The Walking Dead veteran, Michael E. Satrazemis returns to direct the season 7 premiere of Fear TWD. He does an amazing job at bringing an engaging episode with his great direction and visual storytelling, the camera work and cinematography are great. But honestly the sets was kind of disappointing with the unnecessary smoke making the scenes seen worse and not the visually appealing scenery that we got in the previous seasons. The bunker set was incredible though. The writing is mostly good, but some of the writing was flawed. Like I wrote in my review for the season 6 finale, this episode have both the good and bad writing from the showrunners. But I just felt like the dialogue was kind of unrealistic and not as great as the previous season. The overall writing for the aftermath wasn't what I anticipated it would be in terms of writing, with a big thing like a nuclear aftermath, you have to be careful and place logic before entertainment but the showrunners placed the latter before logic.
While most of the landscape is destroyed by nuclear warheads, Strand thrives in one of the few inhabitable places left; Strand's search for survivors uncovers a stranger with an unexpected connection to his past. It's what the episode is about and spending an entire episode with Victor Strand, one of the best characters of Fear TWD and seeing what he had accomplished during the time skip was nice to see. The performance Colman Domingo brought to the role of Victor Strand was the highlight of the episode, the writing for him is great and a nice change of who he was in season 4 and 5 that was a complete character assassination but season 6 improved immensely and brought a character arc that I like and the actor himself it seems like. Truly terrific. But having said that, I just didn't find it worthy of 40 minutes of screen time. The new character of Will made us see the nuclear aftermath from a different perspective and was enjoyable. But not showing any of the other perspectives hurt the episode, hugely. It's a season premiere after all.
But what it was worth "The Beacon" was overall a good season premiere, but it didn't meet my expectations. I was disappointed. The episode included a plenty of suspension, tension and action, thus making the episode entertaining. I just didn't find it to be a great premiere as a premiere to me is how you should grab the attention of the audience and making them want to come back. If I wouldn't have been a big fan of the TWD Universe, I would have thought hard if it's worth coming back. But luckily I think the season has promise and I'm here to stay, we can only hope the writing gets better and a more focused story. The anthology format worked for season 6 because of how big it was. They could have easily added in another perspective of for example June Dorie and John Dorie Sr. For a much better premiere. Some scenes in this episode felt unnecessary as it added next to nothing to the story or characters.
