7x03 The Cell

I’m often struck by the technical and structural audacity of The Walking Dead. It’s often a gorgeous show, with visuals that grab you even when the frame isn’t filled with zombies. But it’s also a show that is great at communicating ideas with visuals alone, albeit one that is maddeningly inconsistent about when it feels like doing so. To that point, “The Cell” centers on two characters: Dwight and Daryl, and it opens with a pair of montages that include zero dialogue, but tell us everything we need to know about who the characters are and what their situation is.

The episode’s cold open gives us the story of Dwight’s sandwich. It’s a fascinatingly run-of-the-mill object that, nonetheless, is a window into the live of the Negan’s lieutenants. The sequence is superb, with shots of each ingredient on the sandwich, and spliced with small scenes showing how Dwight got each one, and the havoc caused in his wake. There’s a rapacity when Dwight grabs a loaf of bread or snatches a jar of pickles out of somebody’s foot locker. It exposes the largesse and freedom and impulsive hedonism that The Saviors enjoy, and also what’s left in their wake. There are fights, rotten looks, and anger lurking in the background of Dwight’s little snack-based tour, that exposes the way that Negan’s tentacles have spread into so much of the new ecosystem that Rick and his friends have been wrapped up in.

Then, the episode contrasts the deliciousness (especially for the apocalypse) of the sandwich that Dwight is about to bite into, with one he makes from dogfood. That far-less appetizing sandwich is prompted by Dwight enjoying his own lunch and gazing upon some lesser captives of The Saviors forced to go through a horrible walker-on-pyke obstacle course of sorts. He remembers his prisoner, and it’s then that we see the abject state that Daryl is in--naked, huddled, and willing to eat what amounts to a kindness from Dwight--as contrasted by the way that Dwight himself is living large.

It’s a startling way to end the sequence and lead into the opening credits, but it’s effective in the visual language it uses to show us where Dwight is, where Daryl is, and how those places are drastically different based only on the kind of sandwich each one is eating.

On the other side of the show’s intro, we get a sequence exploring what was happening to Daryl throughout Dwight’s adventures. We see him awoken by the catchy but ironically foreboding tones of a chipper song called “Easy Street.” We see the products of his torture, the way he’s denied clothing, denied meals, to where the return of these items is meant to be a privilege. The Walking Dead is often accused of excess bleakness, but while this sequence is harrowing, it’s a tempered but effective way of showing the way that Daryl is being broken by his captors.

“The Cell,” to that end, offers one of the strongest performances from Norman Reedus as the fan favorite Daryl. I’ve often wondered if one of the reasons that Reedus’s character is so well-liked is that he’s typically so terse. Dialogue has never been one of The Walking Dead’s strengths, and by making Daryl taciturn, it allows Reedus to avoid many of the clunky monologues or tin-eared exchanges that plague the show.

But “The Cell” allows him to go one step further. If Reedus has half a dozen lines in the episode, it feels like a lot. Instead we see him grimace and groan. We see the steel and defiance behind his eyes. We see him tear up at the image of his departed friends. It’s a physical performance, one where all of Daryl’s emotions have to be bubbling under the surface, but barely emerge above it. Reedus tells the story of a man who is suffering, who is being chipped away at bit-by-bit by a collection of psychopaths, but who is straining with every fiber of his being to stay resolute, for the people he cares about and for himself. If his best scenes from this episode aren’t on his awards-show reel, they certainly should be.

There’s strong work from Austin Amelio, who portrays Dwight, as well. He too benefits when The Walking Dead shows reserve. He’s used as a juxtaposition to Daryl, not just in terms of the way that one is dining on fresh food while the other is eating canned animal feed, but in the way that the two of them represent different responses when faced with Negan’s deal with the devil.

“The Cell” sets Dwight up as a man who is enjoying his position, but who is, subtly and quietly, laden with the horrors of what he’s done and what’s been done to him. Dwight is resigned to Negan’s power, to being unable to fight and resist. He’s already paid the price for that, physically and emotionally, and now he’s copped to joining up with his abuser, to participating and perpetuating the abuse, because it’s the only way. Because beyond death, your only options are to serve Negan in one way or another, so you may as well get to enjoy the spoils of war in the process.

It’s a canny way to establish the abject horribleness of Negan’s reign, that he eventually coopts everyone and everything that comes into his path. There’s the suggestion that Dwight himself was broken, and then made into this bastion of cruelty we see. But there is still doubt in him.

The episode is filled with not especially subtle reminders that Dwight wasn’t always like this, and that he harbors resentments beneath his surface as well. Whether it’s the scene where he kills the escapee, or the one where he shares a quiet moment with his ex-wife (who is more of a prop to give Daryl dire warnings than a real character here), or where he hears Negan’s speech to Daryl and looks at his leader a little cockeyed, there’s the sense that while Dwight’s accepted this new life, he hasn’t forgotten how we got there.

So when he sees Daryl staying steadfast, offering him understanding and resisting both the carrots and sticks that Negan puts in front of him, something stirs in Dwight. That sense is not bolstered by the dialogue in the episode, which underlines Dwight’s position a little too strongly, but it still telegraphs the idea that when the inevitable resistance comes for Negan, Dwight is persuadable. For all his terrible actions, he too is a victim, one who wanted to run away from all of this, but resigned himself to the idea that it was the only way.

That’s why Daryl’s presence matters. As Daryl himself put it, Dwight tried to run, and accepted coming back, because of people he cared about. Daryl can’t let himself give in because of the people he cares about. That’s one of Daryl’s most admirable qualities -- the way he maintains his resolve even in the face of hardship and disaster. Daryl shows Dwight that there might be another way. Despite the fact that Negan has seemingly crushed the rest of this world under hit bootheel, there is one man who refuses to be flattened, and who might give Dwight the gumption, the belief that there’s the possibility to be something other than Negan’s pawn, that may, one day, allow him to exact his vengeance on the man who disfigured him and abuses his wife.

Apart from the emotional stakes and character development that elevate the episode, “The Cell” also does a nice job of filling in the gaps of Negan’s rule over The Saviors, that not only helps to explain the glimpses we got of the group in Season 6, but which makes this man seem even more terrible and effective.

The way everyone announced themselves as Negan makes sense after his demonstration among his goons, reinforcing the idea that he sees all and that everything belongs to him. It was puzzling last season when Dwight was introduced as a fleeing captive, but returned as a hardened loyalist, but the breaking and torture and resignation and brainwashing functions as a comprehensible rationale for the change of heart. And the idea that Negan “marries” women, that the prospect of this is enough to make people flee, and that he has no compunction of inflicting this on families as punishment adds a new dimension to the horror of this man that sets him apart from prior big bads.

That’s the thing about The Walking Dead. When left to quiet moments and its penchant for conveying its ideas in images rather than words, there is a gripping show that explores the depths of the human condition with a certain conviction, one that doesn’t shy away from the darker side of the human psyche, but one which offers hope and parts of ourselves to admire. When, however, it hammers those points home with cheesy monologues, clunky and grandiose conversations about right and wrong, and props characters only there to further the stories of the week’s protagonists and antagonists, it falls prey to its weakest conventions and loses all punch in the process. “The Cell” has its share of those loud and facile colloquies, but when it steps back and lets the story, the world, and the people within it breathe, it succeeds in saying a great deal while saying very little.