Caution: There Are Spoilers In Our Fear The Walking Dead 100 Review
So the fourth episode of the third season for Fear The Walking Dead just aired. This one is one of the key episodes for this season as it is all based around the telling of the story for how Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades) comes back into the show. Daniel is a character that was in the show way back in season 1, but thought to be dead for some time, but just somehow wasn’t and is back now.
I for one wasn’t the biggest fan of Daniel Salazar in the first season, I felt that while his character was a bit rougher than the rest at first and I liked that, he didn’t seem to really merge well with the group at the time. He really was a bit undeveloped and then was all of a sudden gone. I didn’t mind really. Now that he was back, I wasn’t so sure what the writers were going to do with him.
Thankfully, this episode is actually entirely devoted to the character. Other main cast members are no where to be seen at all and are completely absent, except for Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) who encountered Daniel in the last episode while being in prison, put there by Dante (Jason Manuel Olazabal).
By paying attention to the character, they were able to in my view tell the story of Daniel Salazar properly and with impact. We see that his journey was a brutal one. Early in the episode we see him travel around broken due to the events of the fire and losing his loved ones and also injured, with his leg in no good condition to walk. Thankfully he’s rescued by a bunch of people and given some water.
The water he was given and the people who saved him however, were relying on the same supply which Dante supplied. Strangely they’re smuggling it. Daniel gets a job working for Dante later on in the episode and ends up having to go after the very people who saved him. thus putting his character in a difficult position. It’s brutal and it’s horrible. Daniel must make the tough choice of saving the people who saved him from Dante, or letting them literally fall.
I feel that the episode went to a great extent to detail the bad things Daniel has done, then we see him feeling guilty about it all. But by the end, it appears his character has achieved some type of redemption by saving the people who originally saved him in the beginning. I think what’s interesting out of this as well is that we may have a bunch of new characters and survivors to pay attention to now.
I see a lot of potential with this new group and I”m looking forward to see how things turn out next week. I am not sure where they might take the show from here. Is Daniel going to go after Ofelia (Mercedes Masohn) now that he’s free?
Fear The Walking Dead season 3 airs Mondays @ 7.30pm AEST on FX (express from US)
