Warning: Contains spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead season 4 episode 10 ‘Close Your Eyes’.
Only a week after we worried that Morgan was becoming the new lead, Fear the Walking Dead goes ahead and delivers an episode without him in.
‘Close Your Eyes’ sees Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) decide to take refuge from the storm in an abandoned house, only to discover that someone else is already hiding out there and it’s the person she’d least want to spend time with: Charlie (Alexa Nisenson), the girl who killed her brother Nick (Frank Dillane).
And while there aren’t any flying walkers around (although there is an impaled one on a tree), it’s a gripping showcase for Debnam-Carey and further proof that she should become Fear‘s main focus going forward.
The episode largely centres around Alicia’s struggles to be more like Madison which we saw a glimpse of in the midseason premiere as she tried to save a random stranger. Here though, it’s an inner battle between what ‘old’ Alicia would do and what the ‘new’ Alicia should do when it comes to Charlie.
As she makes abundantly clear during a powerhouse monologue, Alicia wants to kill Charlie to avenge Nick and doesn’t trust herself not to, even though she knows that killing Charlie will tarnish the memory of her mum.
“I’m trying to be like my mum. I’m trying to believe what she believed, do what she did, because that’s all I have left of her, that’s the only thing that keeps her alive. If I kill you… I won’t let you take that from me again,” she outlines, ending with a cutting remark that Charlie’s murder of Nick has made her a “waste of a person”.
As Alicia comes to realise though, Charlie doesn’t want to live and had planned to kill herself as she’s scared of becoming a walker like her parents did. It all comes to a head during a tense sequence when the duo are stranded in the flooding basement. Charlie wants Alicia to kill her – “we’re not going to make it, you know that, so please just do it” – and it looks like Alicia might just kill her, trying to find her anger at Charlie by remembering Nick.
However, there is no ‘The Grove’ moment as Alicia finds herself unable to kill Charlie and the two are inadvertently saved by the impaled tree walker falling on the locked basement exit. It’s here where the episode stumbles somewhat. Sentimentality takes over as Alicia decides to bury the walkers she killed in the house, leaving behind a jar of pictures that Charlie saved “for the people who could come back“.
We’re not saying that we don’t understand Alicia’s change of heart as it’s all to do with her trying to be the person her mum became. The issue is that it feels like it comes too suddenly after she’s seen coldly clearing out the house in the opening sequence.
What’s more, all hope that Alicia has discovered goes just as quickly as she found it when they get back to the mansion and the school bus where they last saw the rest of the group. Both areas are abandoned and destroyed by the storm, leading Alicia to declare: “They’re gone. Charlie, things don’t get better and they’re not going to. They’re only going to get worse.”
It’s fortunate that Debnam-Carey is an accomplished enough performer to make the sudden shifts work. Like with season three’s standout outing ‘This Land Is Your Land’, it’s clear that when the focus is on Alicia, the show soars, so it’s a shame that the next episode likely won’t feature her.
The showrunners have said that the second half of season four will feature more episodes like ‘Close Your Eyes’ focusing on fewer characters. That’s fine by us if they can keep the quality up, but they only need to look at The Walking Dead to realise how it can go wrong if the character focus comes at the expense of forward momentum and plot.
Unlike the Madison mystery in the first half of season four, we know why Alicia and Charlie found these places abandoned so the cliffhanger isn’t as arresting.
At the end of the midseason premiere, Al and June were investigating why walkers were getting in the river, John and Strand were looking for Charlie and Luciana was chasing after Charlie after finding her at the mansion. As for Morgan, Alicia reveals that she just left him “alone in the storm, walked away from him” so he’s somewhere out there too.
While we’re not ruling out a death, the hope is that the next episode won’t just be a filler episode that catches us up on what they did during the storm. If that is the case though, at least there might be some flying walkers to keep us entertained.
Fear the Walking Dead airs on AMC in the US and on AMC on BT TV in the UK.
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