Weak is a fitting title for the entire run of Fear The Walking Dead Season 4 so far, although Episode 12 – entitled Weak, while not particularly strong, isn’t predominantly weak either.
June and Althea are going nowhere fast. The hurricane has left them stranded. Al’s SWAT van has run out of diesel, they have no food and water and Al is getting sick. But not all hope is lost, as they hear someone coming through on their walkie-talkie. The problem is, the voice is not recognizable due to all the static and feedback.
At the beginning of the episode, and before we realize just how dire Al and June’s situation really is, June is watching John Dorie’s (Garret Dillahunt) video interview, where he talks about how he is certain he will find his “Laura”. She watches the video over and over again and talks to him on the walkie-talkie, receiving no reply. Could it be John’s staticky voice she and Al end up hearing? Will June and John finally be reunited?
Unfortunately, the voice they’re hearing is not John, it’s Morgan, or “Mo-Mo”, as Sarah likes to call him. He is desperately looking for his friends, calling out on his walkie-talkie, telling them he’s at milepost 27 and not knowing if anyone actually hears him, until he hears something. He doesn’t know who it is, but he knows someone out there is listening. Maybe it’s one of his old friends? Meanwhile, his new friends, Wendell, Sarah and Jim, are getting restless and annoyed and even consider just leaving Morgan at the milepost.
Cut back to June and Al, who are walking down the road and the SWAT truck drives past them. They conveniently find a vehicle just steps away, jump into it and try to catch up to the van. While she’s driving, Al admits that she understands why June kept watching John’s video. June asks Al if she had a significant other in the pre-apocalypse world. Al tells her no. “I’ve been doing what I do since before the world went to s**t,” Al says. She collected tales, which meant she didn’t have any of her own. Now we finally have an explanation as to why the character of Al is so boring and one-dimensional.
And speaking of one-dimensional, Morgan runs into this season’s sinister “big bad”, the filthy woman who keeps a zombie as a pet. She is leaning over one of the “Take what you need. Leave What You Don’t” boxes. He tells her to take what she needs and she tells Morgan to “be careful.” As he leaves, we see the woman pouring out water from a clean bottle and replacing it with dirty water or water mixed with oil – whatever the filthy mixture is, it can’t be good. She caps the bottle and puts it back in the box.
In the meantime, Al spots her SWAT van and then proceeds to drive like a maniac to catch up to it, causing her to blow a tire and lose control of the vehicle. Both women are OK but June is becoming concerned, as Al seems to be more ill by the second and Al tells her there is medicine in her SWAT van.
When Al wakes up in the disabled vehicle, June is trying to change the blown-out tire. They hear gunshots and Al knows it’s her guns they are hearing. June doesn’t want to investigate but Al insists and June leaves her to go check it out and hopefully find the medicine in the van.
She gets close to the SWAT van and is hiding behind an overturned bus filled with walkers. As she looks inside, she turns to find a gun to her head. The man with the gun tells her to put her hands behind her head and kneel. She tells him she is just looking for medicine inside the van in order to help her friend. He refuses to help so she grabs his arm and they struggle for the gun until June comes out on top. She searches the van for medicine, but to no avail. She contacts Al with the walkie-talkie to ask where the medicine is. Al admits there was no medicine, she just wanted to get her van back. Frustrated, June returns to the vehicle.
Morgan is still trying to find a way to let his friends know he is looking for them so he climbs a water tower to get a better signal. June and Al hear his message, just as their walkie-talkie runs out of battery power. June believes they have enough gas in their vehicle to make it to milepost 27. Al tells her she can’t leave her SWAT van behind (obsessed or what, Al?) so June drives away. Bye bye Althea! But wait – Al suddenly fires off her gun and unfortunately June hears it and Al climbs in the passenger side of the vehicle.
Just as Morgan and company get ready to take off, June and Al drive up and the three are reunited. Morgan tells June they are the first ones he has found. He offers them food and water and June borrows his walkie-talkie. She radios to the man who stole Al’s van and tells him they are at milepost 27. He tells her his name is Quinn and that he will get to where they are but as he approaches the milepost, no one is there. He radios June to tell her he’s there but no one is around. As he walks up to the milepost, he notices a 7 was stuck to the sign to cover up a 1 and he is then struck and bitten by the filthy woman’s pet walker.
Unless Quinn is just really stupid, wouldn’t he have kept track of the mileposts up to this point? So how could he not have noticed he’d just recently passed milepost 20 and still had seven miles to go?
Filthy woman frees her current pet walker to go about his zombie business and then writes “People You Know” on Quinn’s face. “You won’t be weak anymore,” she tells him.
Weak was another slow-paced (although it had a few interesting moments), character-driven episode that also happened to be Fear actor Colman Domingo’s television directorial debut.
From the previews, it looks like next week will feature an episode focusing on John and Victor Strand (Domingo) and we’ll finally get to see the alligator Talking Dead host Chris Hardwick was so absurdly excited about during that show’s mid-season premiere.
