This week offered up nuclear zombie action.
A post-apocalyptic Mad Max scenario with zombies is an interesting idea to try and run with. Taking cues from Fury Road, this week’s episode of Z Nation appropriately titled “Zombie Road” is an inventive attempt at vehicular zombie mayhem. The concept makes for a fun ride but lacks in suspense and is missing some of the better character moments that we’ve seen over the first two episodes.
With Murphy’s abilities making him an incredible asset when it comes to protecting the group from any and all zombie attacks it was a natural evolution to create something that would act as an even greater threat. Blasters are a great idea. These zombies, who were created due to the fallout from the nuclear explosion, are faster, deadlier and completely immune to Murphy’s telekinetic abilities. That’s a development in the right direction. From the outset, Blasters are depicted as being more vicious than their regular zombie counterparts. They eat the face right off their victims and do it at lightning fast speed. This sets them up as a formidable threat. However, by the episode’s conclusion, they didn’t seem any more dangerous than regular old zombies besides the fact that Murphy can’t neuter them with his powers. It would have been kind of neat to have kept it to one Blaster this week that was incredibly powerful and managed to lay waste to an entire group of people with the regulars just managing to narrowly escape.
The Mad Max motif mentioned earlier was a nice touch but the midpoint action sequences that has the convoy being attacked by a group of bounty hunters was hampered by everything moving really slowly. It’s a great setup for an action sequence but it felt like all the vehicles were going around 10 mph so any sense of danger was lost. It’s a shame, because the concept and the set piece was just right but that sense of speed wasn’t there.
Towards the end of the episode we’re given another action sequences that featured several Blasters and a lot more just turned zombies chasing down the group on a moving truck. This worked a lot better. The speed of all the vehicles felt faster and the threat was more pressing as the group was outnumbered with nowhere to run. As most of these recreations of film concepts on the small screen, it suffers from a lacking budget and never achieves much of the quality of the big screen property it’s trying to mimic.
Custer’s pressing urge to travel to Edmonton and his stories about his son created an interesting character who was obviously doomed from the start. His relationship with his nephew Wrecking Ball was curious and I’m not sure what importance the word problems had to do with anything but it certainly was unique. The reveal that Custer’s son was actually on the sick wagon was a development that never amounted to anything. We never have an opportunity to see Custer react to his son’s turn. It felt flat.
One of the more peculiar storylines that emerged this week was the introduction of Z-Weed. It’s marijuana that was grown using zombie compost. That’s certainly an idea that I could only imagine being developed on this show but it has a great deal of potential. The curative effects that it may potentially have are teased this week as well. Cassandra seems to normalize, at least for a few seconds, when she inhales the Z-Weed and Murphy has taken a unique interest in the drug as well. It’s a fun idea that will hopefully give us a little more of a narrative backbone for the season than simply getting Murphy to California.
“Zombie Road” is a fun small screen attempt to create the vehicular action of Fury Road but it obviously lacks the budget to pull it off in an effective fashion. The introduction of Blasters is a great idea but their threat level diminishes greatly by the end of the episode. Z-Weed is the next big thing.
