By far, it was an excellent episode. So how about the comparisons to "Fear The Walking Dead"? I read something about the ratings for the premier being down from last year, but I think that has a lot to do with a disappointing start to "Fear the Walking Dead", which to me, is a bit lackluster. I would be surprised if that show continues to pull in the audience that "The Walking Dead" does. On "Fear the Walking Dead", I am a bit ambivalent about the characters; one the problem being that we "know what happens" and they don't. Their responses seem scripted and their actions seem a bit far fetched to me, removing suspension of disbelief, which is critical to any good screenplay.
On the original show, we had to use some imagination to try to figure out "how things went down" when the zombie apocalypse happened. FTWD seems to kind of ruin that use of our imagination, although, admittedly it can add for some interesting stories.
However, the backstories of the characters on FTWD don't seem to matter as much to me as Rick and his plight. On The Walking Dead, we have watched Rick have to deal with his best friend betraying him, losing his wife, and encountering this new, ruthless, dystopia. On FTWD, we barely know anything about these people, and little time has been given for character development. The Walking Dead was a surprise success when it started. One thing most viewers may not know is that the creator of the first season of The Walking Dead was not just Robert Kirkman (the guy who wrote the comics). The one who brought it, arguably, to cinematic quality, is a man named Frank Darabont. This guy wrote the screenplay and directed Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (two highly acclaimed motion pictures). He was heavily involved in the production of Season 1 and possibly half of Season 2 of the original show. He sued AMC for terminating him during Season Two, or something like that, but all episodes of the show were not just originated by the guy who wrote the comic book. So this is very interesting to me, as I considered the first and last episodes of Season 1 to be among the best of the series (I liked Season 1 a lot, this was something we never saw before on television).
There is a very interesting article about Darabont
here.
As far as the latest episode, we saw some heavy action. This may be the best episode in a very long time and I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, I still find myself wanting to know more, and some legitimate holes in the story, I think are present:
If you were in the zombie apocalypse, what is so special about your group that you have not turned into a total savage like the cannibals and murderers we see all the time? Just because civilization has broken down, why is it heavily implied that the survivors would have either turned into naive appeasers or murderous lunatics?
If you were in "Alexandria Safe Zone" (presumably on the outskirts of Washington, DC), wouldn't you at least inquire, to others, about the existence of the federal government at the White House and Capitol Building, as well as the whether or not the government may still be functioning on some level from a fallback location? In real life, the government would probably survive the zombie apocalypse, even in "The Walking Dead" conditions, simply because there is a continuity of government plan.
The leader of Alexandria is an enigma. Why was she filming people who joined the group last season? Why would they leave a United States senator in a gated community with a bunch of civilians and make them build their own wall? Huh?
If you realized thousands of zombies are coming towards your community, wouldn't you just become a permanent migrant until the zombies deteriorate? It looks like in The Walking Dead universe, it will take a few generations for humanity to overcome this obstacle. Even then, most post-industrial knowledge would be lost. Agrarian culture (farming, share cropping, feudalism) would probably arise again.
Again, the need to always have a dilemma, or adversary, is weighing the show down. Even though all law and order has broken down, and there is a state of anarchy, what about rational people who are willing to do what it takes to survive and rebuild? Would that many people really become sinister? This brings up a very famous philosophical question of whether or not people are innately "bad, good, or neither".
Ultimately, these are some questions that the horror genre of television has always brought to the screen, in subtle ways, much like a show like "Star Trek", when it was on the air, had a theme of promoting a positive view of the future. That show, like many science fiction series, used fiction as a way of addressing cultural and social issues by putting characters in a future-world in a dilemma that can be used as an allegory to our real lives.
If I was in a zombie apocalypse, I know what I would do. I would die!