'Fear the Walking Dead' Season 6 Episode 2 Review: Strand changes after dealing with a sticky situation
Spoilers for 'The Walking Dead' Season 6 Episode 3 'Welcome to the Club'
Last episode's focus on Morgan Jones (Lennie James) set an interesting tone for 'Fear the Walking Dead' Season 6, as Morgan's struggles helped him establish a new identity for himself. That seems to become an important theme for the season going forward, as it's not just Morgan who's finding himself a new identity after a difficult struggle. Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) has always struggled with his darker side, but Virginia's (Colby Minifie) Pioneers have ground him down to a desperate enough position for him to realize that the only way to survive is grow as cold as the worst parts of himself. With Virginia herself remaining one of the show's less interesting villains, Strand's heel turn makes him a strong contender for a great series villain, and a force to be reckoned with.
In this episode, Strand and Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey) are assigned to deal with an all new kind of walker threat — a warehouse of them, covered in sticky molasses, turning already horrifying hordes into something of a clawing, gnashing quicksand trap. They meet with several of their other group members who've been trapped with the Pioneers, including Daniel Salazer (Rubén Blades), who's lost his memories but appears to have landed on his feet with a sweet gig cutting uneven bangs on Virginia's forehead.
Strand and Alicia abandon a plan to take out the rangers to instead fight to find a secret weapon hidden in the warehouse, on the advice of Virginia's sister, Dakota. Strand organizes the meager forces to take the sickly-sweet zombies out, makes some very cold-hearted sacrifices to do it and realizes that that's the kind of man he needs to be after discovering that Virginia's true weapon was the callous decision-makers she made along the way.
The episode is centered around an impressively shot battle between the sticky-walkers and those forced to deal with them, but it takes an exhaustingly long time getting there. While it's good to catch up on how various group members have been doing, the show makes it clear with a gruesome opening that the warehouse battle is the episode's biggest draw, and every moment that door remained closed felt like a frustrating waste of time. It turns out to have been worth the wait, however, as even without the stickiness playing a major role, the setup and consequent battle is one of the more entertaining human-walker battles the franchise has seen for a while. That it ends with a cold-hearted betrayal that benefits the larger group is just the icing on the cake.
Featuring more of the show's ensemble cast, this is the episode that really gets the ball rolling, re-establishing the troubles that the show's protagonists are in while setting up some major plot elements that are going to be vital in the road ahead. Dakota is sure to have a bigger part to play, but the more compelling focus of this episode is Strand giving up on his good side in order to become a version of himself he believes is stronger. The show has a lot of moving parts, and as such the episode wasn't as tight in its storytelling as it was in last episode's more single-minded focus, but the story it did tell is still a powerful tale.
The next episode of 'The Walking Dead' airs on October 25 at 9 pm ET on AMC.