Fear the Walking Dead theme from episode 505: Storytelling

Do stories still matter in a world like on Fear the Walking Dead? Al thinks so, and I do, too — as long as people are around to hear those stories.

You have to hand it to Al. She doesn’t give up easily.

I am a journalist by trade, and I’ve met very few journalists who are as doggedly-obsessive as she is when it comes to the pursuit of a story.

[FEAR THE WALKING DEAD EPISODE 505 SPOILERS AHEAD!]

She damn near paid for the pursuit of a story with her life. Instead, she relented, and not only was spared the bullet from Isabelle’s gun, but got rewarded with a kiss.

One of the thornier ethical questions in journalism revolves around knowing when to back off of a story for the greater good. It’s not a question that poses itself often – many journalists will work a full career without ever encountering it – but it’s not an easy one. Journalists are trained to follow the story, and to make it public as soon as possible to keep the public informed. But sometimes, for whatever reason, a journalist may feel it better to sit on something because it would be better for the public to not know, or not know yet.

Imagine if you were an American journalist and you knew about D-Day a week before it happened. You’d probably keep quiet to prevent the invasion from being tipped to the enemy, right?

Al isn’t facing that exact situation in this episode of Fear the Walking Dead – but she may be facing something similar. Isabelle doesn’t want her group to be known, presumably because despite the heavy armaments they have, and the helicopter, and the possible large size of her group (she hints at it), she’s afraid they’ll be attacked by hostile survivors. Not an unreasonable fear, as we’ve seen.

Isabelle persuades Al to give up on the tape in part because she claims that if her group’s story gets out, it might lead to her group falling, and if so, there may be no civilization left to watch Al’s interviews. So that makes Al pause and realize that being too invested in pursuing a story could actually be counterproductive.

The real question is, do the stories matter? I say, yes. If humans go extinct, they don’t, but we know society is rebuilding. So assuming that society gets back up and running someday (and why wouldn’t it? Babies keep being born, the number of walkers dwindles as survivors get better at killing them, and walkers get weak over time as their corpses decay, making them even easier to kill), people are going to want to know what happened.

Older folks who lived through the collapse and remember the world as it was before are going to want to re-live at least some of what happened (perhaps not the worst parts) and those who were children during the collapse, or born after, are going to need to see the history.

So yeah, Al is right, the stories matter. Just glad she got a kiss instead of death for her efforts.