‘Fear the Walking Dead’: Morgan’s in the Middle of a Meltdown in ‘The Little Prince’ (RECAP)
Spoiler Alert
[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Fear The Walking Dead Season 5, Episode 6, “The Little Prince”]
After most of Morgan’s meltdowns have been internal, putting him at the center of an external one feels somewhat ironic… if equally deadly.
Now that we’ve had an episode about helicopters, the narrative has gone back to focusing on planes on Fear The Walking Dead. Morgan (Lennie James) and his group are still trying to fix their plane and get back to their factory. Trouble with that is, some of the parts they need are far away, with Strand.
To make matters worse, the nuclear power plant is still melting down… and it’s going to make life very difficult (and short) for the survivors if they can’t take to the skies.
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Travel Troubles
In a rousing speech, Morgan and crew declare to the group of kids—who apparently have been staying at the truck stop—that they’re going to fix the plane. Of course, that’s easier said than done. They don’t have reduction gear, and when they test the propeller, it breaks.
All of their air travel issues pale in comparison to the threat Grace radios to tell them about: if they don’t give her their generator, the nuclear plant will melt down. Again. As such, they’re forced to give up the generator, but Grace says it’ll only buy them time. They need to get out of there, and quick.
Morgan goes with Grace to install the new generator. Before they get to the plant, she tells him there’s another suit in the back of her truck, but as it turns out, she just needed him out of the vehicle. There’s no extra suit, and Morgan’s not going with her on the mission. “You’re a kind, thoughtful man who’s trying to earn back his mistakes,” she says to Morgan before she leaves. “I’m doing the same thing.”
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Radiation Woes
The kids want to leave after hearing Morgan left with someone from the nuclear plant. Alicia at least wants to know why, and Annie tells her about how her family’s camp got overrun by walkers from the power plant. In the aftermath, after going back to the camp and finding their parents deathly ill, Annie became the group’s leader.
She’s still trying to look out for everyone, but Alicia asks her if she’s really surrounding herself with the dead to keep people safe, or if she’s doing it because it’s easier than surrounding herself with the living. Nonetheless, Alicia gives the kid car keys and says it’s up to her to decide if she wants to use them.
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More Than I Ever Had
Meanwhile, Dwight and John keep looking for Sherry. They talk a little about their pasts, and Dwight comments that John’s lucky he’s able to keep his sunny outlook. “This,” John says of the apocalypse, “gave me more than I ever had.”
They go to an old diner and find a faded note. John manages to make it readable, and it is, indeed, from Sherry. It says that there’s a storm coming, so she’s switching to traveling on country roads. They follow her trail to a cabin, and John, while searching a car, finds another note… in which Sherry says she’s not going to leave Dwight more clues, because she doesn’t want him to die trying to find her.
Dwight doesn’t find his wife in the cabin, but he finds food, and, ecstatic, he goes outside to John and tells him he feels closer than ever to her. When he asks whether his companion found anything, John, not wanting to squelch his friend’s hope, lies and says it was empty.
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Beer to the Rescue
Strand and the rest of his group are trying to find reduction gear, but it all seems hopeless—they have no means of getting their materials to Morgan to fix their plane. Fortunately, Charlie has a lifesaving realization that brings them, and the materials to fix the plane, in range of their friends… in a beer-bottle-shaped hot air balloon. Unfortunately, the kids aren’t able to see it, because they’ve already left, so Alicia makes it her mission to go find them.
Strand and Charlie crash-land in the high radiation area, so while Alicia arrives outside the kids’ new camp, Morgan leaves to find his friends and warns them of the danger. As Strand and Charlie get out of the balloon, they’re being surrounded by walkers… irradiated walkers.
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Other Observations:
- Going from “The End of Everything” to this gave me a headache. Was Al’s bottle episode absolutely perfect? No. Was it leaps and bounds better than this? Yes. As attached as I am to some of these characters, I grow tired of the stiff dialogue (how many times can the writers use the word “help” in a single episode?), the constant, too-convenient use of radios and the deus ex machina trope being used every two episodes to get characters out of impossible situations. I wish the writing on this show was better.
- I know both TWD-franchise shows tend to use kids as the “pure, untainted, innocent moral compass” of whichever group they’re in (or mentally unstable killers, like Jocelyn’s kids and Lizzie Samuels), but the whole “seeing with my heart” phrase was irksome. It might have worked on Once Upon a Time, but it was terribly out of place in a show about the apocalypse.
- The Sherry thing feels like an insult to fans who wanted to see Dwight’s story go somewhere interesting after he left TWD. Granted, John hasn’t told him about the note, so it still could. But I don’t buy that Sherry would’ve told her husband to stop searching for her because she had to kill someone. They were part of the Saviors? They’d seen plenty of death? Sherry had probably killed people before?! At least this’ll provide some conflict for John Dorie, considering how it’ll mess with his moral compass.
- Jimbo and his beer have had more plot relevance and acknowledgement in the story lately than Nick Clark, who was an integral part of this show for three seasons. Madison has continued to have some impact, but I keep waiting for someone to bring up Nick in relation to these kids—for Alicia to say that Nick would’ve known how to convince them, or for Luciana to mention him. No one does.
Fear the Walking Dead, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC
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