Odessa

Ron Underwood directed this episode of the final season of Fear TWD, his direction and visual storytelling was good. The cinematography and editing were great, with some nice transitions. The episode looks great, nothing wrong there, with some great shots and camera angles. The sound editing and musical score is fantastic.

Mo's hunt to prove PADRE's true intentions has her in over her head as she's drawn into the larger web of secrets.

"Odessa" is the third episode of the eighth and final season, it's an average episode, both good and bad at times all depending on how much you want to criticize. Episode three has more of June and actually a Kim Dickens who seems to care of her performance, it's better but far from the same quality she gave her performance in S1-3. One performance I just can't get behind is Maya Eshet as Shrike, I just find her performance to be wooden and far from terrifying. We also get to see Daniel Salazar again, seeing Ruben and Kim share scenes again made me smile but the dialogue is poorly written like most of the dialogue in this is. Good direction though and the actors make it bearable. I still find the whole plot to be quite ridiculous, PADRE is a cartoonish group and haven't improved, Shrike's flashbacks are unnecessary and worsens the pacing. Something Erik Kain of Forbes wrote was quite interesting, how Mo is 8 years old but is played by a much older actress and the funny thing is how an eighth year old is acting out of character like a twelve year old, I like the actress who plays Mo though as I think she's doing a good job with what she's getting. The walkie talkies, unrealistic amount of batteries and bullets is another thing to criticize. Yet, this was a decent episode of Fear the Walking Dead, with an ending leaving you wanting more. There's hope that they'll make PADRE into a less cartoonish group, but the ridiculous clothing will probably remain during the season. Their backstory started out interesting but fell flat.

This show just gets worse and worse every single episode. I love to hate it.

The PADRE storyline is one of the worst storylines in any of the Walking Dead shows thus far - and that's really saying something because there have been some tremendous stinkers over the years. The dialog is so horribly written that almost none of the conversations even make sense. Each "shocking revelation" in this episode literally had me laughing out loud at how incredibly dumb it all was. Everything feels like it was written by AI.

At one point one of the new characters, Crane, freaks out because his dad left his binoculars on a boat. He grabs them and says "I've gotta take these to him!" His sister, Shrike, says "why?" - His response? "Because how will he see what's coming without them?" - This is just a taste of how bad the dialog in this show has become. I've got old stories I wrote when I was still in grade school that are better than this absolute dreck.

Last season Daniel was suffering from serious dementia - he could barely remember anything, could hardly function without Luciana tricking him into doing things, and was, at best, a burden on everyone around him if not a dangerous threat to them. This season he's the leader of a group of parents searching for the kids that were stolen from them by Madison (for PADRE). His dementia seems to have been completely cured. This is explained via a throwaway line - Daniel is slurping on a drink and he says "yerba-maté - it's good for mental focus." Wow. Just wow. I can't believe nobody ever tried using yerba-maté to literally *cure* dementia before. Absolutely brilliant writing.

It just keeps getting worse from there. The writers on this show should never be allowed to work again.

As I've said in the title, the episode's decent. It's not as good as the last episode, but it could've been a lot worse.

First, we have to talk about the script. Some of the lines are just reused and reused, over and over again like please, writers, be a bit creative, won't you? And there are some illogical, stupid moments that I can't really get my head around.

And then there's the directing. Some of the scenes of the episode are just them standing too casually, even when in an *intense* scene. You know what I'm talking about if you've watched the episode. Maybe I confuse this with the acting, but I guess the directing had a little part of it too. At this point, if they keep standing so lifelessly and awkwardly like that, they'd be more dead-like than the walkers do.

But of course, there are some good scenes too, and the soundtrack throughout the first half of the episode is better than expected.

Overall, I think that this episode has a lot of flaws but it's not so horrible that you'd be loathing it. So far, my hope for a good final season is still wavering, but the next episode will be about Morgan going back to King County, a memorable place in TWDU, so let's see if that will end up as a good episode or not.

The plot gets more and more ridiculous as the show goes on.... When faced with the opportunity to take out the leaders of PADRE who have stolen children from families, our "heroes" opt instead to stand there and be captured. They could kill the leaders. But that would make too much sense.

Instead, we have to believe that the logic of "ripping children from their parents" is somehow better (or different) from there mere possibility that the parents MIGHT die.

Somehow the writers of this show would rather support a notion that kids know better than adults, that life experience means nothing, that development of the frontal cortex of the brain does!'t ACTUALLY lead to more rational thought.

