Recently, I have seen a lot of stuff written about Fear the Walking Dead. having lost the thread of The Walking Dead -it was engaging at the beginning, then it got too complicated- I did not pay that much attention, though it seems that this sort of prequel is really making a splash. Take this episode for instance:
[quote]Much has been written about Fear the Walking Dead’s flaws. A companion show to AMC’s hit The Walking Dead, it takes place at the very onset of the zombie apocalypse, but often moves far too slowly.
But there IS one thing FTWD is doing very well: it has one of the most complex, intriguing Latin American characters on prime-time television.
Daniel Salazar, the Salvadoran barber, is played by Panamanian music legend Ruben Blades. And it became clear in the latest episode, “Cobalt,” when he breaks down, that this unusual situation — the attack of flesh-eating monsters — is where television is having the conversation about the legacy of Latin American violence and the generational fractures it has produced among Latinos in the U.S.
…
As Los Angeles falls to the epidemic and zombies start taking to the streets, the army takes over. The neighbors mostly follow instructions and stubbornly cling to hope that civil, democratic society can endure. Salazar has no such notions. He grew up in a Latin America convulsed by violence from head to toe, Tierra del Fuego to Tijuana.
“I’ve seen this before,” he recalls. “People that go out in trucks and never come back.” His fellow survivor, Madison, a schoolteacher and mother, reassures him, “That’s not going to happen here.” He stares at her, pitying her for a few seconds before telling her: “Go home.”
…
Network executives who are pulling their hair out trying to figure out the key to the Latin audience should know that when you deny a people’s pain, you deny the strength it took to endure it. If Spanish-language networks have done one thing well, it’s allowing a space for that hurt to live.
That angst has found an unusual home on Fear the Walking Dead. At one point, Salazar tells Madison an anecdote from his youth in El Salvador: The people in his town had gone missing. His father had inquired about them, and the military told him not to worry — they’d come back. And they did: “I was standing in the river fishing, just a boy, and I found them,” Salazar tells her. “All of them. All at once. All around me. In the water. My father told me not to have hatred in my heart. He said that men do these things not because of evil, they do evil because of fear. And at that moment I realized my father is a fool for believing there’s a difference.”
…
Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead both constantly play with that same idea my dad sort-of consoled me with: that what are even scarier than zombies are the living and what they have to go through to stay alive.
[/quote]
npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2 … storyshare
