PopHorror Let's Get Scared
After last week’s heartbreaking and bloody season premiere, fans of The Walking Dead have mourned the loss of two of the series’ regulars and have had time to think about the show itself and where it is going. What will life be like without Glenn and Abraham? Will the gaunt and sickly Maggie make it to the lair of the Saviors or will Sasha have to continue on her own? What are the Saviors doing to Daryl? What the hell have Carol and Morgan been up to? Can the rest of season 7 survive the enormity of episode 1 or did The Walking Dead climax in the first episode? Some of these questions were answered in episode 2, titled “The Well.”
WARNING!!! There’s spoilers in them thar hills!
Although many of those questions remain, we did get the 411 on what happened to Carol and Morgan while Rick was watching his friends’ heads get bashed in. Last season had Carol running away from life – literally – and Morgan “Hero Complex” Jones doing his damnedest to save her. I’m still not sure what snapped inside Carol to make her suddenly suicidal and unwilling to stay with her apocalypse family, but it did.
Time and again, Morgan would catch up to her, and as soon as his head was turned, she would sneak off into the night. Just as last season was wrapping up, Carol had been ambushed and nearly killed by a few straggling Saviors, only to be saved by Morgan and a couple of new guys swinging swords, riding horses and dressed in sports equipment protection. As the knights in padded armor took out the walkers all around them, Carol actually hallucinated the zombies as still living humans. Either that or she could suddenly see the past. It could go either way.
Carol wakes up after two days to find herself in a medieval type town called The Kingdom where she meets the dreadlocks sporting, enormous tiger owning royalty calling himself King Ezekiel. The whole thing looks admittedly ridiculous in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, and Carol isn’t falling for it. As Morgan teaches a young man named Ben aikido, Carol nice guys her way through The Kingdom, collecting clothes, knives and chocolate so she can leave this crazy place.
Before she can step outside the gates, however, she’s stopped by Ezekiel, who drops his kingly facade and explains that he only acts this way to give the people in his town someone to look up to and trust. He had actually been a zookeeper in his former life and had saved Shiva the tiger from bleeding to death after an injury, causing her to imprint on him. It’s the fantasy that makes them feel safe, and secure people work harder and produce more.
What he neglects to mention to her is the reason he needs his people to produce so much – he’s also under the Saviors’ collective thumb, and to keep the psychos off his back, he has to deliver a weekly ration of food to them. Like the giant grasshoppers from A Bug’s Life, the smarmy Savior douchebags swoop in and take everything that the little Kingdom drones have worked so hard to collect. This week, the Saviors wanted meat, so the Knights rounded up some wild pigs. Little do the Saviors know that, before slaughtering the pigs, the Knights fed them walker flesh. I’m not sure if it will affect anyone once the meat has been cooked, but even if it didn’t, the Knights got to shove a passive aggressive middle finger up at them. Hopefully the meat at least tastes like shit.
The episode ends with Carol insisting on leaving but content to stay in a house just outside of town. This way, she can go and stay at the same time. Just before the credits roll, Ezekiel brings her a pomegranate. Where the hell did this guy get pomegranates from? Isn’t he in Georgia?
Tune back in to PopHorror next week to find out what else is going on in this season of The Walking Dead. According to the previews, it looks like we’re up for some Daryl torture at the hands of the Saviors. Hopefully he gets a chance to shove a grenade up one of their asses or something before he’s there for too long. No one puts Daryl in a corner.
