Fear the Walking Dead: A Podcast

Fear the Walking Dead: A Podcast.Show episode S02E14-15. “Wrath” and  “North.”Podcast episode 19.Bruce and Steve discuss the last double episodes,  “Wrath” and  “North.” Travis reacts to the death of Chris by killing the two American young men who had killed him. As a result, Travis, Madison, and Alicia have to leave the hotel, with Strand staying behind. In other news, Ofelia is getting better at standing up for herself, and she dispatches several walkers as she makes her way toward the United States. Unfortunately, she is captured by a creepy old man and does not reappear for the rest of the episode. Nick works with the other members of the colonia to defend themselves from the narco assault.  While they are successful in fending off the narcos, most of the people are scattered by the end of the episode, and we do not know if they will be able to come back.

Fear the Walking Dead: A Podcast.Show episode S02E14-15. “Wrath” and  “North.”Podcast episode 19.Bruce and Steve discuss the last double episodes,  “Wrath” and  “North.” Travis reacts to the death of Chris by killing the two American young men who had killed him. As a result, Travis, Madison, and Alicia have to leave the hotel, with Strand staying behind. In other news, Ofelia is getting better at standing up for herself, and she dispatches several walkers as she makes her way toward the United States. Unfortunately, she is captured by a creepy old man and does not reappear for the rest of the episode. Nick works with the other members of the colonia to defend themselves from the narco assault.  While they are successful in fending off the narcos, most of the people are scattered by the end of the episode, and we do not know if they will be able to come back.

Fear the Walking Dead: A Podcast.Show episode S02E12-13. “Pillar of Salt” and  “Date of Death.”Podcast episode 18.      Stephen and Bruce discuss this week's episodes, “Pillar of Salt” and  “Date of Death.” Madison shows some strong leadership except when she thinks about Nick; then she loses her ability to think clearly. Travis is going through a similar process with Chris. Ofelia is on a walkabout to find an old boyfriend; her dad Salazar is still missing. And Nick is doing well in the colonia just as its leader is falling apart.

Fear the Walking Dead: A Podcast.Show episode S02E11. “Pablo and Jessica.”Podcast episode 17.      Stephen and Bruce discuss this week's episode, “Pablo and Jessica.” The focus this week is on Nick's integration into the colonia and on Madison, Alicia, and Strand forming a new group with the hotel survivors. Ofelia and Salazar are still missing. Chris and Travis don’t show up either, but we assume they are still with the three American bros.     This was a good week for the women characters in the episode.  Alicia comes into her own by planning how to eliminate the walkers from the hotel.  Madison brokers an alliance among all the survivors in the hotel, and Luciana finds Nick to be a worthwhile partner both in making supply runs and in her own personal life. Nick uses his drug skills in cutting their drugs to make them last longer in their trades. We also notice the cultural difference between the mostly Mexican colonia and the mostly American hotel residents.  Whereas the colonia keeps their dead close as a kind of moat, the hotel residents see them as an infestation to be eliminated.

Fear the Walking Dead: A Podcast.Show episode S02E11. “Pablo and Jessica.”Podcast episode 17.      Stephen and Bruce discuss this week's episode, “Pablo and Jessica.” The focus this week is on Nick's integration into the colonia and on Madison, Alicia, and Strand forming a new group with the hotel survivors. Ofelia and Salazar are still missing. Chris and Travis don’t show up either, but we assume they are still with the three American bros.     This was a good week for the women characters in the episode.  Alicia comes into her own by planning how to eliminate the walkers from the hotel.  Madison brokers an alliance among all the survivors in the hotel, and Luciana finds Nick to be a worthwhile partner both in making supply runs and in her own personal life. Nick uses his drug skills in cutting their drugs to make them last longer in their trades. We also notice the cultural difference between the mostly Mexican colonia and the mostly American hotel residents.  Whereas the colonia keeps their dead close as a kind of moat, the hotel residents see them as an infestation to be eliminated.

