Morgan, Dwight, Sherry and Mo race against time to save Grace.

This one is difficult to sit through in the best of ways. Fear The Walking Dead has always been very good, and got no credit, at the pragmatism baked into its world. You can’t, and won’t, save everyone and the franchise as a whole has almost always dealt with the death of a major character with appropriate weight and time. Sasha and Tyrese in the core show both spring to mind, as does the tragic, offhanded way John dies in Fear.

This episode skirts close to disaster, the sense of cramming as much in as possible threatening to tip it over move than once. We start with a motorboat chase, end with the return of Morgan’s axe and along the way pretty much the entire main cast still standing get moments in the spotlight. However, where previously it’s felt rushed, here it feels needed and oddly streamlined. The entire episode is about saving Grace and just now seeing that written down tells me what the core metaphor of the episode is too. The point isn’t to save Grace’s life. The point is to try.

This is why, for all the other folks we see, the episode is ultimately about Grace, Morgan and Mo. Karen David has always been a big part of this show’s success and the emotional trajectory she gives Grace here is some of the best acting we’ve seen on the show. She knows what’s coming, and her later scenes with Morgan and Mo just break your heart. Her admission that Mo is the reason they’re still alive and where it lands in the episode is a brutal callback to the show’s bleakest year and a moment of literal grace for her to go out on. Her final conversation with Lennie James too is deeply moving. Both of them doing the only thing they can the best way they can, banking on it being something close to enough.

The flip side to this is Maya Eshet’s Shrike, who is emerging as one of the show’s best villains. She is hateful in the best of ways and her scenes with Morgan at the end of the episode draw a stark moral line between the two. Shrike is a fundamentalist who wants to spare people the grief Morgan and Mo have gone through. Morgan wants, and is denied, a moment of dignity even as his daughter closes her hand into a fist around her grief and gives Shrike what she wants. In previous episodes, the moral shift has often felt slightly arbitrary. Here, falling across generational lines, it feels stark and cold and realistic.

Verdict: This is a story about a heroic effort that isn’t enough and what happens next. It’s not easy to sit through but it shouldn’t be, and your discomfort is rewarded with a hell of an hour of TV. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart