Morgan takes a long journey…

Like its new cast members, Fear The Walking Dead has come a very long way. A dismal, rushed opening season led to a fractionally better extended second year. A cast that started as fractious to the point of sociopathy has slowly, but surely, turned into a group of people you both like and care about. Season 3 was ridiculously strong and season 4, in one episode, has already blown it out of the water.

Picking up directly from the end of The Walking Dead’s 8th season, the episode sees Morgan (Lennie James), disgusted with what he’s become and what they’ve been required to do in the war, leave. He walks, runs, sometimes drives until he finds himself in Texas, and in need of more aid than he’s prepared to admit…

When you centre an episode around Lennie James, you’re on safe ground. James is incapable of bad work and his run as Morgan is arguably the most sympathetic leading character The Walking Dead has ever had. When you add Maggie Grace as Althea, a SWAT van-driving journalist and Garret Dillahunt as John Dorie, a gentle, polite man who is impossibly good with an antique six shooter you’ve got something exceptional. From the moment Dillahunt, balancing his deadpan comedic chops with his dead-eyed action physicality starts talking to the closing scene this is one of the best episodes that any show in this franchise has ever produced.

That comes almost entirely from the performances. James’ Morgan is wounded, desperate and drawn inexorably to the very people he wants to be isolated from. Dillahunt’s John Dorie is clearly either a man with a tragic past or a horrific one, perhaps both and painfully aware of it. Grace’s Althea is a relaxed, cautious figure who is collecting the oral histories of the end of the world. They’re a cautious, reticent, instantly likeable team and the script is all the better for focusing on them, especially when it brings them crashing together with the original cast.

Verdict: Rounded out by some top class, quiet direction from John Polson which emphasises both the desolate nature of the world and the fragile nature of the characters and this is a phenomenal piece of television. An effortlessly great pseudo reboot for a show that is about, at last, to not be horror TV’s best kept secret. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart