Kim Dickens should be embarrassed by her performance in 'Fear the Walking Dead'

Good Lord, she was terrible! She was Ed-Norton-in-The-Incredible-Hulk bad. Kim Dickens was OK in Gone Girl and House of Cards but she was laughably incompetent at expressing basic emotions in Fear the Walking Dead. I was going to write about that as part of my recaps of The Walking Dead that I’m starting this season but I was so annoyed by that “actress” and that spinoff that this subject needs its own post.

I once read a backhanded review of an actress’ performance that said “She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.” It’s arguable that Dickens’ portrayal of Madison even made it to emotion B. She had a few brief flashes of feeling but mostly kept that same distracted, slightly slackjawed expression on her face through all six episodes. Looking at her face, you couldn’t tell whether she’d just won the lottery or just watched somebody die. The world was starting to burn down and she looked like she was trying to remember if she left the oven on.

Steve and I made a game of trying to figure out what was going on in Madison’s head while she was making the “lights on, nobody home” expression during the chaos of the series:

“Who was that guy in CHiPs? Not Erik Estrada. The other one.”

“Got to clean the gutters this weekend.”

“Do I have enough bouillon cubes to make soup?”

“Who was Harry Truman’s vice president?”

“I like green olives but not black olives.”

“(Kazoo music plays as a monkey rides a unicycle in circles)”

I first noticed the blank expression on Dickens’ face in an early episode when she and her fellow teachers watched the video of the first zombie getting shot by the cops. Everybody else was horrified but she might as well have been watching cat videos. She had the same dimwitted look on her face in the last episode when Travis beat a soldier to a bloody pulp with his bare hands. A normal person would be horrified but Dickens reacted like somebody was just slapping a malfunctioning tube TV too hard. “Stop …” she muttered.

I waited until the end of the series to see if there was a point to Dickens’ acting choices. Maybe she was trying to play somebody really dumb or maybe there was a twist that while her son was hooked on heroin, she was zonked out on elephant tranquilizers and Botox. Maybe she was trying to be subtle, even though, come on, you’re on a zombie spinoff show and nobody’s looking for subtlety. But no: I think she was just phoning it in and doing a terrible job. Compare Madison with somebody like Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones. That character maintains a stoic face to survive but there is so much going on beneath the surface and Sophie Turner does a great job portraying it. We were just watching Joffrey’s wedding and when Joffrey threw down the goblet to taunt Tyrion, Sansa quietly picked it up, expressing dignity and kindness in such an economical way: That’s how you do subtle. There is more than meets the eye to Sansa but there’s less than meets the eye to Madison. But anyway.

Fear the Walking Dead was a missed opportunity. Since I’ve started watching The Walking Dead, I wanted more information on how the epidemic started, how society collapsed and how people tried and failed to save it. The spinoff glossed over so much of it: One episode things were relatively normal and the next episode they were in internment camps. I didn’t need a definitive answer to why people became zombies but I’d at least like some theories. Nobody on the show had any curiosity as to why all that was happening. In real life people would be throwing out ideas and at least having a little discussion. I guess there was no time for that but plenty of time for a scene of teenagers destroying someone’s living room for funsies.

Daniel Salazar pissed me off. Once he started torturing a soldier (who didn’t really have anything to do with Salazar’s wife’s disappearance), I was done with him. No sympathy, no matter what happened in El Salvador. Then he leaves the gate open for the zombies to overwhelm the soldiers as a diversion so he could find his wife (who was dead anyway)? What? Why would you do that? Why? Because El Salvador? Am I supposed to be on the side of a character whose malignant neglect destroyed a workable zombie sanctuary, killing God knows how many people, just so he could find one person? What about the people in the community who were looking for their own families? Were their hundreds of lives secondary to his needs? He’s a stupid person and morally bankrupt and I wish the soldier had shot him instead of Ophelia. Then after all that, his wife dies and he takes notes from the Kim Dickens School of Acting and looks like he’s at the DMV.

Then at the end the heroin addict says he always felt like he’d lived in a hell all his life and now society is catching up with him. No, you idiot. Heroin addiction and the zombie apocalypse are not comparable. There’s no methadone for zombies. He’s a self-involved asshole but we’re supposed to use this line as some kind of theme for the show? I’m out.

Anyway, Kim Dickens was just not good in this show and should be embarrassed. I will be less likely to watch anything with her from now on. I can’t levy too many insults at her performance.