‘The Walking Dead’ season 7, episode 2 preview: More insight into Ezekiel, The Kingdom

The second episode of “The Walking Dead” will be coming your way on AMC tonight, and obviously it has a tough challenge trying to live up to some of the crazy stuff that happened last week. The good news is that the show doesn’t even seem to be trying to. Instead, we’re going in a very different direction with “The Kingdom,” and that includes putting the focus on a new leader in King Ezekiel (Khary Payton) and getting away from Negan for a little while.

In talking further about this world to Entertainment Weekly, here is what executive producer / effects guru Greg Nicotero (who directed both last week’s episode and tonight’s) had to say:

“The Kingdom is a place of light … It’s a place of life, a place where people seem to have figured it out and have been working together to build a thriving and vibrant community very, very different from anything our group has come upon in the past. And they’re led by a guy with a tiger. There’s an aspect of ‘I don’t get this place, but you’re doing it right and how’s that possible?’ But Lennie [James] and Melissa [McBride] are doing some amazing, amazing stuff coming up in this episode. And Khary Payton, who plays Ezekiel, is a freaking terminator. He showed up with pages and pages of dialogue to do and he never missed a line. He was so, so excited.”

All of this is tremendously exciting for us, given that we’re someone who finds some of the best episodes of the show to be ones like “Clear” or “The Grove,” which are stuffed full of big character moments. We know that this show can be exceptionally gory and has some of the best zombie effects out there, but the investment in these people is what separates it from other genre work.