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The Walking Dead- Season 7: Episode 3. The Cell
I feel like the week has been turned upside between the Presidential Election and the desperate search to find the right thing that will get my 8 month old to sleep through the night. Now I finally get a chance to sit down and dive back into what I love. “The Walking Dead”.
Before I can go into this week’s episode I want to do a little flashback to last week’s episode “The Well”.
After talking to the insightful Emma “The Hammer” about what she thought about all the things that happened last week made me rethink what I thought. While I was questioning if Ezekiel’s group was feeding the wild hogs dead meat in hopes to infect Negan and his Neganites, Emma thought that it was more of a means to make it look to Negan like they were really going out of their way to please him and give him what he was expecting if not more than he was expecting. Lightbulb… that makes total sense. Here’s a group of people who sure know how to build one hell of a kingdom, are great at planting and growing things, can corral animals with the best of them actually keeping them alive unlike all the horses and pigs our group has come across, and they seem to know how to keep the walkers away. But do they really have the ability to protect themselves against people as awful like the ones we’ve seen with the Negan’s or the real Negan for that matter? Ezekiel doesn’t seem to think so since he’s keeping this whole deal thing under wraps.
And then there is the pomegranate. I was listening to a podcast and they started saying how a pomegranate is really an ugly fruit but when you really get in there and get to the center it’s sweet and worth it. And King Ezekiel is pretty much saying that about Carol… well to Carol. Like… hey girl, I know you’ve been through a few things and you’re a little rough around the edges and kind of dirty and stuff but underneath all that grim there’s a tender lady I just know it.
And on to the main event!
Just the title “The Cell” really was like the perfect little sum up for what this episode was in more ways that one. First we have Daryl in the physical cell but then there is also Dwight in this crazy emotional cell both courtesy of Negan. To me Dwight is like the Daryl of this Savior group. Well… besides him wearing Daryl’s vest, carrying around his crossbow, seeming to be riding or walking around a motorcycle and it kind of looks like he’s rocking Daryl’s greasy long hair it seems like he’s a pretty resourceful guy who ends up finding himself sitting at the right hand of the man in charge. Although in this case the man in charge is a psycho who gives a crazy alter-ego to his bat as an excuse to do bad bad things.
1. The difference between Negan and King Ezekiel.
Wow! You have these two well spoken men, who just ooze confidence, likeability and leadership. On one hand you have this guy who is funny, fair and has a fricken tiger. On the other hand you have this charismatic ass who is funny and clearly hella strong…. I cringe just flashbacks to episode 1 in my head, he seems to have this huge group who more than willing follow him even though there are way more of them than him. Which random Dwight friend points out to him when he’s trying to drag him back to the Sanctuary. “There’s all of us and 1 of him and we’re all so scared we gave everything up.” Which makes me wonder what the Sanctuary was like before this guy with a smile and a bat showed up. From what little I’ve seen of these crazy ass guys some of them like the runaway seem like real decent guys just trying to survive in this world.
Ezekiel seems to be well liked by his people, he’s really taking on the role as King to keep up the moral of the people in the Kingdom. It’s a mask he is happy to put on to get others and himself through this sad world. He wants to bring people into his world, give them things and keep them safe. Negan… demands loyalty, demands payment, you lose your life yourself and become a Negan.
2. Negan… and Dwight…. and Daryl
So we all know Negan is clearly not so right in the head. First of all, he’s just a psychotic egomaniac. Sure he can be funny, and he has this kind of charm that makes you think sure I can get on board with this guy, he keeps all these other people safe why not me. And he seems to appreciate hard work, honesty and gives people second chances when they wrong him. But come on people let’s look at the main point again… He’s PSYCHOTIC! Even when he gives people a second chance you just have to hope that that extra psycho bat Lucille isn’t a little blood thirsty that day. The man has a split personality and his second personality is a scary barbed bat.
