‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Recap: ‘PADRE’

Written by John Edward Betancourt

Caution: This article contains spoilers for Episode 708 of ‘Fear the Walking Dead’.
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There are a great many experiences in this life, that shatter us emotionally and psychologically. Such as the death of a loved one or an outright disaster. Since the loss of someone that matters the world to us, creates a painful void in our heart… one that sends us into a tailspin emotionally, and of course… the fear that is created by way of a disaster, the fear for our safety and our future can also put us in quite the sour place mentally, to the point where we find ourselves transforming into a person, we never thought we would become. But what’s fascinating about life and the universe, is that it features other experiences out there that can break us.
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Take failure for instance. Which is something that modern man normally sees as a healthy challenge, since we firmly believe that it should in fact, be a great motivator for success since we can learn from it and grow. But in reality, when we put all of our eggs into a particular basket and firmly believe that one goal is the only way to succeed in life, and fail at achieving it… the end result can be disastrous and can leave us in an equally emotionally broken state and really, the power of failure and how it can transform us into a rattled and broken individual is of note today, simply because it served as the core exploration of the season seven midseason finale of Fear the Walking Dead, and ‘PADRE’ brought about this examination by having us spend a lot of quality time with a character that believed they failed miserably in their goals.

For when we catch up with Alicia here, she’s broken emotionally and mentally for reasons she won’t reveal to Morgan, and she is so desperate to find a win and find the mysterious PADRE, which she came to learn is an actual place designed to rebuild humanity in the event of a major disaster… that she’s going to extreme lengths to find it. In fact, she’s gotten her hands on a walker that was once the senator that Will made mention of in the season premiere, and since he knew of the location of PADRE, this seemed like a logical test to see if by chance… the dead retained their memories after all and could lead everyone to safety. Which was a plan that caught Morgan off guard, but he went along with it regardless, since he trusted Alicia and she rarely offered up poor ideas.

But alas, accomplishing such a plan was no easy task. For Strand and his merry band of rangers were hunting for Morgan to exact a little cowboy revenge and justice upon Mister Jones for his attempt on Strand’s life and well… that brought about a messy and impromptu reunion. One that saw Strand emotionally wounded over the fact that Alicia wanted nothing to do with him and it also led to an apparent bite for Alicia and utter failure in finding PADRE, since the good senator only led them right back to Strand’s Dark Tower and well… that’s really when this exploration into how failure can transform us got underway and in order to provide us with a complete picture of that, we needed to venture to the past. Moments after Alicia found herself locked behind a door by Teddy.

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For following her imprisonment, she met Will, and of course Teddy’s followers who in turn became the monsters roaming the countryside today. And her time with Will allowed for us to quickly understand that Alicia was desperate to get back to her friends, to save them from Teddy and to save the rest of America from a nuclear nightmare and she was so desperate to make that happen and so eager to not fail… that she first let those fears put her in a compromised situation. Wherein an attempt to use the dead senator to help her and Will, find an escape via the sewer tunnels, ended in disaster. For the nukes hit while she and Will and the dead were in the tunnel and that allowed for the senator to take a hunk out of her arm. Forcing her to slice off her own flesh in a desperate gambit to avoid infection and when she came to from the pain… she received awful news.
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In that, Strand failed the group and in turn the group failed to stop Teddy and well… coming to realize that she was unable to play the hero or save any lives, combined with the reality that she might die of a bite long term… since she was still quite sick and fighting something ominous… outright broke her. To the point where she fashioned a weapon out of her own bones to try and retain some semblance of wholeness and where she actually trusted the dead to save the living. But while those surprises should have been enough to hammer home how broken she was in failure; the story took her shattered psyche one step further by having her declare war upon Strand and inform him she was taking his Tower. Not just because she failed, but because Strand failed to uphold his end of the deal of being better, as evidenced by the fact that he killed Will, a truth that Alicia was able to uncover when she found his body at the compound.

Which means that in many ways… this season’s underlying theme has been the power of failure and how it can transform us. After all, Victor Strand and his need to be admired, drove to him to outright fail at heroism. Which in turn broke him and motivated him to lean into his darker tendencies and Morgan is in the same boat as he is. For not stopping the bombs and seeing his friends/extended family suffer in a wasteland without food or proper shelter, broke him as well and also forced him to turn to darker instincts and well… that means that this story can go one of two ways from here. It can either see these characters commit to the darkness within and kill one another in a world where death is eager to claim every last living soul or redemption and unity can return somewhere down the line. 

How exactly the latter happens, is difficult to say. Since everyone is so badly broken right now. But one does have to wonder if last night’s announcement that Kim Dickens is returning to the show later this season… has something to do with that, since Madison Clark did indeed have some wonderful ideas about tomorrow. But while we wait to see how the back half of season seven plays out, we can bask in one fascinating tale. One that offered a heck of a return for Alicia Clark, one filled with high stakes for her future since we don’t know if the bite or some kind of horrific sewer related infection, is to blame for her current condition and this episode also deserves credit for putting our characters at their lowest. Since that’s a brave move in a story that has been about hope more often than not and well, now that this harrowing leg of the journey has reached its end, all we can do now is wait patiently for April 17, 2022… when Fear the Walking Dead returns to show us what comes next for these broken survivors. Until next time.

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