The Walking Dead, Season 7, Episode 2: The Well
Well, this was a bit of a strange turn to take. In the words of King Ezekiel, it's "embracing the contradictions" and going over the top with it. After the huge gore and despair filled premier episode, the the generally increasingly bleak tone that the series is taking in its last couple of seasons (it's telling that the most fun thing in the show before this episode is a murder-happy psychopath with a bat) but this is certainly a move in the right direction. Is it as realistic or down-to-earth as everything else in Walking Dead? Hell no. My reaction is similar to Carol in this episode, a mixture of confusion and amusement. Here we have a dude acting like a king straight out of a Shakespeare play, with a pet tiger, ruling a kingdom with soldiers wearing hockey gear.
At the same time, it gives us something to explore instead of having our main cast stumble through hordes and hordes of incompetent generic asshole Saviours until they hope to find Negan. It gives us seeds for a longer-term storyline, and perhaps the show won't stumble over itself in trying to find out just what it's really trying to do. Granted, Ezekiel's kingdom is a lot more flowery and insane compared to Alexandria or Hilltop, but hey, at least it's not brain-numbingly boring.
But at the same time, it's these kinds of settings that add actual life into this zombified corpse of a show. The fact that it tries to actively fix and explain Morgan and Carol, two of the protagonists I can still say that I like unironically, and try and recoup some losses from the shit that they (okay, mostly Carol) went through in last season's back half. Carol's just amazing. Her easy cheerful, friendly facade as she plans her escape from Ezekiel's Kingdom, believing it to be nothing but a madman's insane dream, is amazingly done.
Morgan's confusion when Ezekiel asks him to teach one of the kingdom's younger members how to use the staff, and his own confusion with having killed a man in the season finale is nicely solved by Ezekiel asking Morgan if the staff had saved his own life, even if it was unable to save Carol's. Carol's story is the more interesting one, as she quickly tries to run away from any sort of attachment, be it the kingdom or Morgan, and thus any more suffering. Carol's arc throughout the sixth season has been absolutely messy, yet at the same time she's also disgusted with Ezekiel's bullshit... and Ezekiel comes clean. Yeah, he's only acting the part -- he's a zookeeper who earned the loyalty of the tiger. He's actually making side-deals with the Saviours, giving them pigs (fed with corpse meat, ha ha!) and still technically under the Saviours' grand rule (again, setting up a potential ally while not downplaying Negan) but he is savvy enough and competent enough of a leader to go out and fight zombies with his men, or to call Carol's bullshit out, or to give wise words that Carol needs to hear.
There's probably an easy meta-commentary about how Carol is absolutely sick of having hope and then having it all ripped away from her when she cares for her. Carol's eventual decision is a bit of a compromise, living in a house apart from the Kingdom, but apparently it's close enough that King Ezekiel can pop up with his pet tiger Shiva and share a fruit or two.
It's in these sort of more self-contained episodes that the Walking Dead seems to excel, and even if I've lost most of my faith in the show ever going to give a solid seasonal arc from start to finish, some individual episodes can certainly be good. And seeing characters who aren't just wallowing in grief and sorrow and glowering all the time? Honestly I'm dreading cutting back to the main cast at this point. Yeah, King Ezekiel, you're amazingly infectious and as someone who's gotten tired about the show for a while now you're definitely an amazing addition. Being acted by Khary Payton, Cyborg himself from the Teen Titans cartoon, is the icing on the cake.
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