This week’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead was the mid-season finale, leaving viewers with a few cliffhangers as the show goes away until August. It’s been a mostly monotonous, occasionally interesting, season but this episode finally put gave us some meat on the bone (so to speak)
In the episode titled “Shiva,” Celia (Marlene Forte) presents a very unique perspective on the zombie apocalypse. You see Celia, the matriarch of the Mexican home the group has ended up at, keeps her dead alive. The basement is filled with the zombies of her loved ones. And when Strand (Colman Domingo) shoots his boyfriend/her son Thomas (Dougray Scott) in the head, she’s furious. This kind of finality cannot stand, and she banishes him.
Here’s where things get interesting. Celia doesn’t see the zombie apocalypse as an “apocalypse,” she sees it as the “beginning of eternal life.” Now, as long as you don’t destroy someone’s head, they cannot die.
Whoa. That’s… kind of true, right? I mean, obviously, the zombie versions of people have no morality or consciousness and will blindly kill anyone in their path. When Madison tries to kill Celia and Daniel burns her house down, you understand their disgust at this idea. Years and years of zombie movies and TV shows have led us to a universal truth that these creatures aren’t human.
But I applaud Fear the Walking Dead for providing a flipside to the argument. This early in the zombie outbreak (I mean, we’re probably only like a month into it at this point, right?) it makes sense people would have different interpretations. What makes less sense are Madison and Daniel’s instant and violent rejection of this more optimistic view, but that’s another story. For instance, here’s what Daniel thinks of Celia’s idea:
It’s also great that this belief has begun to splinter the main group. Will these complex, interesting thematic threads continue when the show comes back in August? We don’t know, but it’s promising nonetheless.