Fear the Walking Dead season 3 episode 6 review: Troy the ‘survivor’

Through the past few weeks of Fear the Walking Dead, we’ve become introduced to the world of Broke Jaw Ranch. With that, we’ve learned about their chaotic atmosphere, the leadership in power, or the people who are starting to fight back against that.

Tonight, we saw in the early minutes a major reminder that there was trouble there in the aftermath of Walker, the Native American man who shot down the helicopter in the midst of a longstanding dispute over land. It’s still a little weird to have a man named Walker on a show featuring walkers, right?

One of the things that was clearly happening was that there was a crisis of leadership at the ranch. You could see that Jake was worried about it in his conversation with Alicia; meanwhile, Jeremiah was more afraid than he’s possibly ever been. There are considerations over a possible move to Colorado, one where apparently the elevation could be an asset to escape some of the chaos.

What the danger and the aftermath of Walker’s arrival meant was simple: Everyone running for the hills. The guy’s people murdered several residents at the ranch. Why would they want to stay? Everyone reacted to these departures in different ways. Take, for example, Jeremiah being somewhat stoic. However, Troy started to lose his cool all over the departure of a longtime resident of the town. After a conversation with Madison (she’s certainly rather great at some of these pep-talks, no?), Troy was turned around enough to lead an inspiring speech encouraging people to stick together. Wasn’t that nice! It helped to break up the monotony of one of the slower episode introductions.

Things start to pick up

After we spent a little time with a mother-daughter chat featuring Alicia and Madison, things started to get a little bit crazier. First, it was the presence of an unusual bit of livestock. Then, there was the decision from Jake to go and see Walker on his own. Alicia of course didn’t want him to go on some sort of “suicide mission,” but just like he didn’t listen to his father, he wasn’t all that keen on listening to her, either.

So how did things go from bad to worse? Some of those people who left the ranch were killed (seemingly) by Walker, and their remains were turned into zombies. This gave Madison an opportunity to deliver an effective speech of his own, one where she told everyone just how stupid it’d be to leave.

Then, here’s the other twist: These people weren’t killed by Walker. It was Troy that was behind what happened to these latest series of murders. She still isn’t giving up on him, which is odd because at this point, we’d be RUNNING from the guy at full speed after everything that he’s done to mess things up.

Final Verdict

After last week’s revelations, tonight took a long time to get going. We spent half an hour watching people react to last week, and then Jeremiah and Nick acting buddy-buddy even though he didn’t at first want him to even be there. The twist with Troy was the right sort of unexpected, and it helped to pick things up: It made sense for him to lash out at people who left his home. Yet, it makes a little less sense for Madison to try to see the good in someone so horrible when she has kids to protect. Grade: B-.

Get ready for the midseason finale

It’s coming next week, and it you head over to the link here, you can get some additional news right now in terms of what is coming up there! (Photo: AMC.)