“King County” should have given the fans more than this.

In the latest episode of Fear the Walking Dead‘s final season, our favorite moral guardian Morgan Jones (Lennie James) takes a trip down a memory lane littered with corpses. The episode revisits Morgan’s family history and a location last seen in The Walking Dead: King County. It also sees – at least to a certain extent – revert back to his fragmented “Clear” identity, PTSD-plagued, seeing visions of his dead wife. We also get to see Morgan dispatch skunk-eating walkers with a staff, skills acquired from his cheese-making mentor. Don’t rejoice just yet; this episode is anything but a return to form. This isn’t exactly a bottle episode or will be remembered as a classic. The nods to what came before only serve to depressingly remind the viewers of the greatness that came before.

In “King County,” Morgan Revisits His Past, Again

In “King County,” Morgan Jones decides, after a decade away, to return to an environment that can be only a source of pain and end his son Duane’s zombified suffering. For fans unfamiliar with the importance of King County in this universe, allow us to provide a brief recap. In the pilot episode of The Walking Dead, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) wakes from his coma, and the world is now overrun with the dead. In a weakened state, he finally catches sight of someone approaching and starts calling out, unaware it is a walker. He is knocked unconscious and rescued by Morgan and Duane. They fill Rick in on everything that has happened, help him find guns and Morgan elects to stay, sending Rick to search for his family.

In “King County,” Morgan effectively travels back in time, and Lennie James plays a haunted character well, with a few nice callbacks to The Walking Dead, including name-checking Rick. It’s a nostalgia-heavy episode, woefully light on entertainment and logic. It is a pretty manipulative tactic, cheating a fan base who’ve been loyal with the promise of delivering something great. At least have a cameo or a character from the original make an appearance – Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) en route to Dead City, Daryl (Norman Reedus) riding his bike through King County, or even Carol (Melissa McBride) on a cake run. Instead, it’s the tortured Morgan/Duane dynamic rehashed again. Why tell the same story to audiences we’ve heard countless times?

In ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Season 8, It Gets Worse (For Us)

Grace (Karen David) shows up with Mo (Zoey Merchant) and reassures Morgan she was very careful on the trip — driving a 4X4 with PADRE emblazoned on the side is really discreet. She is adamant she hasn’t been followed, but she has. Dwight (Austin Aurelio) and Sherry (Christine Evangelista) have usurped Morgan as villains by default, showing up on horseback and using flares to draw the dead to their location. So begins a stand-off between Sherry, Dwight, and Morgan. The latter barricades himself in his old haunt alongside Grace and Mo.

There are plenty of action sequences and redemptive, self-tortured dialogue, bonding between Morgan and his surrogate daughter, a few revelations concerning Grace (and a conclusion that should shock but lacks emotional impact), and the appearance of a gun formerly belonging to Rick. There is a burning walker jump-scare you’ll never see coming and the topic of a cure resurfaces after a main character is bitten. The cure has been relegated plot-wise to a get-out-of-zombie-bite-jail-card with no explanation for scientific how of it apart from it involves radiation. Sherry and Dwight had the potential to be memorable villains – remember how awful Dwight once was in The Walking Dead? In the episode, the viewer is never entirely convinced they’ll really hurt their friends or carry out Shrike’s (Maya Eshet) orders. And do we need any more proof of Shrike’s inadequacies? She’s been outwitted, outgunned, floored by Madison (Kim Dickens), and knocked out by Finch (Gavin Warren).

There are moments during the episode when the viewer realizes Lennie James is wasted in this show and deserves better. The issue with the writing is we’ve seen this side of Morgan Jones so many times, and we know by the end of the episode, he’ll have returned to a calmer, less-conflicted state. Espousing the virtues of living a good, moral life in a landscape chock-full of walkers, bandits, and murderers. It is nice to believe in the essential decency of humanity, but it just doesn’t make for great drama. Unlike Rick, who can still surprise us, Morgan is a character who has stopped evolving. Fear the Walking Dead is a predictably lame dystopian drama and this has rubbed off on Morgan Jones, who was himself once a beloved franchise character.

“King County” should have given the fans more than a Rick Grimes reference and a return to Grimes’ first post-apocalyptic pit-stop. As fans, we may need to accept the former, gory glory of The Walking Dead has now passed, and tuning into Fear the Walking Dead’s final season is tantamount to attending its wake.