review of Fear the Walking Dead 1.1 

Fear the Walking Dead 1.1: Great Beginnings

Fear the Walking Dead, the prequel to The Walking Dead, debuted on AMC last night, and I gotta say, blasphemous as it may be, that I liked it better than many an episode of The Walking Dead in recent years.

The opener of Fear the Walking Dead was a perfect little masterpiece in itself - beginning like an episode of The Walking Dead, then pulling out to reveal that this world of Los Angeles was still teeming with human beings, and thus a big, significant step before the world of The Walking Dead.

And the episode continues in that fine, frightening vein - beyond frightening, because we the audience of course know all too well what\'s going on, and what Nick experienced is all too real.  But no one, including Nick, quite knows that yet, and the arc of this first episode bends slowly towards Nick proving to himself and his mother and her man that what he saw in that drug den - his girl friend turned into a flesh eating zombie - was exactly what truly had happened.

And this is beginning to happen all over Los Angeles and in at least five states.  The police can\'t control zombies who get up and come back at them after being riddled by bullets.   Hospitals can\'t treat an illness which leaves the deceased all to read to actively spread the disease further and further. We\'ve seen the ultimate result of this in The Walking Dead, and that knowledge makes this prequel even more blood curdling.

Indeed, what we know invests every encounter with the potential for unimaginable danger - or, peril that we can indeed not only imagine but have seen on The Walking Dead.  A school administrator is hunched over his desk, non-responsive.  Has he already turned?  No, in this case he\'s just listening to some audio.   But it may happen next time we see him, and may have already happened to some poor soul who walked by one of our central characters in the hall.

And the ending leaves provocative questions, too.  Were Nick\'s mother Madison and Travis bitten in their encounter with the newly-minted zombie?  In The Walking Dead, our characters know to look for that.  In Fear the Walking Dead, no one yet knows what to look for, which means anything can happen.

Labels: Fear the Walking Dead, television, The Walking Dead

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Paul Levinson, PhD, is Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City.  His 8 nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003),  Cellphone (2004), and New New Media (2009, 2nd edition 2012), have been the subject of major articles in the New York Times, Wired, the Christian Science Monitor, and have been translated into 12 languages. His science fiction novels include The Silk Code (1999, ebook 2012), Borrowed Tides (2001), TheConsciousness Plague (2002, 2013), The Pixel Eye (2003), The Plot To SaveSocrates (2006, ebook 2012), and Unburning Alexandria (2013).  His short stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, and Sturgeon Awards.  Paul Levinson appears on "The O'Reilly Factor" (Fox News), "The CBS Evening News,"  “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” (PBS),  “Nightline” (ABC), NPR, and numerous national and international TV and radio programs. His 1972 album, Twice Upon a Rhyme, was re-issued in 2009 (CD) and 2010 (remastered vinyl). He reviews the best of television in his InfiniteRegress.tv blog, and was listed in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Top 10 Academic Twitterers” in 2009.

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Dear Paul, I just dreamed of airships flying between raindrops. I just returned from 2042 CE, where I sold my hardcover copy of The Plot to Save Socrates for seventy million Neo-Euros, because it had your response to this e-mail from way back in 2007 scotch-taped onto the inside of the cover. A Paul Levinson collector paid top Neo-Euro, because of the authentic archaic e-mail printout from you. It turns out that not many of your e-mails from before your tenure as CEO of HBO/Cinemax and terms as United Nations Secretary General will survive that far into the future. So, please respond to this e-mail, to help found my great-grandchildren\'s fortune. My Will will stipulate that they must share with your great grandchidren. Thanks! Tom

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