No Man's Land.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
"Red Dirt" may have been a conversation-heavy episode -- in typical Walking Dead style, with one character doing something on the outskirts of camp (even just staring off into space) and another one approaching for a chat -- but it was also an important one.
In just a short amount of time, Jeremiah's entire "Plan B" has crumbled under the fickle umbrella of "liberty." Filled with people who loved freedom so much that they never wanted a leader, Broke Jaw Ranch began to scatter into the wind after Madison, Troy and the rest all returned with the dire news of Walker and his new psychotic persona. As a former tribal lawyer, Walker's now seized on the lawlessness of the zompocalypse and is dead set on reclaiming his ancestor's land - suddenly making Broke Jaw a place where folks don't feel safe.
Of course, these are folks who haven't actually been outside of the ranch since the zombie plague hit, so they really have no real barometer for true danger. But Madison knows better, and this episode really zeroed in on how smart she is as a manipulator. She wants the land. She wants the food and the guns and the fences. She could take or leave the other people in it, but she wants the camp for her family. So she's going to fill in as leader while everyone else spirals into cowardice and grief. Also, she's going to "mama's boy" Troy into her corner.
That was really the best part of this chapter - Madison's sly puppeteering of Troy. Granted, it's not a smooth operation (he did hold a knife to her neck last week), but she's going to give Troy the stern-but-supportive mother he never had in order to use and exploit his craziness. Hell, she didn't even care that he wiped out Gretchen, Mike and their whole family! She just wanted to make sure that she could control his berserker rage. "All I care about is if you can control it."
I also liked that this week's little mini-mystery was just that: mini.
The question of whether or not Troy killed all those people could have been dragged out for weeks, with no one ever really knowing the truth, but it got answered right away and it made Madison feel more ruthless than ever. I also enjoyed that Nick, in the end, backed her play. His only concern was that she didn't trust him enough to share it ahead of time. Everyone's more or less on the same page now, with no bickering to make them weak or cause them to make bad decisions. Even all the time Nick is spending with Jeremiah is its own form of manipulation. As Jeremiah shrinks and crawls back into his bottle, Nick, a freakin' former addict, is gently luring him in and gaining his trust. The Clarks are dug in.
This includes Alicia too, though she does seem to have genuine affection for Jake. Madison did probe a little, however, to see if Alicia was working him. The answer was a half-yes. She's using him and she likes him. Though Jake now stands on the precipice of making, perhaps, the first truly dumb movie of Season 3. I understand where he's coming from, since he has this courtroom past with Walker, but I just don't see how he thinks a guy who just killed eight people in cold blood is going to listen to reason. Or even - what is the reason that Jake thinks he can deliver in this scenario? Walker wants the ranch and he's killing people for it.
The Verdict
Fear the Walking Dead may be suffering a little from the slight inertia of delivering a solely ranch-centric episode, but it's still burning through story at a decent pace. It's a good mix, and this chapter basically jumped us forward in a big way regarding Madison's rise to the role of de facto leader - with her pulling Troy's strings and each of her kids now also paired up with an Otto. She's going to trick people into fighting for this land for their own good. Because she knows that there's worse out there.
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