Summary
“Six Hours” is an impressively stupid and frustrating hour of television.
This recap of Fear the Walking Dead season 7, episode 2, “Six Hours”, contains spoilers.
The seventh season premiere of Fear the Walking Dead was divisive, but at least it felt like it was trying to do something meaningful with a long-established character. It felt, for better and worse, like the start of something new, or at least the start of something old moving in a new direction. “Six Hours” feels like a writer’s exercise designed to make an audience despise two characters as much as humanly possible. It’s deeply, irredeemably bad, in much the same way as the show used to be at its very worst. If our first two hours in this new season are anything to go by, then the show only pissing off half of its remaining audience seems like a best-case scenario.
Fear the Walking Dead season 7, episode 2 recap
While Victor Strand has been busy building an isolated, thriving community, Morgan and Grace have been busy slowly starving to death along with baby Mo, hiding out in the nuclear submarine. Mo won’t stop crying, so Grace is steadily losing the will to live, and the way this manifests is in a series of incredibly bone-headed decisions that made me actively wish for her death, so at least we’re on the same page in that regard. But Grace’s problems essentially boil down to the fact that Mo isn’t Athena, her biological child who was stillborn. The episode that dealt with that, you’ll recall, was one of the best in the show’s history. This one… is not. Grace, who pays no mind to the fact that Morgan has lost a child of his own and is in the exact same situation with Mo as she is, spends the entirety of “Six Hours” trying to get everyone killed because she’s sulking.
Look, there’s no horror quite like a baby that won’t stop crying. But it’s almost impossible to even see Grace’s point of view here. If she had been presented as having explicitly lost it, that’s one thing. But by the end of the episode, thanks to a series of contrivances, she has seemingly made peace with the whole thing, meaning that it was all just a worthless way of imperiling these three characters for the sake of some cheap drama.
It’s difficult to overstate how annoying all this is. Morgan somehow builds a radiation-proof car with clean air, enough gas to get them out of the blast radius, and a tape deck. They pop a mixtape into that deck and set off on their road trip, and almost immediately Grace doesn’t like what starts playing, so she frantically attacks the tape deck and starts screaming and they crash. It’s blisteringly dumb. And speaking of blistering, the two crash right on the doorstep of a couple who have been driven mad by the loss of their own child, are looking for a replacement, and whose faces are messily peeling off behind swathes of bandages.
So, if you can accept the magic car and the sheer coincidence of running into these two people with a baby in tow, “Six Hours” challenges you further by breaking the established rules of the universe constantly. Grace removes her mask outside. She warns Morgan that the couple are highly radioactive, and they shouldn’t go near them, and they spend most of the episode wrestling with them anyway. Neither seems to have any adverse reactions to this. It’s pure filler.
What’s frustrating is that, in a different show, this might have been an impressively creepy subplot. The woman’s nose-less face is suitably horrifying. The late reveal that the father smothered their own baby out of mercy, which, along with the radiation, has driven both of them mad, is creepy – the fact they still carry the baby around in the holdall even more so. But it’s impossible to take any of it seriously since it’s occurring in the midst of such rampant stupidity, and torpid conversations about Morgan and Grace’s relationship, of all things, like that matters at this moment.
This whole setup is also used to introduce the brother of the bounty hunter Morgan killed last season, who pursues them very briefly and is easily, albeit temporarily, thwarted. He carries his brother’s head around in the box that Morgan left it in, and he has somehow managed to track Morgan on his name alone through a Texan nuclear wasteland despite Morgan barely having left a hidden submarine since the event? Okay, if you say so.
This would obviously be far too much nonsense for any reasonable show, and yet the episode isn’t even finished here! When Morgan and Grace get back to the submarine, they find Strand’s right-hand man Howard waiting for them with a bunch of goons, who have raided the place and want to take Grace and Mo back to Strand’s tower, though Morgan isn’t welcome. Morgan thinks it’s a good idea since he’s willing to do whatever for the sake of the kid, but now Grace has decided she wants to stay and make things work together. What was the point of everything earlier then?
Luckily, the two of them find a whole bunch of tinned supplies, including powdered milk, under the sub’s floor when Mo starts crawling and accidentally uncovered it. So, they can stay in the submarine for months. I hope they do, and none of it is filmed. It’d be the best thing for everyone.
You can stream Fear the Walking Dead season 7, episode 2, “Six Hours”, on AMC.