Fear the Walking Dead: A Podcast.Show episode S02E10. “Do Not Disturb.”Podcast episode 16. Stephen and Bruce discuss this week's episode.  Quinn got separated from the group, but we have high hopes that we'll meet her down the road. Chris and Alicia seem to be mirroring each other this week as they both come into their own in fighting the walkers and the living, and make new friends outside the group.  Alicia seems to be making better choices in the friends she makes with Elena, the head of housekeeping in the hotel. The three bros that Chris identifies with do not seem trustworthy. Chris chooses between the new guys and his dad by shooting the farmer whose farm they were on.  It's hard to see a clear path back for Chris at this point.  Alicia is starting to come into her own.  She hangs in the elevator shaft to evade the walkers, makes a daring walk from one balcony to another to get away from yet more walkers, and releases even more walkers to attack the hotel guests who hate her new ally. She has a happy reunion with her mother and Strand. That sub-group is still separated from Ofelia, and we have no idea what is happening with her father Salazar.

Fear the Walking Dead: A Podcast.Show episode S02E09. “Los Muertos.”Podcast episode 15.     Stephen Payne and Bruce R. Magee discuss this week’s episode. Nick tries to steal from a gang that is guarding a box store, and Madison and Strand get drunk and loud. What could go wrong?      We discuss the nature of the group that Nick has joined. They follow a pharmacist who has become not only their doctor but also their leader. But have they become a cult? Usually groups like this go seriously wrong somewhere. Bruce predicts that they will meet their end by the end of the season.     We learn more about some of the rest of the group. Madison, Strand, Alicia, and Ofelia are on their own, and are searching for Nick. When they reach a dead end, Alicia becomes angry with Madison for ignoring the child she has with her in favor of the missing one. The group tries to return to the yacht but finds it’s been stolen. They settle on a seemingly empty hotel.  Alicia & Ofelia explore the upper floors while Madison and Strand get drunk and make a lot of noise. One of the frustrating elements of horror is characters acting stupid. Sure enough, zombies start approaching the noise.  Many of them walk off of upper floors and splatter to the ground below. The ones who aren't wounded too badly get up and continue toward the noise. The episode ends with our group under attack: Alicia is hiding upstairs from the infected, Ofelia is  missing, and Madison and Strand are in the bar surrounded by the infected. 

Fear the Walking Dead: A Podcast.Show episode 2x08. Grotesque.Podcast epiode 14.     Quinn Warner, Stephen Payne, and Bruce R. Magee discuss this week's episode. Nick spends most of the episode trying to survive in the desert, either by himself or with a herd of infected.     Quinn likes this episode a lot because it focuses on Nick, her favorite character. And she and Bruce like the focus on Nick's internal life.  This is the first time that we've really gotten to see the impact of Gloria's death in the first episode on Nick, since in the earlier episodes we haven't known what was going on for him emotionally. We also find out why Nick's father is missing from his life; he died in a car wreck while Nick was in rehab.      Nick's journey through the desert is also in internal journey as he has to face the memories and emotions he's been avoiding.  The infected are dangerous but not evil; true evil has to have actual malevolence, like the murderous trio who kill for fun until they get too close to the infected. Nick seems to want to join the infected in eating the men they killed, but he settles for eating a freshly killed dog. By the end of the episode, Nick has joined a new group near the U.S. border. With Nick in their midst, how long can they survive?  Tune in to find out.   

Fear the Walking Dead: A Podcast.Show episode 2x07. Shiva.Podcast epiode 13.     Quinn Warner, Stephen Payne, and Bruce R. Magee discuss this week's episode. To answer last week's question, no, our heroes have not found a safe haven.      Nick works the hardest to maintain some kind of order. With Celia in charge after Thomas' death, Nick understands that she'll let his group stay if he can get her son back.  He puts on his zombie camouflage and retrieves zombie Luis. But the deal falls through when Madison locks Celia in the basement with the zombies, and Daniel burns the compound. By the end of the episode, the compound is gone, and our cast has splintered in 4 directions. It's hard to see how they will move forward in the second half of the season. 

