, in those characters, I think the much maligned writers have actually done a good job. Strand, Nick, and Daniel are all people I can easily believe in as survivors in a ZA. I think Madison is also likely to turn out to have hidden strengths. Ofelia we don’t really know yet, but I suspect she’ll cope pretty well too.
Which leaves us with Travis, Alicia, and Chris.
Travis is this series’ Rick: a good man who has to learn to do terrible things to protect his family. OK, that’s a standard trope, and since we know this is going to happen it’s likely to be quite predictable getting there. Hopefully they can keep the emo stuff to a minimum. Alicia and Chris seem to be the best candidates for zombie-chow so far. And, so far, nothing’s made me want them to stick around. It’s possible that they’ll develop into likeable characters, but for the moment their role is to get into trouble and need rescuing. Motivation for Travis and Maddie.
We know that at least one more person will be joining the Abigail’s crew soon, and I expect we’ll see a few more as the series continues.
People seem to be assuming that a boat full of people got machine-gunned by someone - it seems equally possible that it was already a boat full of zombies and the machine-gunning was a reasonable response. The log book will probably shed light on things, though it seems a bit of an odd thing for Chris to latch onto. But, you know, the writing can be a bit weak. 
Between seasons I had forgotten how little I cared about any of the characters on this show. I started watching the re-broadcast of last season, catching the last 3-4 episodes before the airing of the Season 2 premier. I was completely bored with it. There were some interesting plot points - the doctor having to euthanize all her sick patients, the military trying to function and protect civilians in a world gone insane, etc. But it was all just so flat. And the collapse was too fast but that’s another topic I guess. Anyway, I think it is entirely because they’ve created a cast of characters that are either completely flat or completely devoid of any characteristic that makes me wish for their survival. Hell, I can’t even name most of them. I find myself now actively hoping the zombies take out many of them starting with every whiny moody emo teenager on the show.
What a colossal fail on the part of AMC.
Meh. I watched simply because I had nothing else to do.
I couldn’t believe ‘Talking Dead’ was on afterwards, is that going to be a regular thing now? A whole hour of hot air and trying to whip up enthusiasm for not much of anything?
Apropos of Talking Dead, the Sunday NYT did a whole feature article on Chris Harwick and his “Nerd Empire”. You guys are probably a lot more familiar with him than I am, but I really only knew him from TD, and have recently been noting how impressed I am with him. He’s very good at what he does.
One problem I have with the show (and this is personal) is that Maddie is a dead ringer for one of my worst customers. Every time she’s on screen, my skin crawls.
I don’t hate these characters any more or less than the ones on TWD, so that’s not my issue.
My issue is that I was hoping that FTWD would actually be about fear of the Zombie Apocalypse rather than fear of other non-walkers. S1 was more about the outbreak. The first episode of S2 seems to be already focusing on the evil of others at the expense of the horrors of the dead walking.
Sheesh. I get enough of that on TWD.
I believe not covering the collapse of society stems from the writers not knowing how the virus began. The story is first person; the characters are in every scene. It would have been interesting to see more of how society collapsed. Why, for instance did cities lose power on the same night?
Very well said; I couldn’t agree more. I think people criticizing the characters’ actions are forgetting something - this is all new to them. They still have hope that this is temporary and things will eventually go back to normal. We, the viewing audience, know better because we know this a prequel to TWD. The characters on FTWD have no idea that this is an official “Zombie Apocalypse.”
One of the benefits of watching is that you know some of this assholes are going to die. Of course it’s probably going to be the cool ones like Salazar or Strand, but there is always the chance it might be one of the teenagers which would make all the suffering worthwhile.
I felt a little sorry for Chris Hardwick having to drum up some after-show excitement. With Hozier, no less.