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
Channel: Superhero 