Fear the Walking Dead: Season 4 review

8 / 10.  A much-improved season compared to the last two, a big shake up with new characters and direction *MILD SPOILERS*

AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, season 4, follows Madison Clark (Kim Dickens), her daughter, Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), her son, Nick (Frank Dillane) along with my fave, Victor (Colman Domingo), and Luciana during the zombie apocalypse.

This season started brilliantly, with some backwards timeline storytelling. backwards. The mixture of the present situation explained via flash backs was intriguing.

In the first crossover between this show and The Walking Dead, Morgan Jones leaves Virginia and head south, encounters newcomers to FTWD, gunslinger John Dorie (the delightfully versatile Garret Dillahunt) who is searching for his lady friend and SWAT truck driving journalist Althea (Maggie Grace in a pivotal role), before meeting Alicia, etc.

The original group finds safe haven inside a baseball stadium and enter a stand off with the new enemy, a strange and dangerous survivor group known as the Vultures. Betrayal and revelations occur, and later in the season just when a zombie apocalypse wasn’t enough, a hurricane hits causing mayhem.

Morgan is a good addition to shake up the group dynamic and provide a moral compass, always found him a bit boring though (sorry, Lennie). Old faithful favourite Victor (Colman Domingo), is still bringing style and understated humour since the start.

An expanding universe is unfolding as we see thecast travel to different states not encountered before, and Morgan tries to return to Virginia. I’m glad he looked at a map as I was going to do the same thing when he ended up in Mississippi, to see where he’d been and where he needed to be.

This season was a big improvement on the previous two, and has less of the moody talking at length, compared to the main The Walking Dead series, which is a good thing.

The second big bad of the season, Martha (Tonya Pinkins) was at first very creepy and mysterious, but the back story they gave her wasn’t very inventive and made it all seem a bit silly. They could have done more with that sub plot.