7x02 The Well

8.7/10. In between Seasons 6 and 7 of The Walking Dead, I finally found the time to watch Deadwood, the acclaimed, short-lived HBO series that helped usher in the era of prestige television that The Walking Dead has tried desperately to be a part of. And while Deadwood is a consistent critical favorite, and The Walking Dead has received a mixed response from reviewers at best, the most recent seasons of TWD have been focused on the same question that consumed Deadwood for its three season run -- what does it take to make a society?

That’s oversimplifying both shows, but to my mind, Deadwood was first and foremost about what it means to build a civilization, the myths we perpetuate, the wheels we grease, and the dirt and blood we try to scrub off the floor or otherwise paper over in the process. And from the onset of the Alexandria arc, The Walking Dead has been interested in the same idea. Whether it’s Deanna’s vision for Alexandria as the start of something sustainable, or the Gregory running the Hilltop as his own little fiefdom, or Negan extracting his pounds of flesh via The Saviors, this show has been interested in what kind of “government” what type of system, will prevail. All of these people, like Deadwood’s Al Swearingen, are trying to fashion a society out of something approaching a state of nature, and this arc seems as poised as any to be about the ways those differing perspectives clash and conflict.

“The Well” introduces one more perspective, one more camp that’s humming a different tune, to the equation. It’s called “The Kingdom” and it is governed, appropriately, by a man who calls himself “King Ezekiel,” who speaks in an affected Medieval Times accent, keeps a pet tiger, and is prone to spout grandiose verbiage about his land and its people. It’s King Ezekiel and his subjects, for lack of a better term, who take in Morgan and Carol after the events of the Season 6 finale.

And Carol is, understandably, bewildered, amused, and more than a little annoyed by this pageantry, but tries not to let on. One of my favorite treats in the recent seasons of this show is when we get to see Carol act. Her transformation from diffident housewife to badass warrior to self-questioning soldier is the series’s greatest achievement thus far, but the most enjoyable offshoot of that journey has been the times when Carol is obfuscating her true cold-blooded capabilities. Those moments add weight to the times when she drops the act, but also show her craftiness, her skill, her wolf in sheep’s clothing bonafides as she plays the part of the sweet, overwhelmed lady who just can’t believe her good fortune.

Despite her public protestations to the contrary, Carol wants no part of The Kingdom, regardless of Morgan’s attempts to persuade her otherwise. After all, King Ezekiel seems to want to pretend that this place is a paradise, and Carol believes that no such place can exist given the state of things. The subtext is that she once thought Alexandria would be that place, that you could live a life free of having to kill people, that things could start to become normal again, and had the harsh reality of the falsity of that promise brought down on her with a force that made this otherwise steely and sturdy individual begin to buckle. Being with people means that their lives are your responsibility, that if you have the capability, you have an obligation to defend them, maybe even kill for them, and creating a place that pretends this isn’t true, that looks like some oasis of stability in this sea of murder and death, is nothing more than a vulgar lie in Carol’s eyes.

After all, in the episode’s chilling opening sequence, we see that Carol is still haunted by the people she’s had to kill. As Morgan and the fighters from the Kingdom defend her from an oncoming zombie horde, she hallucinates (or simply imagines, depending on your purview) that the undead are regular human beings, being brutally slaughtered before her. The loss of human life casts a shadow on everything Carol sees. She has been so much a party to death and destruction, to innocents and indiscriminate enemies being felled by her hand, that even these snarling monsters are a reminder of lost humanity, of something that all but guarantees that a world where such violence, such moral compromises, need not be engaged in, is a fantasy, something that Carol once let herself believe in and then found herself tasting the bitterness of after that dream fell apart.

Even Morgan is starting to experience some self-doubt and facing the limits of his own personal philosophy. I’ve appreciated Morgan’s pacifism, especially as contrasted with Carol’s more pragmatic view of killing, despite its lack of practicality in a world with zombies and roving gangs of less than savory folks, because it’s meant to be a path to healing for him. After the tragedies he’s faced, that everyone’s faced, it’s nice, and I would argue necessary, to have someone finding their way back to some semblance of peace in all of this.

