‘The Walking Dead’ season 7, episode 3 review: Did Daryl join Negan, Dwight in the Saviors?
Last week’s episode of “The Walking Dead” had us following Carol and Morgan story where they settled into the Kingdom, run by King Ezekiel. We weren’t sure if Carol was going to stay, but she found a way to be part of it, while still being on her own too. She may not know it yet, but she is still connected to Rick’s group, since Negan and the Saviors stop by the Kingdom weekly to pick up their payment from them.
Tonight, we started with a situation that felt a heck of a lot like something almost out of “Lost,” where we had a reasonably-new character dancing around to some odd song and going about the same routine time and time again. Yep, we’re officially going to be triggered by “Easy Street” for the rest of our lives. It’s the new “Make Your Own Kind of Music,” people! This song was basically one of many ways that Dwight was tormenting Daryl, in between the little sleep, the dog food, the terrible sweatshirt (what is it with the letter “A” and this show?), and of course the walker grunt-work.
The problem with Dwight is merely one of mass hubris. This is a guy who’s either been so beaten down or disillusioned that he doesn’t really think a lot of things through. Take, for example, moseying along with the bike while surrounded by walkers, which was almost his way of holding up a massive sign encouraging all of the zombies to just come at him and destroy him limb from limb. While Dwight was away, Daryl made his own attempt to escape — which of course didn’t go altogether well. He ran into Negan, who was still carrying around Lucille and acting like it was the coolest thing of all time. We do gotta say that there were a few moments where we legitimately thought he was going to beat the tar out of him.
What was the point of spending so much time with Dwight? It was paced fairly slowly, but the primary motivation here may have just been to show you the state of the world, and why a guy like Dwight who’s been through what he had would continue to support Negan. You can make the argument that there are clear political undertones in this story and we wouldn’t quite fight you. The big takeaway that we got from watching this was that Negan is just an alternative for aloneness, and a guy like Dwight needs a cause. That is why he pulled the trigger against the opposition.
Now, let’s talk for a minute about Sherry, one of the few other people in this compound who seems to have A) a heart and B) some semblance of humanity. She is the person who warned Daryl that he wasn’t going to get out, and we appreciate her presence within the Saviors’ compound as one of the few people Daryl can actually communicate with. (Random though: A true sign of Norman Reedus’ excellence is that you can watch him say very little for almost the entire episode, but still believe every word or facial reaction.)
We suppose that coming out of all of this, the great news for Daryl may just be that he’s still alive. That’s worth celebrating, and let’s be real: There weren’t exactly many other reasons for him to be other than that eventually Dwight, realizing that he couldn’t kill him because of whatever sort of liking Negan had taken to him, decided to change the music over from “Easy Street” to Roy Orbison — and that apparently, this was all it took to trigger Daryl’s tears. When you have nothing else to go on, even one little element of change could trigger this sort of emotion.
As the episode winded down, Negan decided that the time was right in order to deliver a lengthy monologue when it comes to how he married Sherry, and how this came about mostly as an arrangement in order to ensure that Dwight didn’t die. Somehow, this was almost like a Dwight testimonial while Negan tried to recruit Daryl over to the Saviors. He gave them that offer — complete with a threat courtesy of Lucille. Unfortunately for Negan, Daryl didn’t accept Negan’s offer. Yet, he understands why Dwight did, and through this character study we ultimately understood better what made these two separate men tick.
In the end, consider this a surprisingly-emotional hour, one that brought us more pain than we imagined we were going to get given that we only had one major character we’ve known for longer than a year featured in it. It signified why Daryl was out for himself, why Dwight allowed himself to be a Negan patsy, and above all else how messed-up this world still is. Episode Grade: A-.
What did you think of tonight’s episode of “The Walking Dead”? Leave us a comment in the box below and tell us what you think of this season so far. If you want more scoop on “The Walking Dead” the head on over to the link here. (Photo: AMC)