Fear the Walking Dead: A Podcast     Quinn Warner, Stephen Payne, and Bruce R. Magee discuss this week's episode. Has our cast finally found a safe haven? At first, the village's in the church look like they're making do during the outbreak, but shortly after the service, they begin to bleed from their eyes and die. Thomas Abigail tries to intervene with the villagers, but he's interrupted by their sickness.     We all liked this episode a lot. It had several interwoven subplots. Celia Flores, Thomas Abigail's housekeeper, is at the center of one. The villagers are about to attack her when they suddenly die, and it turns out that she poisoned the communion wafers. She also keeps walkers in the wine cellar and worships Santa Muerte. Another subplot centers on the death of Thomas Abigail, who had been bitten by a walker. Quinn notes that this is the first time Strand loses his cool, and it's clear that his feelings for Thomas are real. We wonder what he'll do next after the loss of his emotional center.Chris begins to spin out of control when he learns that the group doubts that he had to shoot the hostage last week.  He escalates quickly, and we wonder whether he can recover.The relationship between Ofelia and her father Daniel continues to evolve. She was repelled by learning of his ruthlessness last season; this episode she sees him freeze & has to step in to save him. She's beginning to see his mortality and fragility, and her feeling toward him begin to thaw.

Fear the Walking Dead: A PodcastFear the Walking Dead 2x05. "Captive"Podcast episode 11.  "Captive"     It's just Bruce and Stephen this week discussing the new episode of Fear the Walking Dead, "Captive." Our crew has retaken the yacht, but can the get back the missing members of their group?     Stephen notes that this episode balances action with character development, in contrast to other episodes that tend to have one or the other. We both like the steak cooking scene and our introduction to Connor. He seems to have taken over rather quickly in the first few days of the apocalypse, having been the cook before. Probably as time goes by in the series, we'll see more capable leaders develop. It seems with the death of modern civilization, people revert quickly to tribalism, humanity's first social structure.  It may be that tribalism proves to be the most durable way of organizing society. 

Fear the Walking Dead: A PodcastFear the Walking Dead 2x04. "Blood in the Streets"Podcast episode 10.  "Hurricane Zombie"    Quinn Warner, Stephen Payne, and Bruce Magee discuss episode 2 x 04: "Blood in the Streets." We find out more about Strand's past in a flashback to the period of Hurricane Katrina.  We also encounter pirates and see Nick going on a secret mission.      Nick continues to show his value to Strand by going on a secret mission to bring back Strand's friend. We were confused by his actions as the reason for them only became clear when he met Strand's friend. The takeover of the yacht by a pregnant woman and two guys shows just how little you can trust people when civilization collapses. We liked the flashback to Katrina that showed how Strand became the man he is now. We compared the local collapse of civilization in the aftermath of Katrina to the general collapse of civilization in FTWD. Alicia seems to be developing as a character.  Having been fooled by Jack when he was talking to her on the radio, she sets out to trick him in return by acting like she likes him.  Madison continues to demonstrate a fierceness in both physical and psychological warfare. Bruce speculates that there will be no safe haven in the Baja, or the show would become an updated Gillian's Isle.

Fear the Walking Dead: A PodcastFear the Walking Dead 2x03. "Ouroboros"Podcast episode 09.  "It's Raining Zombies"    Stephen Payne and Bruce Magee discuss episode 2 x 03 "Ouroboros." There was a lot of action this week, with the yacht having to remain anchored while Travis cleans zombie goo out of the engine's cooling system.    Alicia takes the initiative in going to shore and scavenging from the wreck of Flight 462, the web series that shows a plane being taken over by zombies and crashing on the beach. We discuss the web series about Flight 462 and agree we'd like to see more crossovers on Fear the Walking Dead. Alicia gets to kill her first zombie, and Chris kills his first human, a survivor who has a fatal injury. Nick discovers that being smeared with zombie body parts makes him invisible to zombies. We discuss Strand and whether he cut the boat the yacht was towing because he felt threatened by having his leadership challenged by Madison. Is the cold aloofness beginning to crack?  Stay tuned to find out!

