Fear the Walking Dead season 4 episode 10 review: Close Your Eyes

Alycia Debnam-Carey as Alicia Clark – Fear the Walking Dead _ Season 4, Episode 10 – Photo Credit: Ryan Green/AMC

Before Alicia can do that, she’s got to let a lot out and it’s safe to say, this girl has earned herself an emotional breakdown. As Charlie hides in a room, Alicia tells her she is “garbage” and a “waste of a person.” What Alicia doesn’t know is Charlie has a gun, but it isn’t for anyone else but her.

Despite her anger, Alicia also has this strong need to carry on Madison’s legacy of helping people, as we saw in “People Like Us.” So while still absolutely livid at Charlie, she utilizes her to try to board up the house as walkers head towards them.

This episode was dark and gritty, giving us a lot of back and forth between Alicia and Charlie. As the storm rages on, Alicia is tempted to kill Charlie again when she finds her hidden gun while trying to light a fire with Charlie’s jacket. With a gun to Charlie’s head, Alicia asks if the gun was meant to kill her. Eventually letting her go, Alicia backs off… only to then come and save Charlie who finds a walker impaled on a tree branch outside a window. Charlie is pulled back from the walker, right as it is about to bite her.

Finally, Alicia realizes how grave the situation is with Charlie, that she does want to kill herself for everything she has done. Alicia is unsure of why she saved Charlie, but she does know she has to live with what she’s done.

Over dinner, we learn more of Charlie’s backstory. Her family was headed tot he beach and boardwalk in Galveston, Texas when as Charlie puts it, “everything changed.” The reason she loves to read is because — shocker here — she’s a kid, at the end of the day, and wants to escape from this horrible world and imagine better places.

To further this imaginary side of her, we find Charlie has been collecting photos of the family who once lived there. When Alicia finds them and angrily asks what Charlie is trying to do with them, Charlie says she wanted to leave the photos behind in case anyone came looking for this family. Alicia, not having any of it, tells Charlie everyone is gone, and dead, and it doesn’t matter what photos she leaves behind. No one is coming to look for this family, and the bigger picture is that everyone anyone cares about is gone — at least in Alicia’s mind.

When the storm finally breaks through, shattering a window, allowing walkers a way in.

This leads to the most heartbreaking but revealing moment for Alicia and Charlie. They’re forced to hide in the basement, only to become trapped due to storm debris and the one escape door being chained.

It is here that Charlie reveals she does not want to die but she also fears turning into a walker, having seen her parents turn. She begs for Alicia to finally just kill her. As Alicia puts a gun to Charlie’s head, a flurry of flashbacks cross her mind, and she realizes she cannot do this. With that, Alicia lets go of her anger and resentment.

The storm miraculously blows the walker who was impaled on the tree off of it, directly onto the escape door, causing the chain to break. The two are able to escape, and the next morning, are seen burying the family and leaving the family photos behind in a jar. Alicia also gifts Charlie her weapon, a gun barrel sharpened into a blade, as the two go off to find the others.

On their drive back to the estate, Alicia proves she has truly let go of her resentment, gifting Charlie an imaginary view of the beach. It is here that Charlie can let go of her own grief and guilt, remembering her family for who they were before the world changed. She tells Alicia she sees Madison in her, and yes, my heart fluttered a bit at this bittersweet moment.

When the two return to the estate, they realize everyone is missing. Morgan’s truck and John and June’s bus are wrecked, as is much of the estate. It is here that the show sets us up for not only stories of how the storm split everyone apart, but how they will find each other again.

Charlie has hope they will locate the others, while Alicia seems to resort back to her negative way of thinking, saying they’re likely all gone. She takes her old weapon back from Charlie to kill a walker who emerges from the bus… making us think Alicia isn’t ready to give up all of her darkness yet.

Undead Afterthoughts

• Alicia reminds me of Carol. Though the two have very different backgrounds, they definitely have similar struggles with anger and mercy.
• Come on now with that walker breaking the chain and letting them escape from the basement. How could his soggy, walker body break the chain? Please…
• We realize that in the next few episodes, we’ll likely see how Morgan, John and Strand, June and Al, and Luciana all survived the storm (hopefully).

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 8 p.m. CT on AMC.