Fear the Walking Dead’s season 4 finale, entitled I Lose Myself, was not just hokey, it was completely ludicrous. There were enough plot holes in it to fill a leaking ethanol tanker truck (more on that later).
Since showrunners Scott M. Gimple, Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg took over for season 4, Fear has changed from a drama about a family trying to survive in the zombie apocalypse, to The Morgan Show. Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against the character of Morgan, or Lennie James – I liked the character when he was on The Walking Dead, but he was a supporting character. Morgan is not a strong enough character to lead a series.
As the episode begins, we see Althea has survived and is pointing a rifle at Martha and her pet walker Jim and for once, I’m rooting for her. Please shoot this bitch and put an end to this lame Filthy Woman character once and for all. But instead of shooting her, she lets Martha get the better of her and ends up knocked to the ground.
Al wakes up, surrounded by June and John, and she has a video message for Morgan, from Martha. He watches the message several times and after finally gathering everyone together, Morgan then nonsensically decides to leave the group to find Martha, because:
a.) He’s the biggest dumbass in the history of the Walking Dead franchise or;
b.) The writing on this show is just that terrible.
Then the season 4 finale denigrates into Morgan looking for the murderous psychopath Martha, hoping to save her.
At least there’s a few breaks from this – the others head to Polar Bear’s truck stop to drink coffee, wash up and brush their teeth, meanwhile, Al sucks back tons of the water that Martha has laced with something.
Then June and John reconnect and Dorie tells June he knows what she’s all about: “You don’t need a whole day to recognize sunshine.”
Morgan And Martha
Morgan finds Martha lying on the ground and she looks like she’s dying. He dispatches zombie Jim and puts her in the back of a cop car and drives away as she tells him her ridiculous backstory. Morgan gets in touch with the others and finds out they’re all sick. He tells them he’s coming back right away and Martha asks him to pull over. He refuses. Then she asks him to pass her some medicine and he actually opens the security window for her and sticks his arm through it. And if you didn’t think the terrible writing on this show could hit yet another new low, you’d be wrong. She grabs his arm and causes the car to crash – and who couldn’t see this move coming 54 mileposts away?
Morgan wakes up as Martha is writing: I Lose People, I Lose Myself in sharpie on his forehead (too bad there wasn’t enough room for her to add the word Dummie). She tells him she put antifreeze in the water back at the truck stop. He tries to contact his friends to tell them what’s in the water but he can’t communicate with them on the walkie-talkie. He tries to strangle Martha but can’t do it so instead, he takes a pair of handcuffs and locks her to the police car and we all hope that is the last we ever see of this one-dimensional character.
Morgan finally gets in touch with Al and tells them the water was poisoned with antifreeze. June immediately knows the antidote is ethanol. “There’s a crashed tanker truck outside filled with ethanol,” Sarah chimes in. Wow, how convenient is that?
Morgan The Messiah
In their weakened state, the group heads outside, and as the walkers close in, Al shoots them up with the guns from her SWAT van. But she also shoots up the tanker and the ethanol pours onto the ground. Instead of rushing towards it (the path was clear to the truck and if you were dying, would you not just lick the ethanol up from the pavement?) they all go back inside, defeated. The whole scene was just contrived nonsense to drag the situation out so Morgan could return and be the hero. And even though he is injured and limping, Morgan miraculously finds Jim’s truck full of beer and arrives at the truck stop just in time. They’re all cured by drinking the beer that their savior Morgan has brought them.
In the next scene, Morgan returns to the cop car to find Martha’s severed arm still cuffed to the car but down the road is Martha, who has turned into a walker, and he puts his stick through her head. Good riddance.
Then Morgan tells the others they’re not going to Alexandria – they have to stick around and help people. Seriously? After the whole back end of the season consisted of Morgan rounding up his people so he could reunite with his friends in Virginia? Now they’re not going? What was the point of all this?
Even worse, the only two original Fear characters (Alicia and Strand) left on the show were given a handful of lines in the entire finale. What is wrong with this picture? It’s amazing how the showrunners have managed to destroy Fear in only 16 episodes. As I watched this garbage last night, I imagined that somewhere out there, former showrunner Dave Erickson was also watching in utter disbelief at what these complete morons have done to his show.
I was hoping that Gimple and his idiot minions would surprise us all and, at the very least, show us a glimpse of Daniel Salazar. I would have even been OK if they’d taken a page from Dallas and at the end of the episode Alicia woke up after the season 3 finale dam explosion, with Nick and Madison beside her, and proclaimed: “It was all a dream.” Then this whole sh**fest of a season could be erased and we could start with a brand new drawing board (and hopefully new showrunners) for Season 5.