Fear the Walking Dead: A PodcastFear the Walking Dead 2x02. "We All Fall Down"Podcast episode 08.  Zombie Preppers    Quinn Warner, Stephen Payne, and Bruce Magee discuss episode 2 x 02 "We all Fall Down." The main cast hides from the ship that's been pursuing them by landing on Katrina Island, where they find a ranger and his family.  It turns out the ranger is there because he's been preparing for some kind of catastrophe.  Unfortunately, it turns out that he is preparing for a permanent end to the crisis they are facing. We discuss the connections between the bubonic plague, which they discuss for the first time, and the current plague. We also discuss the kind of thinking that goes into a group suicide. We agree that this may be the best episode so far. It concentrates on character over plot, but manages to keep the episode incredibly tense.

Fear the Walking Dead: A PodcastFear the Walking Dead 2x01. "Monster"Podcast episode 07.  Going Galt with zombies.    Stephen Payne and Bruce Magee discuss the beginning of the new season, which gets off the a fast start with our characters abandoning the land to try their luck on Strand's yacht. Quinn couldn't join us today, so it's just Stephen and Bruce. This episode starts off well, with the bombing of Los Angeles driving zombies to the beach and forcing our group to flee on the yacht. For much of the episode, the yacht seems like a somewhat safer option, but it becomes clear that dangers are as powerful on the sea as on the land. Something needs to drive the crew back to land just to keep the show interesting. It wouldn't be very interesting television if the crew spent the apocalypse riding around the ocean watching Gilligan's Island reruns. We discuss the role of Strand as the current leader of the group. As a member of the 1%, he's been preparing for some kind of catastrophe. He makes it clear that it's his boat, his rules. We discuss the way that this week's episode treats the presence of the monsters as an opportunity to go Galt, i.e., for the 1% to leave civilization for their own paradise. Of course, in this brave new world without government or a legal system, Strand's ownership of the yacht only lasts until someone with a gun disagrees.  We also talk about the development of other characters, especially how Travis has moved from being the "mayor" of his subdivision last season to being focused on the survival of his family this season. The group has already started making the transformation that has taken place to the people in The Walking Dead as they figure out how to survive in this new world. 

Fear the Walking Dead: A PodcastFear the Walking Dead 1x06. "A Good Man"Podcast episode 06.  Five Days at Walker Memorial Quinn Warner, Stephen Payne, and Bruce R. Magee discuss the season finale. We agree that is is a great end to the season. The growing tension from the season comes to a climax in this episode.  We finally get a big herd of walkers, which attack the army base and hospital.  Also Travis reaches his limit, and we see the violence that has been brewing beneath the surface.  Our metaphor for the week centers on what happens as the army leaves the sick and the medical staff behind during the evacuation.  Dr. Exner makes a grim decision when she uses the bold gun to kill the patients who have been left behind.  Following Katrina, a similar situation occurred at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, when the doctors and staff at the hospital kept their patients going as best they could for five days, with charges of euthanasia emerging afterward.  We speculate about the 2nd season and hope they won't spend too much time at sea. 

5. 1 x 05. Cobalt. Shawn Igou joins us again as we discuss of episode 5 of Fear the Walking Dead.  Bruce takes a victory lap for suggesting that Daniel Salazar had belonged to the death squads in El Salvador during the 1980s.  Ok, he took several victory laps. The gang likes this episode quite a bit.  The focus again is less on the zombies themselves and primarily on the breakdown of human society.  We welcome the arrival of a strong black character named Strand (played by Colman Domingo).  He is a well-to-do "closer" who uses his ability to read people to manipulate them. The army decides to stop trying to preserve its corner of civilization and switches to Operation Cobalt.  Daniel Salazar reveals that he did indeed belong to the death squads in El Salvador's civil war, and he dusts off his torture skills to figure out where his wife has been taken, and to find out what Operation Cobalt is.  At the end of the episode, Cpl Andrew Adams, the soldier whose arm Daniel has flayed, reveals that the army plans to abandon their enclave, killing everybody on their way out. Bruce and Stephen agree this is great TV, but worry that fans will learn the wrong lesson about torture.  It hasn't been very long since watching the torture scenes in 24 influenced rulings coming from the Supreme Court.  Madison is a surprise this episode. When she learns that Daniel is torturing Andrew, she's upset.  However, when Daniel asks her a couple of times if she wants to get her son Nick back from the army, and she goes along with his plan. Travis, however, is stuck in his pre-apocalypse mindset.  He still sees walkers as human and is unable to shoot one even when army men place a sniper rifle in his hands. Liza starts showing her potential when she finds Griselda in the hospital, sits with her while she dies, and then uses a bolt gun on her head to keep her from turning.  Meanwhile, Alicia and her step brother Chris bond through youthful hijinks.  They break into the nicest house in the neighborhood, get drunk, dress up in nice clothes, and broke glass and china for fun.  And are they starting to be attracted to each other? We try to figure out whether it's icky to have step-siblings falling for each other.

