Fear the Walking Dead: Dead in the Water

I've been on a TWD Universe binge for the last several months. I'm almost caught up for the new mini series! With that said... I've watched every single web series and let me say... most of them have been terrible. But this one? It's high quality. It was written well. I loved it. It was great seeing Nick Stahl again and he once again proves he is an amazing actor. Right now? This web series killed FTWD Season 7. Which is really terrible. I wish they would put the same effort into FTWD they did into this mini series. I do really enjoy seeing everyone's origin stories. The show doesn't concentrate enough on that.

I get it, TWD and FTWD writers all assume their audiences have very short attention spans.

"Dead in the water" is a great example of this. Simply put, why was everyone turning so quickly?

I don't know when it changed, but somewhere around season 7-8 of TWD, and around season 5 in FTWD, walkers started turning more quickly. Instead of a change that took 1-2 days after death, or after a bite, suddenly shortened drastically to hours, or minutes in some cases

My assumption for continuity sake was that as the virus evolved over time, it turned the dead faster.

This "short" or whatever you want to call it throws all that convention out the window. Why were these initial outbreak zombies turning in minutes?

For the sake of the story and direction itself, I also found it hard to believe over 100 navy soldiers would so easily succumb to zombie attack. "Noooo...zombie slowly approaching...should I move? Do anything to avoid the attack? Fight back even? Nah!" TWD / FTWD always paints every soldier as incredibly incompetent in every series, completely incapable of defending themselves from slow-moving attackers.

Bottom line, these directors are just so sloppy, all the time, and this episode broke no new ground, it goes exactly like you expected it would.

However, as a plus, I will say I'm a big fan of Nick Stahl's acting, including in this. I wish he was in more things.

I was suprised that this was so good. Being a fan of the original walking dead I was absolutely appalled at the way it slowly slithered into Wokness after Rick left and basically turning into some sort of mothers meeting. Even my heroines Micheonne and Carole seemed to turn into a meek version of themselves more concerned with feelings than fighting the baddies. The spin-offs that followed were unwatchable, full of preachy woke rubbish and no real story. Men and Women with perfect makeup and hair worrying about trivialities does not a good Zombie series make. . Then we get this, and what a fantastic surprise, Fear the walking dead: Dead in the sea is very different to the other pale spin-offs . Good suspenseful story, reasonably likeable characters that you root for (unlike previous spinoff where your hoping the cast get eaten and quickly) no preachy woke messages and all on a submarine . I feel that it has a limited life in its present form as there's only so much they can do in a submarine but hopefully this will expand as the series progresses.

Fear the Walking Dead: Dead in the Water is a good example what's wrong with the whole TWD franchise since season 5 or 6 of the mothership TWD - the writing is lazy and not only occasionally plain stupid. I never was on board of a submarine but can't imagine that a zombie outbreak would overtake the crew in such a way (the show makes a convenient time jump, so the writers don't have to explain how the infected take over the sub), I just mention all those bulkheads, close them and you are save and/or you can confine the infected, on top, secure and control the Combat Information Center - easy work for a military crew, one might think. Anyway, the little show is not a total fail and not worse than the regular Fear the Walking Dead show (I must admit, that I do not watch that one anymore and missed the last two or three seasons) but you get just served the same lukewarm characters like in all the other shows, nothing really makes sense or provides real suspense, it's like eating a cheeseburger while you still do some stuff on your machine.

TWD Webisodes have not always been great. The original ones by Greg Nicotero (Torn Apart, Cold Storage and The Oath) were all very great! But after that, they went downhill. Flight 462, Passage and Red Machete were meh. Dead in the water was a great standalone short that shed light on an intriguing villain and expands the universe. I was seriously expecting to hate this! But wow this was loads of fun. Nick Stahl absolutely killed it! If it's possible to get him an Emmy for this, do it! The ending was brilliant to. Awesome work team.