‘Fear the Walking Dead’ episode 3 review: The Army, and the sad saga of Susan

The first season of “Fear the Walking Dead” is an exploration into chaos, and on Sunday night’s new episode “The Dog,” what we saw was a mixture of humanity and inhumanity. The rise of the zombie apocalypse is going to test who these people are, and we certainly saw some of that.

For one, who would’ve figured that Travis would still be trying to be such a pacifist? While he did eventually make it home to Madison and the family after being trapped with both his ex and his son, it was not before getting a real sense of the scope of what they are dealing with. The apocalypse hit home more when they saw that their neighbor Susan was infected, and Travis’ demand that he and Madison not kill her is a testament to how he remains hopeful that there could be a cure. He is an idealist; meanwhile, Madison is more of a realism.

Just when we started to see the now-extended family (coupled with the shop owner from last week and his family) preparing to finally leave to a more secure place, Madison felt the need to return, realizing that Patrick was going to be in danger seeing his wife. She went back, and as a result of that got a close-up look at what the Army is doing now in order to protect the city. It’s brutal, but at the moment they may understandably think that there is no other choice.

While this episode overall remained somewhat slow in terms of its pace, we feel like seeing characters close to the family dying and become infected is critical to getting where we need to be by the end of the first season. Specifically, we like to think that we’ll be closer to where Rick Grimes’ world was when he woke up. Episode Grade: B.

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