Fear the Walking Dead: Season 3 (Blu-ray) – Series Review
We have been following the Clark and Salazar families from when the zombie apocalypse started. Together with Victor Strand, both families, or at least what was left of them, made it to Mexico, hoping to find a safe haven in said country. Nonetheless, it was clear that things weren’t better across the border, and at the end of the second season Nick left his mother and sister’s side, but eventually all of them ended up at the border again, to be reunited during the first episode of this season. Sadly, it seems they won’t have the time to celebrate finding each other again as they find themselves in a rather gruesome situation.
When Madison (Kim Dickens), Travis (Cliff Curtis) and Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) are captured at the Mexican border they have no clue what is going on, as they are split up. Travis is put separately with other male ‘prisoners’, and he sees Nick (Frank Dillane) and Luciana (Danay Garcia) are both captured as well, with Luciana heavily wounded. Madison and Alicia receive much better treatment and are placed separately and are offered refreshments and so on. Sadly they don’t know that Troy (Daniel Sharman) is actually experimenting on the other people, by killing them and testing how long it takes for them to turn into the living dead. He calls it a valuable research, but eventually he simply is a stone cold killer. As expected, the family eventually does manage to escape, but they will have to work together with Troy’s family to reach a safe location, and on the way to said location a lot goes wrong, with casualties along the way, be it characters we hardly know but also one of the main characters.
It’s hard not to spoil too much in this season, but it’s all about finding a proper place to live, in this scenario the ranch of the Otto family, of which Troy is a part, but they are also under siege by ‘the Nation’, which are the indigenous people who originally owned the lands now in the possession of the Otto family. Not that far away you’ll see how Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades) survived the catastrophic fire of the previous season and is looking to find a new purpose in life, all while finding evidence of his daughter still being alive. He eventually ends up putting his military skills to work for an evil man who controls the distribution of water in a big part of Mexico.
The pacing still feels a lot different than the normal Walking Dead series, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as all the events of this series unfold at the beginning of the so-called apocalypse, rather than when it’s already underway for quite some time. While the main series often follows specific characters around for the duration of one episode, Fear the Walking Dead tends to follow many different characters on different locations throughout the course of one episode. The latter allows you to track the progress of everyone, not having to wait for an entire episode, or more, to hear something about a specific character again. Once again, both formats have their charms, and sometimes Fear the Walking Dead does follow the ‘original’ formula, but in the end this series is slowly becoming its own thing, which is certainly nice. Overall this season handles one main topic, namely finding peace and serenity, or at least some stability, in the ever decaying world filled with the undead.
When looking at the main characters, not much has changed cast wise, as it’s still about the Clark family, the Salazars and Victor Strand, the latter being played by Colman Domingo. These characters, and their respective actors are pretty much the frame around which the series is built. Nonetheless, this season has a lot of new characters, of who we aren’t certain they will stick around for a long time, but all their roles are performed excellently and qualitatively speaking they equal the characters in the main Walking Dead series.
Even though the extras are included on a separate disc on the Blu-ray edition of the third season, they are not really all that much. You’ll get about an hour’s worth of extra content, taking a closer look at what happened in this season, which is certainly fun to wade through. Other than that, there are two featurettes, both spanning two or three minutes, in a trailer-like form of content you’ve already seen, feeling a bit useless to be included in the extras section. Nonetheless, the first hour of extra content is still fun to watch, but the last two special features can easily be ignored.
Conclusion
Fear the Walking Dead: Season 3 might not be the fasted moving season, and honestly doesn’t have all that much to do with actual zombies, it’s all about finding a place in a world that’s rapidly deteriorating and turning into a dog-eat-dog Earth. Nonetheless, if you liked the first two seasons, you’ll love following the Clark family around and some of the other characters, while saying goodbye to some and getting to know others in a typical Walking Dead format. Overall this series still has a lot up its sleeve in terms of story progression, but we hope the spin-off doesn’t get dragged out too much.
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