by Rich Cross
Attention switches to the character of June in Blue Jay, whose own off-screen experiences during the season’s seven-year time jump are revealed to have been even bleaker than Madison’s. While Madison endured the punishment of solitary confinement in a PADRE lock-up, June had freed herself from the clutches of the cult to live life deep in the swamp as a lone (and psychologically-damaged) avenger.
The opening sequences of Blue Jay are far and away the most effective, as June deploys her sniper skills to target PADRE boat patrols. After subduing the henchmen with tranquiliser darts, she follows a grim symbolic ritual intended to neutralise the threat they pose by surgically removing their trigger fingers. It’s a gruesome image made more impactful by the sight of the jar of severed digits she keeps as a memento in her otherwise spartan cabin. However, June’s isolation and one-woman anti-PADRE campaign are soon under threat. A desperate father, who has discovered the whereabouts of her shelter, pleads with June to help him find his kidnapped daughter Hannah. June not only refuses but packs up and abandons her now-compromised base of operations.
When she attacks the next speeding PADRE craft, she is shocked to discover the identity of its occupants: former compatriots Dwight and Sherry and, hidden beneath a tarpaulin, a young boy in urgent need of life-saving treatment for appendicitis. Given no choice but to help, June guides the group to a set of abandoned train carriages. Amidst the cobweb-covered hospital equipment and macabre undead body parts, she prepares to carry out the urgent surgery. But as the sounds of gunfire in this moribund medical facility attract attention (from both the living and the dead) June’s predicament worsens.
As with last week’s season opener, Blue Jay sets out to back-fill the unseen life story its protagonists experienced during the time leap. Yet the number of Fear fans that would put Sherry and Dwight at the top of their ‘most compelling character combo’ list must be pretty small. And their story is just not that exciting. The pair, who had become parents, have hunkered down at PADRE for seven years and kept their familial relationships secret. Now reunited and at liberty once more, the trio are in acute need of June’s help – thanks to an unfortunate puncture in their inflatable raft.
June’s own traumatic tale of conscription, revulsion and resignation has a great deal more substance. Carried by Jenna Elfman’s intensely committed performance, it’s a grim tale that reverberates through all those around her as the true and repulsive purpose of the medical train is exposed.
Other elements of the episode are less successful. The action sequences, mostly aboard the train, are marred by perfunctory staging. There’s a by-the-numbers clear out of the undead and a routine roof collapse. But what should be a tense and claustrophobic scene of entrapment in a cadaver-crammed carriage is so poorly rendered that it’s devoid of tension.
It’s also a problem that one of the key moments of emotional distress and personal sacrifice is handed to a guest character who’s only just been introduced. The resolution of their brief story arc is sad, but because it’s predictable and the audience has no connection with them, it feels unearned. The other heart-rending event in the episode does have more impact, but only because the motivation for the misery it inflicts is so absurdly counter-intuitive.
By the episode’s end, enforcer Shrike’s insistence that June restart a grotesque series of experiments on live subjects has reaffirmed PADRE’s moral nihilism. A last-minute catch-up on the plight of Morgan and Madison introduces a brief chink of light, as does the rumour that an anti-PADRE army may soon be forming. But for now, the tone of Fear is as dark as the execution is awkward.
New episodes of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD – SEASON 8 premiere on Mondays on AMC in the UK
Read our previous reviews of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD below:
