S06.E12: In Dreams

[raven]

Airdate 2021.05.09

 

Quote

Grace wakes up with her memory blurred and sees what her world's become years later.

 

[livra59]

I was just wondering why if everyone has the disease why didn't Grace's baby turn when it was still borned

[Lamima]

A whole episode on a dream that wasn't even true. Dumb!

[cdnalor]

When I saw Morgan with the white hair and beard, I imagined him singing "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" surrounded by animated birds.

  Except for the plot point about Riley getting the key, this felt like a wasted episode.  Oh, and Morgan wasn't the father of Grace's baby?  I guess I must've forgotten that detail.

Also, a car blew up in Grace's face?  When did that happen?  With last weeks episode of our heroes suddenly showing up in the underground colony, and Riley's bunch instantly finding Morgan (how?) this week, it feels like the show is trying to rush the story to a conclusion.  But they have time to waste on dream sequences, apparently.

Edited May 10, 2021 by cdnalor
Added some gripes.

[laschifosavita]

I spent most of the episode trying to figure out what this episode reminded me of, and I think it is Unedited Footage of a Bear, except that is definitely a parody of medication commercials and is scary. I am not sure if this was supposed to be funny or not.

[wintrygal]

When I saw Morgan with all that white hair, I thought, 'oh, they found a cure for baldness!' in the middle of the world going to shit, he is bald isn't he?  I know it's a dream but still...

I don't remember knowing that Morgan wasn't the baby's father either.

I found this whole episode confusing, and I had to keep turning the volume up to hear Grace talking, then a commercial would come on and scare the crap out of me, as they're always so loud. 

 

[MrPissyPuppy]

6 hours ago, wintrygal said:

I don't remember knowing that Morgan wasn't the baby's father either.

They brought it up last season when they figured out that she was sick as the result of being pregnant rather than having radiation sickness.  I think she had her baby daddy's picture on her fridge or something like that. 

[nodorothyparker]

The show has never implied that Morgan and Grace have done more than make goo goo eyes at each other over a mall carousel while simultaneously letting Morgan clearly plan any future around her. She's the same character we were introduced to who was convinced she was dying of radiation poisoning only to find out, oops, never mind, I'm pregnant by a guy who I guess died during the nuclear plant meltdown a full season ago.

It sucks but it's not really surprising in a world with very little medical care. I'm mostly just glad the show resisted the urge to go Dawn of the Dead and force Morgan to put down a zombie baby. That and that terrible fake beard and wig combo would have been too much. I wish we had any idea at all roughly how big an area all of these people are inhabiting because they seem to have amazing GPS powers over each other with cult guy so easily finding them to grab Morgan's key.

[GustavMahler]

I cannot recall the last time I was actually becoming angry watching an episode of a television show...What a contrived mess of hot garbage! Think about how Morgan was reluctant to hand over the key even though there was a gun pointed at a pregnant woman. He had to be convinced by Grace, not because her and her baby's lives were threatened, but because she visited the wonderful world of zOz and knew all would be allright. I was actually happy to watch commercial breaks.

Edited May 10, 2021 by GustavMahler

[SailorGirl]

So did Morgan have to knife the baby in the head? Because it is dead but the brain isn't spiked . . . newborn zombie? 

Or, because of all the nuclear radiation that Grace was exposed to, is the baby immune to the virus, and will remain a corpse, and if so, does this mean that Charlie Manson-lite's cult will actually save the world by detonating the nuclear sub missle/bomb/whatever? 

Not that it makes a whole lot of sense, but, well. . . it makes about as much sense as anything else they've thrown at us. . . 

And I don't know why I'm so obsessed with knowing whether Morgan had to spike the head of a newborn, but its the question that has stuck with me. I guess maybe its the only thing worth wondering about in this episode?? 

Edited May 10, 2021 by SailorGirl

[Madding crowd]

I didn’t understand this one. I know it was a dream but why wouldn’t Morgan and Dwight recognize Grace even if it was 16 years later? Why does Morgan have a full head of hair? When Grace wakes up she says her dream was Athena’s final moments , but how does that make sense? Athena never lived at all . Dreams don’t have to make sense in real life but they should make sense in a fictional story. And what do the pink flowers mean ? I could have used a Talking Dead after this one.

[DrNowsWeightScale]

I watched last night's episode of "Fear."

That was one bizarre, all- over- the- place episode.

At times, I found it boring, at other times confusing, at other times kind of interesting.

I appreciate that the show tried to switch things up a little bit, but whenever they do try to do so, the execution is not always 100%.

Last night's episode was, at points, veering a little too much into the cheese factory that was Season 5 for my taste 
(i.e., beer shaped hot air balloons 😫, acting like one can get stranded in the state of Texas if one doesn't have a working plane, etc).

Last night's episode, with the magenta colored foliage and the concept of being inside someone's mind reminded me of the 2000 Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D'Onofrio movie "The Cell." 

The IMDB page for The Cell, if you're not familiar.
There are a few scenes in that movie showing characters in surreal, Dali-esque landscapes with trees that have magenta foliage. 🌷

I've not been able to find many examples of the "pink tree" scenes from The Cell on You Tube that I can point to as examples except for this one  
(starting around the 2:03 mark - the scene I am referring to is way after the opening dialogue scene with J Lo talking to the Vince Vaughn character).

Edit: This may be a better You Tube video, showing clips from the Cell of the pink trees, etc:
Jennifer Lopez Magic Fairy from the Movie The Cell - on You Tube

At some point early in the episode, I figured that the teen girl in the red blouse was probably the unborn baby, but once I figured that out, I didn't know how the show was going to play out, if they were going to let the baby live and Grace die, or vice versa.

I was more expecting Grace to die and the baby live. I was a little surprised they let the baby die, rather than Grace.

I don't understand having the Grace character make a big, impassioned speech to Morgan about her baby daughter being the hope for the future as a rationale for Morgan to hand over the key to John Connor from The Terminator if in the end, the baby died.

I guess that means that Morgan handed the key 🔑 over for no reason?

June (at least in the "dream" like sequence) got promoted from nurse to "Dr. Dorie."

I keep tuning in weekly hoping this show will get better, but it's really not improving. The storylines are either weird, don't make a lot of sense, or can be repetitive (as I was explaining in another thread here).

The original TWD show is coming to an end - I wonder when or if AMC will be putting an end to "Fear." I was wanting to tune in weekly to see where they went with the John Dorie character,  but since they off'ed him and never did much with his character (or mis-used the guy, giving  him awful story lines usually), I lost interest.

I don't see how much longer this show can go on.

Daniel and Strand are at least jovial buddies, in the dream-future of Grace's imagination, at least.  🤷‍♀️

Edit. I almost forgot to mention.

I love Roy Orbison, I like the song "In Dreams," but I found its use in this episode (mainly as a soundtrack for Grace giving birth) to be so totally bizarre.

From Entertainment Weekly:

Fear the Walking Dead showrunners explain that devastating twist ending

^One of the showrunners says (in that EW article) they got the idea for the pink trees from the Eternal Sunshine movie, but I still say it screams "The Cell," starring Jennifer Lopez.

Edited May 10, 2021 by DrNowsWeightScale

[livra59]

 If everyone is infected with the disease that turns you when you are killed or die why didn't Grace's baby turn when she was still borned?

[BasilSeal]

8 hours ago, DrNowsWeightScale said:

I don't understand having the Grace character make a big, impassioned speech to Morgan about her baby daughter being the hope for the future as a rationale for Morgan to hand over the key to John Connor from The Terminator if in the end, the baby died.

the death of the child signifies the death of hope, grace is convinced her child will unite the community and lead to a bright future for morgan's colony, but the child is still born so, which is not a good sign for the future of the colony and the latest  band of redshirts that have put their faith in team morgan. Also morgan gave the key to some nukes to a bunch of crazy death cult  followers, so there's that.

2 hours ago, livra59 said:

If everyone is infected with the disease that turns you when you are killed or die why didn't Grace's baby turn when she was still borned?

the dead don't turn instantly after death, though the time it takes dead people to reanimate seems to be somewhat flexible, and is usually dependent on what is needed by the plot, it can take hours, but sometimes only minutes if the plot  calls for a prompt reanimation. Zombies are a impossible anyway so who knows if a still born baby would  become a zombie, one presumes it probably would but maybe the  show runners thought a dead baby was enough of a downer to end the episode on.

[DrNowsWeightScale]

2 hours ago, livra59 said:

 If everyone is infected with the disease that turns you when you are killed or die why didn't Grace's baby turn when she was still borned?

Via Entertainment Weekly:

Fear the Walking Dead showrunners explain that devastating twist ending

Quote

Instead, Grace survived giving birth… but her baby did not, having absorbed the radiation that Grace incurred from the nuclear plant where she worked. 

....[Goldberg speaking]: It was very important to us [the show writers] to honor and be truthful to Grace's experience and what she'd gone through at the power plant and her radiation exposure that we played as part of the story in season 5.

So we wanted to be realistic with the truth of what would happen.

In our research into pregnant women that had been part of radiation exposure and events like Chernobyl, we found that often the radiation did get absorbed by the baby and the baby didn't survive.

....CHAMBLISS: We definitely had those discussions, and we had a lot of discussions about how much we were going to see of the baby. And, for us, we wanted to tell the story.

We obviously didn't want to kind of upset anyone by it, but in the same token, it was kind of what Ian was hinting at.

I think there are so many people who lose pregnancies, who lose children during childbirth, who lose children very early on. And it's such a sensitive issue that it doesn't get talked about.

 

[heisenberg]

9 hours ago, icemiser69 said:

Riley could have just taken the key from Morgan, it was kind of silly just asking for it.  It was even sillier that Riley didn't kill Morgan.  Of course Morgan earlier in the episode has his chance to kill Riley, and like an idiot, he didn't take it.

Same old same, that show is going full circle...  as usual.

[WaltersHair]

This is relatively wrong. The baby doesn't 'absorb' the mother's radiation which I think they may be alluding to so Grace will survive. This myth started after the Chernobyl series. If Grace was shot by many bullets, the baby wouldn't absorb them., but the baby will be hit with a few.

I'm willing to retract if Grace dies later too, because she probably should given the sheer amount and *time of exposure.

eta: this is in reply to the EW story.

Edited May 11, 2021 by WaltersHair

[heisenberg]

1 hour ago, BasilSeal said:

Zombies are a impossible anyway so who knows if a still born baby would  become a zombie, one presumes it probably would but maybe the  show runners thought a dead baby was enough of a downer to end the episode on.

How would he bites with no teeths?😁

[BasilSeal]

14 hours ago, Madding crowd said:

Why does Morgan have a full head of hair?

Lennie James does have hair

Morgan has a shaved head, as one would in the apocalypse, (in the close up scenes of the birth you can see the stubble of hair on his head), perhaps 15 years down the road he's finally run out of razors and morphed into Uncle Remus, i was expecting him to burst into a chorus of Zipedee-doo-dah. Presumably the show runners were  searching for a look for the dream episode and someone decided across between Laura Ashley fuchsia pink and Racist Disney would be the one to go for.

18 hours ago, DrNowsWeightScale said:

Last night's episode was, at points, veering a little too much into the cheese factory that was Season 5 for my taste 
(i.e., beer shaped hot air balloons 😫, acting like one can get stranded in the state of Texas if one doesn't have a working plane, etc).

Overall i like the themes FearTWD deals with, and overall as i've argued before i think Fear is the most coherent of the three shows in terms of the ideas they explore, however, they do love a good plot hole.

In this episode, Morgan kills all of Riley's accomplices but leaves riley alive, because it's not like he's going to come back and have another go is it? Riley however only remembers he has a gun after Morgan has killed all his mates and perforated him with a sharp stick, there are similar inconsistencies every week.

that said, i didn't mind the dream episode, despite my trepidation as dream episodes of a popular show are almost always shit on toast. they telegraphed grace dying but the baby dies instead which was pretty much on brand for TWD, if things had played out as expected then we'd know everything was going to work out ok so what would be the point in watching anyway? As per my last post, Grace's child signified hope for the future, and her death is a metaphor for the threat they still face from the crazy car park cult people, who are hell bent on making it so Grace isn't he only thing in Texas that glows in the dark.

[Bulldog]

If 16 years was supposed to have passed in Grace's dream, why did some people appear to have not aged at all and Morgan appear to be about 30 years older? 

And why would nobody recognize Grace, whom they all knew, and whose appearance has not changed at all since she "died"?

Edited May 12, 2021 by Bulldog

[redpencil]

14 hours ago, Bulldog said:

If 16 years was supposed to have passed in Grace's dream, why did some people appear to have not aged at all and Morgan appear to be about 30 years older? 

And why would nobody recognize Grace, whom they all knew, and whose appearance has not changed at all since she "died"?

The simplest explanation is "It was a dream." Since when do dreams make logical sense in every detail?

[Starchild]

What a waste of an hour. There must have been a less pointless way to ensure the two actual plot movements: the baby's death and Riley getting the key.

Instead, the episode was all about the emotional attachment between a character we've never seen before and a character we barely care about.

Meh.

[TV Anonymous]

This episode may have been the worst episode in the last several seasons. Definitely the worst within the last year.

What is the purpose of this episode, anyway? It was all a dream so it has no relevance whatsoever with the story arc. Every bit of information we see in the dream can be just waived as 'it was just a dream', and therefore does not matter in the story.

[DrNowsWeightScale]

6 hours ago, TV Anonymous said:

This episode may have been the worst episode in the last several seasons. Definitely the worst within the last year.

What is the purpose of this episode, anyway? It was all a dream so it has no relevance whatsoever with the story arc. Every bit of information we see in the dream can be just waived as 'it was just a dream', and therefore does not matter in the story.

To this point, I don't think any episode can ever beat any episode for horribleness that was the train wreck of season five-
- beer bottle shaped hot air balloons and being stranded in the state of Texas due to lack of a working plane
- the Pink Tree / Dream episode was so out there bizarre, but to me it's a step above ridiculous hot air balloons, etc 😆

I'm a bit more forgiving of the Pink Tree episode, and most of it was not featuring the usual, worn out Baddies Vs. our Group of Protagonists we usually get, which to me, is a bit in its favor.
(edit. Of course, there was a little bit of this going on, but it was mainly the teen girl chatting with Grace through out much of the program, only interspersed with the bad guys showing up to fight.)

It did feel like a "filler" episode to a point, though.

Edited May 17, 2021 by DrNowsWeightScale

[BasilSeal]

On 5/17/2021 at 12:59 PM, TV Anonymous said:

This episode may have been the worst episode in the last several seasons. Definitely the worst within the last year.

What is the purpose of this episode, anyway? It was all a dream so it has no relevance whatsoever with the story arc. Every bit of information we see in the dream can be just waived as 'it was just a dream', and therefore does not matter in the story.

Well i did kind of explain above, the death of the child is symbolic as the death of hope. The episode is also a whopping great metaphor for the impending doom of about to be wreaked on them all by discount Charles Manson and the car park cult.

Then there's the child herself, Athena, named after the Greek goddess. Athena is a very important goddess of many things. She is goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, law and justice, strategic warfare, mathematics, strength, strategy, the arts, crafts, and skill, she's usually depicted in art as carrying a spear, you can see where they're going with this. Athena is frequently used as a symbol of civilisation, a recurring theme in TWD is the conflict between those who want to continue or restart civilisation in the apocalypse, and those who want civilization to end, ie the Wolves, The Whisperers and indeed  Fear's very own Armageddon enthusiast, Teddy. there's also the conflicts caused by plain old human nature, where the needs of the individual conflict with the needs of society as a whole, or those who either have different ideas about what the brave new world should look like, or simply want power for themselves.

Overall, the outlook for future civilisation on TWD has been pretty bleak, the settlements set up by the main protagonists repeatedly fail, and the peripheral groups that appear to have succeeded, like the CR, are presented as fascist states.

So part of the purpose of the dream  episode is to show us what a future society could look like without these malign influences. Whether you think they succeeded in doing so is another matter, but that is the purpose of the episode.

18 hours ago, DrNowsWeightScale said:

To this point, I don't think any episode can ever beat any episode for horribleness that was the train wreck of season five-

I disagree that season 5 was a trainwreck, it was imperfect certainly, it suffers from many of the usual TWD failings of sloppy writing and having characters do dumb things to drive the plot etc, but nevertheless, it did explore some interesting ideas of how one would cope with the reality of survival in a world like this one.

All of the characters have done bad things, and they try to achieve redemption by helping others, the writers try to explore how the characters come to terms with the fact that they have survived at the expense of others who have not, and contrast their altruistic approach with the ruthless pragmatism of Virginia. they don't quite hit the mark with it but that doesn't mean it's a total disaster.

Edited May 18, 2021 by BasilSeal

[DrNowsWeightScale]

6 hours ago, BasilSeal said:

All of the characters have done bad things, and they try to achieve redemption by helping others, the writers try to explore how the characters come to terms with the fact that they have survived at the expense of others who have not, and contrast their altruistic approach with the ruthless pragmatism of Virginia. they don't quite hit the mark with it but that doesn't mean it's a total disaster.

I did appreciate that the show had the characters trying to help other people.
It's a nice break from the "dog eat dog" nihilism of these series...

I just cannot get over the pure cheese of things like hot air balloons, or acting like a plane is needed to get around the state of Texas (a state I lived in for years). 😅

The "helping others" was an interesting concept and a welcome respite from the usual non-stop selfishness and killing we otherwise see on this show (and the other WD shows), but IMO, the execution of said plan was really, really lacking. 

[BasilSeal]

On 5/8/2021 at 11:46 AM, livra59 said:

I was just wondering why if everyone has the disease why didn't Grace's baby turn when it was still borned

The time it takes for people to turn after death seems to vary, usually depending on the needs of the plot. in this case it would appear that the baby dies in the womb because, er, reasons, and we don't know how long Grace's labour lasts because it's compressed into a few minutes in the episode, but it could have been hours, so maybe the baby could have turned before the birth, which could well have been, messy. that wasn't what the plot demanded though, so it didn't happen.

Really, the biggest obstacle to the continuation of civilisation in this particular apocalyptic universe isn't the mad cult leaders and psycho bad guys like Negan, it's that no woman in their right mind would get pregnant, given that what could happen if the foetus dies before birth doesn't bear thinking about.

[ctlady]

On 5/12/2021 at 2:21 PM, redpencil said:

The simplest explanation is "It was a dream." Since when do dreams make logical sense in every detail?

Especially the fact that in her dream, Grace is a kick-ass zombie killer where in RL all she's seemed to do is walk around rubbing her pregnant belly and having Morgan place most of his worry on her.  I bet Maggie was cutting down walkers right up until she delivered Little Herschel.  Grace is dead weight to me.  I wish it were that she had died and Athena had lived

I thought Morgan looked like Morgan Freeman!

[FierceCritter]

If the writers were smart, they would have made a point of Athena not turning.

Indicating that the next generation will not automatically be infected, resulting in an end of the virus once the currently infected all die off.

But I suppose if they'd thought of that, they'd save a bombshell like that for the original TWD.