And what a horrible, twisted relationship he has with Dwight. Everything we see Dwight do in this episode is all about Negan testing him. He emasculate him in front of people, takes his wife as his own , maybe impregnates her, sends him out to bring back his runaway friend to for sure be punished one way or another. I guess seems kind of understandable that Dwight is trying to stay on his good side since Dwight, and as Negan puts it, his “hot wife and her hot sister” (aka his maybe one day fiancé) ran away and took lots of drugs from Negan… I guess it makes sense that he takes his wife for his own, burns his face and forces him to do his bidding. The loss of hot almost fiancé must have really taken its toll on poor Dwight. Enough of a toll for him to believe that him and Sherry couldn’t survive on their own, or trust that Daryl would have taken them to a better place when he offered it the first time they meet and they took all of Daryl’s goodies. That the only place they could both be safe would be with Negan. Maybe Dwight sees that the future will only hold places Negan will conquer and control because “there is nowhere to go. Everything is his or will be.” So their is no point running.
Speaking of Dwight’s poor runaway friend… I wonder how the guy lost his family, like maybe I just missed it but did his wife die or is she just kind of lost to Negan. Whatever it is he saw what Negan had turned their home into, what he was making his followers do to people they ran into and he didn’t like the person he was told to be. But oh… even this is a test for Dwight. What would Negan’s response be if he didn’t return with his property one way or another? So was Dwight killing his friend a mercy killing because he knew that even if he let him go Negan would find a way to hunt him down and he saved his own neck in the process or was this action purely just a result of Dwight trying to save himself?
It’s clear Dwight is a big man on campus. They way he struts his stuff around at the beginning of the episode has to show that he was a pretty big deal even before they ran away and came back. He gets all sorts of nice looking food to make a proper sandwich, people just hand it over with seemingly no problem. He gets to watch Who’s the Boss. And he’s the ‘lucky’ one(?) who gets to break Daryl. Sure he’s feeding him a dog food sandwich and making him listen to Easy Street over and over and over again… but is it really torture? Well, yes. Is he trying to break him? Maybe… But I think really he’s just trying to show him that playing along is the best and only solution. And that really Negan could give him some things that Rick could never… well he defiantly can’t now. But Negan has such power that the way to survive was to just give into him.
” I get why you took the deal. You were thinking about someone else… and that’s why I can’t” So is this Daryl’s way of saying that he will sadly but gladly go through all this torture as a sort of penance for what happened to Glenn?
Ehhhh…. at any rate Negan is clearly loving the fact that he gets to break this wild stallion, or rather get his minions to do it for him. Because when you’re Negan you don’t have to beat up Daryl for escaping his cell you get your Nganites to do it for you. Daryl is fighting so hard to keep what little of his Daryl essence and pride he has left. How long can he hold on for? Will his friends come and rescue him before Negan finally breaks his will? What will be the final straw that gets Daryl to finally kneel to Negan? Could it be Carol finding her way somehow to the Sanctuary and Daryl giving himself to save her. Or could it be Maggie on her revenge tour finds herself in front of Negan and Daryl gives himself to the dark side to atone for what he did to Glenn. Or maybe it’s just the picture of poor Glenn’s body…
3. “Easy Street”
I don’t know about Daryl but I feel pretty good speaking for him… if we never hear that song again I think we’d be quit happy about that. I’ll always think about dog food sandwiches and dark cells when I hear it. But really the song says it all. Stuck in this dark, I’m assuming, judging by the very dirty Daryl, very smelly cell Dwight shows his authority in the Sanctuary by being the one to break Daryl.
All Daryl has to do is give in and be like all the other Negan minions. All you have to do is kneel and give up your name… kind of like Ayra in Game of Thrones (‘a man has no name’, except he does and it will be Negan). But no, our dear sweet noble and rebellious Daryl refuses to be anything other than himself.
4. Negan and the ladies of the apocalypse.
So….. Negan takes in all the ladies as his own? Maybe. But one thing we learn for certain is that he just hands these ladies out like skittles when his Negan’s have good behavior. So…. I guess the ladies are well taken care of… in a sense. They seem well feed, well clothed. But is this how I would want to live out the rest of my apocalyptic days? I am oddly physically attracted to Negan, sure, but I think that has more to do with the fact that he was papa John Winchester in Supernatural. And sometimes he’s really funny, in a very inappropriate way…. But it feels so wrong… but I can’t help it… but it’s so wrong.
