Fear the Walking Dead season 2 isn't quite doing enough that's new or fresh 

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 began with what stands up as one of the great opening episodes in this generation of television, and whatever the frustrating developments that show has suffered since, we knew immediately what it was capable of.

, by design, started with more of a slow-burn. But we\'re now two episodes into a second season - a third has just been confirmed - and there\'s still no sign of that killer episode just yet; that hour of television that a fledgling series often needs to cement itself; that allows people to say: "Just wait until you get to THIS episode!"

Still, if the first two episodes of this season haven\'t been the most dynamic, they have been quietly absorbing. This second instalment opens with the sort of brilliant sequence that the show could use more of, as two happy children play innocently on the beach, while Walkers slowly emerge from the surf, silhouetted frighteningly against the setting sun.

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It\'s artful and scary in a way that either series rarely achieves. That it ends with a punchline - the Walkers hitting a chain-link fence, the kids having never been in danger - is a return to that impish sense of humour that the early parts of the first season revelled in.

\'We All Fall Down\' sees our heroes - striving to escape the ominous boat that\'s chasing them - take shelter in the cove of a small island nature reserve, where they meet a family of survivalists and, inevitably, things aren\'t quite what they first seem.

It\'s an episode defined by implication: where the most fascinating parts are those we don\'t see on screen. We still don\'t know who their pursuers are, but the implications are many and exciting - even if distant, at this point.

The mystery of the enigmatic Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) deepens as we see him communicating with someone via satellite phone. But who is he arranging to meet? And why?

That opening scene - so fraught with implied threat - is followed by an episode that trundles along in fairly predictable manner. But it\'s the implication of what might happen after the credits roll that really sticks in the mind, rather than anything we see on screen. And yet the show will probably never explore it.

After tragedy strikes the island family, and only little Harry is left, Madison (Kim Dickens) means to take him with them to keep him safe - although his mother\'s logic that her children would be safer on the boat than at home with their family was flawed from the off.

It seemed for a while as if the episode was designed to get Harry on board the Abigail - a symbol of Madison\'s desire to save people and her defiance of Strand - but in a pleasingly unexpected twist, Harry\'s big brother Seth takes him back, and the Abigail departs with the same crew it docked with, leaving the brothers alone on the island.

\'s Jake Austin Walker was (presumably) only a one-episode guest star, we\'ll never learn what more befalls Seth and Harry, but the implications are ill-weighted for them. The thought of them left alone, traumatised - and on an only vaguely secure compound that also boasts an army of Walkers in the nearby town - has far more impact than most of what\'s happening with our friends on the Abigail.

always delivers a few good scenes, particularly when Ruben Blades or Colman Domingo are on screen (and particularly when they\'re on screen together) as Daniel Salazar

and this is an episode that chugs along nicely enough, but in a way that has all the juiciest material happening just off-screen; only glimpsed out of the corner of one\'s eye.

The issue is that the meat of the episode\'s middle section consists of conversations that we\'ve heard before, and not just in

. Variations on \'this is nature\'s way of purging us\' crop up in lots of apocalyptic fiction, so you have to go some to make lines like that feel engaging rather than rote.

doesn\'t often manage it. Seeing someone learn to stab Walkers in the head might be more interesting if we weren\'t already desensitised to it from a thousand examples on

Viewers who never saw the original series may get more mileage, but for

isn\'t quite doing enough that\'s new or fresh, even as there\'s always the sense that there\'s good material just over the horizon. We could do with reaching it soon, but for now, the wait for that big, momentous episode goes on.

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