The real horror of this show, ultimately is with the writing.

When it was announced, "Fear" was marketed as a series that would address the beginnings of the apocalypse within the universe of "The Walking Dead," and one of the main things fans expected to see was the origin of the virus and the potential cure. However, as the seasons progressed, the series strayed from this concept and shifted its focus more towards survival.

Over the years, "Fear" significantly lost its audience. At its launch, the series had achieved a record viewership worldwide, even surpassing the main series and the more recent "The Last Of Us." However, due to the questionable quality presented over the seasons, the audience gradually abandoned the series, leading up to this 8th and final season. In essence, it took the series about eight years to answer a question, and it chose its worst phase to do so, as the main series, which carried the highest viewership in this universe, has ended, and the viewership of this spin-off is the lowest of all. Thus, they answered a question that few will know the answer to and that will not affect the main series, since it has already concluded.

Besides these issues, the idea that a cure was discovered by a nurse who isn't a scientist, and with a group that lacks half the resources of a CRM (Civic Republic Military) or Commonwealth, is a huge and forced convenience. Moreover, if this cure is not addressed in upcoming spin-offs, all of this will have been in vain.

A positive aspect highlighted in other episodes was the fact that the season had fewer episodes, which helped the plot to have more substance and pace, something this chapter seems to have failed to capitalize on. Many of the scenes seem disjointed and unresolved, as if during editing many were cut. For example, the scene where Mo (Zoe Merchant) and Dove (Jayla Walton) suddenly find themselves walking in the forest and investigating the schemes of PADRE, and how they got there and why they decided to investigate, especially Dove, who in previous episodes seemed satisfied with PADRE's actions, remain unanswered during the episode.

Additionally, the poor handling of the time passage between the previous episode and this one, which seems to be a direct continuation but simultaneously states it takes place a few days later, makes the episode quite confusing.

The reunion of these two major characters was a huge disappointment and a waste of potential; the episode does not sufficiently explore their relationship, something that could be better explored in future chapters and has great potential, but "Odessa" squanders this golden opportunity for much of the time. Fortunately, this episode saw the return of one of the best and most beloved characters of the series, Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades). A character who has been winning over audiences since the first season, and rightfully so, as the actor is always very charismatic and his Panamanian accent adds even more charm to the character.

Moving from one of the episode's positives to one of its major negatives, we encounter a series of unnecessary suspenseful elements that the episode introduces. One of them is the entire mystery behind the character Dove, who had until then been very underexplored, resulting in a lack of connection between the character and the audience.

The episode creates situations to place her in specific locations at exact moments, and from there, it generates clumsy suspense around the character's parentage. The episode thinks it's developing an interesting plot for the character by putting her in conflict with everyone in search of her true identity and origin, but it fails because it executes this idea in such a weak and generic manner.

Another poor reveal in the episode concerns the identity of PADRE. All the mystery surrounding this group and who was behind it, which had been built up since the end of the previous season, is broken in a ridicul*us way. This third chapter is filled with flashbacks that serve to explain the origin of this group, and it could not have been more cliché. The episode tries to deceive us by working with the idea that the man leading PADRE might be Krennick (Michael B. Silver), the father of Shrike-Sam (Maya Eshet). But we later discover that Krennick died trying to save his children Sam and Ben (Daniel Rashid), and that the mysterious man behind PADRE is Ben, and that he and his sister developed and shaped what PADRE would become. All the flashbacks serve to deceive us and briefly tell the story of PADRE, but this is shattered by a terrible revelation that diminishes the merits of this group and their level of threat, because discovering that the great mysterious leader is nothing more than a teenager pretending to be someone he is not, completely nullifies the mystery and threat that had been built up around this group.

"Odessa" is by far the worst episode of the season so far. It has the weakest script, the worst editing, and technical work. It is filled with events that, instead of enhancing the story, diminish it, destroying some of the good ideas that had been built up until then. Episodes like this, with such empty and clichéd stories, led to the downfall of "Fear the Walking Dead." But despite some flaws, the episode still moves the story forward and maintains the season's fast pace, giving us hope that this arc around PADRE might be concluded in this first part of the season, leaving room for the last six episodes of the series to tackle a new plot. We just have to wait and see if the next three episodes will conclude this arc in a worthy or forgettable manner. The season suffers a significant drop in quality overall with this episode, but the hope for a good season and good episodes still persists, depending on whether the next ones are as good as the first two or as bad as this third one.