4. 1 x 04.  The Apocalypse takes a Tea TimeFear the Walking Dead episode 1 x 04. "Not Fade Away."Quinn, Stephen, and Bruce discuss episode 4, and red tea, at Parish Press. After the tension of last week, the pace let up some; the apocalypse has taken a tea time as well. This is the first episode of TWD or FTWD that we can remember not having an active walker. The focus therefore isn't on the walkers, but on the attempt of modern society to recover from any crisis. Nine days have passed since the army came in at the end of the last episode, and everybody is attempting to hold on to some normalcy. But the cracks in the facade are obvious. Nick is back to his IV drug use.  Alicia is inking her arm with the design her probably dead boyfriend Matt drew on her arm on their last date.  We wondered during the episode whether the hospital that the army took people to was real or not. By the end of the episode, we thought it was real, but were suspicious about what goes on there.  We also wondered about what has been happening in the zone around the fence.  Is the army just killing the walkers only, or everybody it encounters?  

3. 1 x 03.  Zombie Hurricane1 x 03. "The Dog."Quinn, Stephen, and Bruce discuss episode 3 with guest Shawn Igou, who visited us at Parish Press. We agree that this is our favorite episode so far. And what do the zombies repesent this week?  Bruce thinks they represent a disaster like a hurricane, with the national government stepping in to solve the crisis when other institutions fail. At the end of the episode, after the group makes it through the difficult night, the military sweeps in to save the day.  Quinn says that if this were a typical zombie movie, the movie would be over at this point. But in the very end of the episode, we see a soldier drawing x-code, made famous in Hurricane Katrina, on the wall of the house next door.  It's hard to imagine anything good coming from such an ominous ending.The action is beginning to intensify.  The effects of the zombie virus are beginning to spread.  A couple of episodes ago, there were rumors on the Internet about an outbreak affecting 5 states.  By this episode, the news has become public, and governors in 11 states have declared states of emergency.  LAX and the Denver airport have closed down; other airports probably have, too.  Most institutions are trying to keep operating, but the cracks are beginning to appear in the façade of civilization.  Bruce thinks they should be filling the bathtubs with water, along with the trash cans in the back yard. Most worrisome at this point is the collapse of the health system.  When Nick was in the hospital in episode 1, the hospital was still functioning normally; even when the man beside him coded, the staff whisked him away quickly and professionally. Now just a few days later, the group goes to a hospital to get Griselda's broken ankle tended to, but they find police surrounding the hospital shooting the walkers on their way out.  Worse yet is the state of the hospital itself.  We can see in the background the signs that it has been overrun by the walkers.  We consider the way various characters are developing during the growing crisis.  We agree that right now Daniel Salazar is the most ready both mentally and physically, with his mysterious past in El Salvador during its the civil war.  Bruce hopes they develop the character of Alicia--Alycia Debnam-Carey, the actress who plays her, also plays Lexa on the series The 100.  Her character Lexa is the Queen of the Grounders and a real bad ass. We hope they'll let Alicia live up to her potential. Listen in iTunes. Listen in Stitcher.Like us on Facebook.  The Louisiana Anthology Home Page.

