There Are Spoilers In Our Fear The Walking Dead: Another Day In The Diamond Review – Episode Discussion
So the second episode of the fourth season for Fear The Walking Dead just aired and this one is almost as big an episode as last week’s premiere because while last week’s premiere focused on mainly just Morgan coming into the show, this week sees our focus turns back on the main cast from Fear The Walking Dead that we’ve all come to know and love.
It’s been some time since we’ve seen what they’re all up to, but at the end of last week’s episode we saw that our core group seemed to be in some sort of trouble. All we had to go on was that whatever happened to them was bad and that there were “bad people here” but we didn’t really know what. This episode sees time go back a little to before the encounter of our core characters, with Morgan.
When we first see Alicia, Madison, Nick and Victor. Everything seems pretty good for the group, they’re all living together at a baseball stadium and have settled down in a small community. But we are however, introduced to a threat early on for their group. There’s a little girl who we see in this episode who mostly chats with Madison and also quite a bit with Nick. She’s escaped from some bad people and let’s them know where her group was in the past before they were all dead and she escaped.
Madison goes to the young girl’s old camp to investigate with Victor, Alicia and some others. We are shown a town where there’s nothing really there, except for one survivor and a couple of the dead eventually turn up. I found the scene itself, with the characters searching the town to be quite tense. When Victor mentioned that it was missing even the dead, things started to look suspicious and the tension increased. I enjoyed the mystery of what could possibly be in this town. The location was also quite good and all the old buildings and ruins looked great on screen this week. As a viewer I felt that I didn’t really know what was to come from this town and the survivor they found seemed very defensive and she was later brought in to live with Madison and her people. What happened to that place I wondered? What’s the story of the survivor?
As the episode goes on, we see that Nick looks to be not his usual self. At the end of Season 3 we saw him as the central character in the finale and he was the character that looked to be pretty much ready to sacrifice his life on that damn.Nick blew it up with everyone on it in an attempt to save everyone from the bad guys. This is the cliffhanger we were left with, did they all survive that? It looks like they all did survive the damn explosion (except the bad guys), but the aftermath of that explosion is still something that our characters are dealing with. As we see in this episode, Nick is still not past the explosion, to an extent that he can’t even leave his settlement in a car to investigate the music. I’m not sure how long they’ve been living in that baseball stadium, but Nick has been quite quiet there and is mainly concerned with farming and doesn’t go out. This is a big change for the character and I’m interested to see how he develops as this season continues.
The final big thing about this episode was the reveal of what looks to be this season’s main villain. I didn’t really catch his name, other than his group being known as “The Vultures”, but a quick look at IMDB has what I think is this season’s villain played by Don Daro and he’s listed there with the character name “Vulture”, but that may change as we get to know him more. With this week’s tense tone to the whole episode, when the Vultures first appeared I felt a little nervous for our group of characters. We’ve never really seen them settle down for a long time in town before and the failure of Nick to investigate the sound due to his personal issues led to the group getting caught off guard when the Vultures approached.
The Vultures themselves didn’t do all that much to our group at first, they seemed to just camp outside and wait. For what they’re waiting to see I don’t know, but like actual Vultures they’re waiting for something to happen to Madison’s group and they’ll likely feed on the spoils of whatever happens there. The big reveal from the Vulture leader was that the little girl was a spy and the whole time has been sending them info about Madison’s group. It’s a big deal because clearly they trusted the wrong person, although who would doubt a kid in that environment though?
With the episode ending the way it did and a new threat for Madison’s group revealed, I’m very interested to see what’s to come in Fear The Walking Dead season 4. There’s still a bit of a timeline gap between when Madison and her people meet up with Morgan’s group. How Madison is not with the rest of the baseball stadium people is a bit of a mystery. Are they all dead? Have the vultures attacked and it’s only Madison and our main characters alive? I loved this episode and the amount of tense moments that were in it, it was also quite mysterious which made things more tense to watch and the reveal of the main villain was well done. I’m curious about this new Vulture group and what they’re up to, but the mystery of what happens to Madison’s group after this initial confrontation is even more appealing.
Fear The Walking Dead airs every Monday on Showcase on Foxtel at 1:30pm and 7:30pm. Weekly reviews and episode discussions on Resident Entertainment.