The Walking Dead: World Beyond
There is a scene in Sunday night’s episode of The Walking Dead: World Beyond that basically sums up just how stupid this show is.
In it, Felix has found Iris after she killed the CRM soldier at the end of last week’s episode. They see lights off in the distance and try to hurry away, but some zombies shamble toward them. Instead of just leaving the zombies as an obstacle for the incoming CRM searchers, they decide to fight each of them. But Felix is worried that the CRM soldiers will hear the zombies falling so he tries to catch each one as they go down. This is all very stupid but it gets worse.
He’s fighting two zombies but in the process of gently lowering the first one to the ground he drops his knife. So he grabs the zombie around its waist and backs up against a tree and tells Iris—twenty or so feet away in the dark—to take the shot. His head is three inches away from the zombie’s. She needs to get a headshot to kill the thing. She’s at a pretty good distance in the dark but clearly this is the only way to kill this zombie.
This is not how you behave in order to survive anything, anywhere during a zombie apocalypse or otherwise. Iris is not an experienced survivor. She hasn’t trained dozens of hours with a crossbow. As someone who has fired crossbows many times, I can tell you with certainty that this would be an enormously difficult shot. Your target isn’t still. Missing your target could result in the death of your friend. Enemies are chasing you through the woods. This is not a shot you’re going to take and it’s certainly not one you’ll make, but of course she does and they get away unscathed.
If this show’s writers had any handle on reality whatsoever they could have produced a better scene. Maybe Felix is pinned by a zombie and Iris is going to take the shot but instead of firing from a distance she runs a few steps closer, or she grabs the bolt out and stabs it instead of firing. There is literally no reason she couldn’t have done these things. She could have picked up the knife and used that. Felix wasn’t in imminent danger—until he ordered Iris to shoot. It’s so stupid.
Alexa Mansour as Hope, Joe Holt as Leo
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But this isn’t even close to the most stupid, ridiculous thing about this show. The most annoying thing is bigger than just this one episode. It’s why I can’t take World Beyond seriously. In many ways, Fear The Walking Dead isn’t even as stupid as this show, and that says a lot. My god does that say a lot.
Here’s the thing. Here’s why my eyes glaze over whenever anyone in this show talks about anything. Why I can’t even remember the Silas scenes from tonight’s episode enough to write down why they matter. Why even though I like Hope, her scenes with her (very smart but also gratingly stupid) dad and her dad’s girlfriend just made me bored and annoyed.
The CRM killed 100,000 people in Omaha and the Campus Colony and the reason was because they wanted Hope.
Hope, mind you, was already on her way to the CRM, making this mass-killing completely unnecessary. Kublek knew this. Also, as far as I know, Hope is not the messiah. She is not possessed of super powers or the “cure” for the zombie plague. As far as I can tell, she’s just a very smart person who can help them carry out their research.
They might have tried asking her if she’d like to help and offering her a chance to see her father rather than manipulating her, sending her out on a suicide expedition across country and then killing everyone she ever knew for no reason.
Maybe just try asking nicely first rather than murdering tens of thousands of people—people who maybe could have contributed to the war effort and who posed zero threat to the secretive CRM. Many of these poor souls were highly educated, many others possessed important skills that the CRM could have exploited.
No, I don’t think Hope is so smart that she can outthink an entire campus and its staff. No, I don’t think any of this makes any sense.
This is just such a preposterous premise that the rest of the show becomes almost unbearably annoying to watch.
All the CRM scheming is boring and silly. Hope and Iris’s dad is a dolt and his manipulative girlfriend sucks. Kublek is another completely implausible villain. Felix is clueless. Iris never fails to get on my nerves. Only Hope and Elton are at all tolerable, and might even be really great characters if they had a show with a decent story to work with.
You don’t kill 100,000 people to recruit one genius teenager to your cause when you don’t have to and everything else, everything that comes after, all the fallout of this absurd decision makes the rest of the show (which is pretty boring most of the time) nigh unwatchable.
I have spoken.
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