2. Zombie Lives Matter  1 X 02. "So Close Yet So Far."Quinn, Stephen, and Bruce discuss episode 2. We agree that the excitement level has gone up considerably since the first episode.  If zombies are a metaphor for drugs (and sex) in episode 1, what do they represent now?  We conclude that zombies this week are most closely associated with Black Lives Matter. We disagree over how the movement is treated. Quinn likes the way the show treated the movement; Bruce thinks they are portrayed as impediments to the police trying to handle the situation.  We agree that the movement and the numerous videos of police violence against unarmed citizens has undermined the status of the police in minority communities. We also discuss the way Madison and Travis ditch Alicia's black boyfriend Matt when they see that he's been bitten. Madison is later ready to take in the white student Tobias, who has some knowledge of the outbreak. Bruce has trouble getting past the incident, especially since the characters don't fully understand the zombie process yet. He spent last week in New Orleans during the 10th anniversary of Katrina. It's hard forget the images of black people left behind when most white people had been safely evacuated. Given the high death rate of black male characters--3 in two episodes, it looks like Fear the Walking Dead is following the example of The Walking Dead in its treatment of black male characters. We also discuss the timeline of the show and how many days have passed so far. (We think two.)Zombie Lives MatterListen in iTunes. Listen in Stitcher.Like us on Facebook.  The Louisiana Anthology Home Page.

1.  Episode 1 x 01 Fear the Waking Dead (FTWD).  Quinn, Stephen, and Bruce discuss the premier of Fear the Walking Dead.  The episode focuses on the family dynamic of Madison Clark and Travis Manawa, who are navigating the complicated world of a blended family. Quinn's favorite character in the episode is Nick Clark, the drug addict who wakes up to find a zombie in the abandoned church where he and his acquaintances get high.  We discuss the way that monsters serve as metaphors for problems we face. In this episode, zombies are metaphors for illicit drug use.  Of the three zombies we see in the first episode, the first is the girl Nick has been getting high with.  When he finds her, she's eating somebody's face.  Nick believes she might have taken some bad drugs (like the bath salts stories that have been in the news), and he eventually tracks down his dealer, Calvin.  The two fight over a gun, and Calvin dies from a gunshot wound then returns as a zombie.  He tries to bite Madison and Travis, but Nick runs over Calvin with a truck.  Twice.  We discuss whether the authorities would try to cover up a zombie outbreak.  Who would be the first people to notice the zombie apocalypse?  How would people start hearing about it?  We discuss the year when the zombie apocalypse happens.  The world of FTWD seems to be current--the smart phones everybody uses seem to be latest generation.Listen in iTunes. Listen in Stitcher.Like us on Facebook.  The Louisiana Anthology Home Page.

Episode 0.  Quinn, Stephen, and Bruce are joined by guest Savvy Woods at the Parish Press Coffee Shop in Ruston, LA, as we discuss the upcoming pilot episode of Fear the Walking Dead.  Unfortunately, the beignet machine was broken, but we persevered.  We summarize what we know about Fear the Walking Dead.  We discuss the main actors and characters, the setting in Los Angeles at the very beginning of the epidemic, and speculate about the year that this could be set.  Modern society is incredibly complex and therefore easily disrupted and possibly destroyed. We also discuss The Walking Dead as the first show set in this universe, both the comic book and the television show on AMC.  In this universe, the monsters aren't called zombies; they are called walkers or biters.  The pathogen that creates zombies in mysterious; at some point, people realize everybody is already infected and will reanimate if they die with their brains intact. We move back from there to zombies in movie and television.  The White Zombie from 1932 is more closely based on folktales of people who are controlled by a sorcerer called a bokor.Oddly enough, the James Bond movie Live and Let Die in 1973 stuck fairly closely to the traditional folklore, possibly because it was based on the 1954 book by the same name.  Only this time, the voodoo elements were just a cover for what the boss was up to.  Night of the Living Dead introduced the new kind of zombie, one produced by natural rather than supernatural causes and not controlled by anybody.  These zombies crave human flesh, sometimes brains. We end with the earliest zombies, based on African traditions and developed in Haiti.  Voodoo theology held that the human has various aspects; the bokor could capture one part of the soul and control the person's body through it. The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the only successful revolt by slaves, and many people fled the violence. A large percentage ended up in New Orleans, which doubled in size from the migration.  The immigrants came with zombie stories along with the larger voodoo ideas and spread throughout the south until they made their way to the broader culture.Listen in iTunes. Listen in Stitcher.Like us on Facebook.  The Louisiana Anthology Home Page.