5. Sherry and Daryl.
Through Talking Dead we get a little insight into the strong mind of Sherry. She wasn’t given to Negan, she actually gives herself up in an effort to save her husband from being attacked by Lucille. We also learn that when she sees our poor dog food eating Daryl reminds her of who her and Dwight use to be before they returned and surrendered to Negan. It’s clear that Sherry isn’t very happy with the decision that her and Dwight made but when life hands you lemons…
6. The Music
The music in this episode really tells a story in itself. From ‘Easy Street’ to the final song… ‘Alone and Crying’. Well, that is exactly where I never thought we would see Daryl and that is exactly where the episode leaves us hanging. He finally brings himself to look at that dreaded polaroid… we all know what’s on there and I for one for sure don’t want to relieve that moment again but no matter how hard I try to live in the land of denial where Abraham and Glenn are still alive I always get dragged back to the sadness. He looks at that horrifying picture and is reminded on why he is in that cell, alone. He was the reason his friend is dead. The reason Glenn’s maybe kid, I’m still not sure Maggie is going to survive that pregnancy, will grow up without a father. Daryl has really turned into a for the people kind of guy over the seasons. Going out of his way to look for lost children, protect those that are his family fiercely and here he is the cause of one of his friends death and that has to be weighing so heavily on his conscious. And he just breaks down in a dignified man cry, you don’t need monster snot bubble to be super distraught. But you can hear the heart break in his cry. This break down can really only go one of two ways once the tears dry. We’ll either see a reignited Daryl, a man ready to break the rules and break some heads on his way out the door. Or we’ll see a man just completely broken and ready to bow down and give up his identity and his ability to care about others.
If they do manage to bring Daryl over to the dark side can there really be 2 Daryl type figures in the same spot in this world? Could the end result of this be a show down at the OK Saloon? Really is there a way that Dwight breaking Daryl that doesn’t end with it coming back to bite Dwight in the ass? All I know is after hearing some of D
Next week on the Walking Dead…
So our little glimpse, that is if you got to catch the what’s coming on the Talking Dead, we saw Michone walking through her happy little house. Katana on her back she walks up to the fireplace where she use to hang it and it looks like she kind of stands there looking at the blank space. But instead she goes inside the fireplace and pulls out this sniper kind of gun. She quietly walks through the house and past this kind of sad, broken, grieving looking Rick.
I have to say, Rick… not being the leader and the fear of having to follow orders does not look good on you man. I get it. You have a lot riding on your shoulders. You’ve already watched Negan take out 2 of your friends in a very horrible way and I could not imagine how you would even begin to process that but then that freak wanted you to cut off your poor pirate kids hand… side note maybe Carl really wanted him to take his hand so he could live out his pirate dreams with an eye patch and a hook hand… and you just lost your Rick essence.
We’ve already seen Maggie intent on going and taking down the man who took away the love of her life could she be the one to bring the group back to their former glory? Is Rick to far gone now is he going to go start to raise pigs and talk to dead people on the phone again? Sure the men are all big and strong and go in all balls to the wall but there are so many strong woman who take a back seat and quietly put the pieces together. Each of these women have had horrible things happen, people they love taken away from them not because of the walkers but because of the evil people left in the world, except for Carol she had the evil man in her world taken away by a walker (the zombie apocalypse is kind of Carol’s jam). And judging by Sherry’s interaction with Daryl maybe the ladies of Negan aren’t too happy being there. Maybe there will a kind of lady collaborated uprising. But can the ladies really take the head of the snake off without Carol “the Cookie Monster”? because I still feel that she is the key to taking down this psycho. Even with super samurai Michone… Carol is the one who can act first while thinking about the good the outcome will be at the same time no matter what the consequence.
All I can hope for is that Daryl keeps strong and waits for his lady friends to come and rescue him before he becomes a Negan. And That’s a Wrap for this episode of Walking Dead. Zombies aren’t what we have to be afraid of anymore as we’ve seen time and again over the last how many seasons, we have to watch out for handsome men with a nice smile and a bat. “We thought we knew how to fight the monsters but we were wrong…”
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