Fear The Walking Dead Season Seven: Who’s The Worst?

Fear the Walking Dead -Victor Strand

Strand (Colman Domingo) ended last season with a heel turn, stupidly betraying Morgan in the hope of stopping Teddy’s nuclear attack by himself (without a key to even get into the weapons room) to get the glory. So it comes as no surprise that, as the season began, he carried on being the villain of the season.

From the very beginning, we saw just how the power Strand had assumed had gone to his head. He went from treating Howard as an equal in season 6 to being his clear superior by season seven, only a few months later, and commanding the rangers like disposable lackeys. When Strand became commander of a battalion of rangers under Virginia in the previous season, he was respectful. In fact, the very reason he was given the promotion to ranger in the first place was because he was able to bring together a ragtag team of strangers, and coordinate them well enough to clear out a warehouse full of walkers. He wasn’t giving orders to lackeys but to equals, whom he just happened to be leading, but when you saw him in the season premiere, you knew that the tower’s rangers meant nothing to him. They were cannon fodder, just people to take bites and bullets intended for him.

Of course, that wasn’t the meat of what made Strand a villain this season. His penchant for needlessly killing people made him a villain this season.

Starting with the end of the first episode of the season, Strand began a trend of throwing people he didn’t want or need off of the roof of the tower, most notably Will. Not because he didn’t need him at the tower, but in an attempt to drive Alicia away so that he could run things the way he wanted. He assumed that, if she knew he killed someone she loved, she’d never agree to join him.

As the season progressed, Strand’s body count climbed, as he threw more and more people off the roof, some because he thought them useless, others because he felt they were disloyal, and others, like Howard, because they failed him.

In episode 712, “Sonny Boy,” Strand spent the entirety of the episode manipulating Howard and John Dorie, Sr., to get them to do what he wanted. Knowing that Howard held out hope that his estranged wife and son would arrive at the tower, Strand lied to him, keeping him in the dark about the tragic fate of his family so that he’d stayed motivated by the false hope of a reunion with them. At the same time, Strand lied to John Sr., letting him believe that, if he eliminated Howard for failing to find Mo, he might be more willing to listen John’s advice and not be so ruthless. John complied, throwing Howard off the roof at Strand’s insistence, only to discover that Strand was never going to listen to him, and just wanted to get John to do his bidding.

The point is that Strand had gotten so drunk with power that he was playing games with his subordinates, using them as pawns to get them to become killers at his command. They were willing to bend their own rules at the promise of something Strand could give them. He was amused by his ability to corrupt the people around him.

What might be Strand’s worst crime, though, was collecting a herd of irradiated walkers from the crater left behind by one of the nuclear warheads and intending to use them to destroy Alicia and Morgan’s group, condemning them to either being eaten alive or slow, agonizing death via radiation poisoning. His plan ultimately backfired, but the fact remains that Strand wanted to do it, even to people he’d been friends with, like Luciana and Dwight.

While Strand turned bad at the end of last season, at the time, his actions were merely selfish and misguided. Still, by the time this season ended, he’d devolved into outright malice and Machiavellianism, using people as his pawns, and seeking to destroy even his friends in the worst way imaginable. Strand has been bad before, but, this season, he was easily at his worst.