Episode Title: Captive
Original Airdate: 5-8-16
Time for revenge on the high seas…or just off the coast of Cali. Whatevs. On the Abigail, Daniel tends to an impaled, but still alive, Reed, to get info about his brother Connor and where he might have taken Alicia and Travis. Strand allows Madison to take half a day to rescue her family, in exchange for having pulled him out of the water and saving his life, but his buddy Luis is getting more and more agitated about getting to Mexico.
Episode Title: Blood in the Streets
Original Airdate: 5-1-16
The consequences of Alicia’s radio hookup from the season premiere come full circle, as the survivors are taken captive on the Abigail by Jack and his group. As the pirate (for lack of a better word) trio await the arrival of their own leader, Travis is instructed to “hot-wire” the Abigail into starting, because Strand jumped ship, with the keys, at the first sign of trouble. Speaking of Strand, several flashbacks peel away a little of his mystery as we learn he lost everything in Hurricane Katrina, then stole $36,000 from a businessman, Thomas Abigail, who eventually became Strand’s partner in various real estate ventures as well as life. Meanwhile, Nick swims to shore on Strand’s orders, to meet up with an associate by the name of Luis, who takes Nick back to the Abigail in time to kill some of the commandeering pirates, but not before their own leader takes off with Travis and Alicia. The episode ends with Madison pulling a near dead Strand out of the water.
Episode Title: Ouroboros
Original Airdate: 4-24-16
This episode opens with passengers of Flight 462 surfacing in the ocean. Alex (not Charlie, as I stated in my “462” review yesterday, as that is how IMDb had her listed) finds Jake among the wreckage, but he’s badly burned. They share a lifeboat with two other survivors, who try to convince her Jake is dead weight and will soon die and turn. She ends up killing them when they try to kill Jake.
After Fear the Walking Dead wrapped its first season at the end of September, AMC aired a sixteen-part related short titled Fear the Walking Dead: Flight 462 during commercial breaks of The Walking Dead’s Season 6. They somehow thought it was a good idea to drag out a fifteen-minute short from October 2015 to April 2016. It wasn’t. Caring what happened to characters we saw for a minute a week didn’t seem possible, so it was far more practical to just wait for the whole thing to finish and watch as a whole online.
Flight 462 follows passengers of a red eye flight to Phoenix at the beginning of the apocalypse. Teenager Jake is talking to his mom on the phone, who didn’t make it onto the plane due to being on standby. Jake hears screaming in the background, but his mother reassures him everything is okay, just before the line goes dead and the flight takes off. Meanwhile, fellow passenger Marcus isn’t feeling too well, but his wife claims it’s a stomach issue, though another passenger, Charlie, seems very skeptical.
Marcus ends up in the bathroom, but is there so long the flight attendant must intervene. Marcus’s unresponsive body falls out, and when the flight crew tears open his shirt to shock his chest, Charlie sees the bite. She warns them to tie him down immediately, but after a couple of shocks he opens his undead eyes and starts attacking, brutally biting his wife and scratching a flight attendant. The air marshal on board attempts to shoot him, but misses and runs out of bullets. Jake grabs a knitting needle of the woman sitting next to him and Charlie puts it through the back of Marcus’s head, then through his wife’s eye.
Unfortunately, when the air marshal was shooting at Marcus, his arm was knocked sideways and one of his bullets went through the plane’s window. Also during the kerfuffle, Jake noticed the lights going out all over Phoenix, and the pilot reports they will reroute to LAX. The scratched flight attendant confessed to Charlie that it’s not just Phoenix but everywhere, and they have no place to land. Soon the hole in the window turns into a massive crack and breaks away completely. As the plane begins to land (crash?), Charlie confesses to Jake that she got the last seat instead of his mom, who should be there with him instead of her. On the ground, Nick sees the plane overhead losing altitude.
Overall, it’s not a bad way to spend fifteen minutes, but there isn’t a lot to say about it either.In just a short span of time, I find myself really liking Charlie and want to see more of her. She clearly has some kind of interesting backstory since she is the only one onboard who seems to know anything about the infected and impending apocalypse. Jake’s a bit whiny, but he did save the day by grabbing the knitting needle to kill Marcus, so he’s already been far more useful in a short fifteen minutes than any of the teens on Fear the Walking Dead have been in eight episodes. Thankfully, we will supposedly learn their fate on tonight’s episode of FTWD, so it all ties together.
You can watch the short in its uninterrupted entirety here:
http://player.theplatform.com/p/M_UwQC/MMOjZwvNwhNj/embed/select/media/Q19CF0tRqiVc?form=html
Episode Title: We All Fall Down
Original Airdate: 4-17-16
The survivors decided to make port for the night to try to shake the other boat that mysteriously started following them. Travis, Madison and their kids find a family led by a survivalist on a small island. He tells them that all the major cities have fallen. After talking to the wife, Madison is convinced she wants to leave with them. It turns out the wife has MS, but wants her two small children to leave and have some sort of life, whatever it may be. Meanwhile Nick, snooping for drugs, finds what he theorizes are poisonous pills the father is keeping around in case things become bad enough the family can die together. Nick just happens to be right, because as the wife and husband argue over their younger kids leaving, the daughter takes one of the pills, dies and reanimates, biting her mother. The husband tells them to take the younger son and leave, but their teenage son stops them on the dock, as his reanimated mother shambles toward them. He retrieves his younger brother, then shoots his mother in the head as the survivors sail off.
Episode Title: Monster
Original Airdate: 4-10-16
It’s back. The prequel spinoff to that really popular show that’s two years ahead of it in the timeline. It’s all very strange when you think about it. Anyway, the second season premiere kicks off just a few hours after the first season finale. With no hope left for LA, the military (we assume) are just bombing the hell out of the city, driving a lot of Infected to the coastline, where the small band of survivors is preparing to sail out to Strand’s boat, the Abigail. They barely escape, with Liza’s dead body, and head for open water, hoping to make it to a naval base in San Diego.
I don’t do too much news here on the site for a few different reasons. One is that news is such a fast paced thing that one minute it’s news and the next minute it’s old hat. There’s plenty of other sites out there that have the ability to cover news as its happening in enough detail to get the whole story. For my part, I share as much news as possible (from official sources) on our Twitter feed. But this week there has been a whole lot of news about next year’s shows. Plenty of shows have been renewed and a few have been picked up and I thought I’d take a bit more of a look at the fate of all the shows we cover and will cover right here.
Continue reading Upfronts: What’s Cancelled, Renewed, & Picked Up
Channel: Superhero 