Good Riddance: Fear the Walking Dead and The Strain

Fear the Walking Dead shuffled to the end of its six episode first season at the beginning of this month and the rotten stink has been lingering ever since. What makes Fear’s lackluster conclusion so dismaying is the speed of its decomposition from the heights at which it began. The first episodes were some of the best that the whole Walking franchise has produced. Stirred from his heroin-induced stupor in an abandoned church, Nick (Frank Dillane) follows the bloody bread crumbs to his zombified girlfriend, impaled in the heart and gnawing at the homeless man who unwittingly bunked up in the same building as patient zero. The result is Nick’s desperate attempt to distinguish the real from imaginary (we know better) and to convince others exactly what went down. With the apocalypse firmly rooted with the disenfranchised, the drug addicts and the homeless, the danger…