Fear the Walking Dead season 5, episode 8 review: Is Anybody Out There?

On Fear the Walking Dead’s midseason finale, Morgan and company pull off the “flight of the Phoenix” and get their plane in the air. Do all the survivors make it on board for takeoff?

“Is Anybody Out There” begins with the crew asking that very question to the world. Flashback to before the events of Fear The Walking Dead‘s season premiere, “Here to Help”, when Morgan and Alicia organized their charitable experiment to call out over the radio looking for people in need.

That is how Logan lured them away from the factory. Now Logan’s real motives are revealed – he and his people are looking for something vital on the premises and have failed to uncover it.

In the nuclear neighborhood, Grace offers Alicia some clean water to wash off the contaminated blood. Warning sirens from the imminent meltdown are heard from a distance, while Morgan struggles to find an ideal place to lead a herd of dead. The trio hide out of sight while the constant plant alarms call them away.

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Suddenly an explosion goes off at the nearby facility and the startled Grace accidentally garners some unwanted attention. She crashes her truck and the three are forced to escape on foot as a dead crowd follows behind them. Massive gray clouds of smoke start to form from the nuclear power plant.

Meanwhile, John and Dwight can’t find a car with a full tank as they are desperate to make it back to the plane before the nuclear disaster reaches them. When they finally get lucky, that luck runs out a good 15 miles from their goal as the gas in the car has gone bad. They look on at the nuclear cloud while John breaks the bad news to June over walkie. He makes her promise to leave on the plane even if he can’t make it back on time.

On the other side of the mountain, Sarah attempts to enlist Logan’s aid in lighting up the runway, seeing as Althea and Strand’s estimated time of arrival is in the dark of night. Logan rejects the plea. He and his people also move on from the mill without the unnamed item that they have spent most of their time looking for.  As Sarah and Wendell are brainstorming other ideas for lighting the runway, Salazar drives in with a truck full of Christmas lights.

Just as Althea and Strand get the engines running on the plane, Morgan and Alicia show up with dozens of growlers nipping at their backs. The group try to hold them off as long as possible to wait for John and Dwight.

They come speeding around the herd in a minivan seconds before departure. The plane barely misses flying right into the nuclear cloud and makes it over the mountains. Recognizing how close he came to never seeing June again, John proposes to her mid-flight.

With the hardest part seemingly behind them, Althea and Strand steer the plane to a dangerously bumpy landing. Low on fuel, they spot the lit-up runway. A few walkers almost compromise the whole mission when one trips over the cords and unplugs the lights. Wendell is attacked but crawls over to the plug right before the plane touches ground, and the pilots pull up to land safely.

As the group drink displeasing ale and celebrate their success, Morgan receives a communication from someone looking for help. Logan interrupts when he drives into town with a proposition.

He explains that the late Clayton had a map in his journal of a place that will resolve their old gasoline and increasingly blocked roadway issues. Luciana has the journal and Logan would like to break free of his former acquaintances to work with Morgan and Alicia.

Weekly Walkaways

• So it looks like Alicia is fine after her decontamination shower. For now, at least. “Still Standing” ended with a gravely serious mood as Alicia was splattered with diseased walker blood. Then this episode almost completely disregards that set up. Even if her contamination is revisited in future episodes, the moment feels like it has come and gone.
• When Strand and Althea admire the scenic mountain view, Al remarks that it is “the prettiest thing she’s seen since the end of everything. “The End of Everything” is the name of the episode where Al meets and falls for Isabelle. So not only does her line hold a double meaning, it is quite cleverly a non-diegetic reference to a specific Fear the Walking Dead chapter.
• Next up, the Fear survivors are set to face their biggest threat yet… bad fuel. All of a sudden John and Dwight’s car stalls because of expired gasoline; Dwight mentions that he has seen it happen before and Logan calls a truce with the group over the matter. Since The Walking Dead jumped ahead of the Fear timeline, this would explain why those characters have mainly resorted to horse and buggy, although Daryl’s chopper is miraculously spared of the spoiled fuel pandemic.
• The MVP of “Is Anybody Out There” is Morgan for leading his entire team, and more, to safety. The nuclear disaster storyline was wrapped up a little to neatly in a bow, which also goes for Morgan wielding his staff again after Grace forbid anyone to touch contaminated items. Let’s hope rotten gas isn’t the only obstacle to hit Morgan and the others in the season’s second half.

Fear the Walking Dead returns in a few weeks with “Channel 4” on Sunday, August 11th at 9:00 p.m. ET on AMC.