But in the Season 6 finale, Morgan violated his code against taking another human life in order to save Carol. And while, at the time, I thought it was an example of Morgan showing that his philosophy is not so doctrinaire, that he understands there’s a time and a place for such grisly acts, but they are a last resort, the impact of his having to kill someone to save someone else, something Carol has been grappling with for the last season, is clearly weighing on him.

I would hate to see Morgan give up his faith in the way of life he’s adopted so quickly, but the questioning is fruitful territory. Whereas he once was interested enough in proselytizing to try to influence Carol, to give her a way out, here, he is reluctant to pass on the lessons he learned from Eastman to Ben, the member of The Kingdom whom King Ezekiel asks him to instruct in combat. Morgan saw Aikido as a way to cope, a way to find purpose in his life after the death of his wife and son, and he thought he’d found peace in the process. Now, even in these seemingly safe, beautiful, plentiful surroundings, he seems to be wondering if, as Carol seemed to tell him for so long, he’s been deluding himself.

Carol, however, is not one to be deluded. So while The Kingdom is presented as a paradise -- replete with a lovely, even heavenly choral rendition of a Bob Dylan classic to drive the point home as the edenic qualities of the camp are shown off in a lovingly-shot montage -- she doesn’t have to know that Ezekiel is feeding his people pigs who are fattened up by eating the dead or tything to The Saviors to know that it’s not the unspoiled land of plenty it seems.

That’s the rub of the episode, however, and the thing that makes Carol stay and that makes The Kingdom more than just another stop on the Walking Dead’s tour of civilizations. When confronting Carol as she tries to leave, King Ezekiel drops the act, and reveals that he’s not some madman with delusions of grandeur; he’s a self-aware regular guy trying to give people someone to follow, someone to believe in.

That’s where the themes of Deadwood start to seep in. Carol’s grand beef with the universe, with the state of the world as it is now, is the idea that any notion of safety or security or peace is a myth, something that tantalizes us into thinking we’re okay but is then shattered and only serves to remind us how tainted and damaged we must be in the new order. Ezekiel, on the other hand, offers a different view of that myth.

He acknowledges that his royal attitude is a bit ridiculous, confesses his community theater roots and explains the source of his tiger as stemming from his days as a zookeeper, not some myth of having wrestled it and tamed it himself in the forest. But he argues that these stories, these grand ideas built on nothing, give people hope, help them to build a community on those fantasies, one that will hopefully, one day, be able to sustain itself without the need for such theatricality.

But every camp, every civilization, tells a story about itself, offers some founding principles or creation myth that helps give it direction and purpose. That’s what Ezekiel, with eyes wide open, wants to give the people who follow him, in the hopes that they can use it to live freely, to start something that might be able to outlast them. He offers the same thing to Carol--a lie agreed upon--and hopes that it may be something to help her find a path to peace and growth and perhaps even stability as well.

So the final images of the episode are of Morgan and Carol setting Carol up in an old house, something that allows her to be away and alone, but close enough to where she can be a part of The Kingdom when she wants, and The King can visit her just as easily.

It’s a ray of sunshine for Morgan, a respite from the idea that Carol is content to pursue her solitary death wish. It’s a hopeful beat for Carol, herself finding a middle ground between the ghosts of the dead that seem to follow her wherever she goes and the notion of cutting herself off from civilization, from anyone and everyone. And while King Ezekiel standing on her doorstep offering an apple is a bit on the nose, it’s symbolic of the theme that paradise may be out of reach, but perhaps the people in the ashes of the world can still gain something from that myth.

For however much fans and critics alike were turned off by the bleak brutality of The Walking Dead’s season premiere, “The Well” offers an antidote, a chance for its most developed characters to replenish the parts of themselves that have been drained by the horrors they are confronted with. As for the denizens of Deadwood, the episode posits that there can be something wonderful, something strong, something bright and communal and healing, that can emerge from so much muck and hardship.