Well, that was different. After last week's traumatic massacre of a season premiere, it wasn't immediately easy to see a way forward for The Walking Dead, now that its central group of survivors have been broken down and terrorized into submission by raving sociopath Negan.
As it turns out, the second episode of Season 7, "The Well" doesn't deal with the aftermath of Negan's attack at all, instead moving away from Rick and co. to focus on the two that got away. Carol and Morgan—who don't yet realize just how lucky they are to be separated from the rest of the group—wound up being taken in by a new group of survivors in the Season 6 finale, and in "The Well" we see what their new community looks like.
Still recovering from her gunshot wounds in the finale, Carol is initially delirious and later simply bewildered as she wakes up in "The Kingdom," a place in which Morgan already seems strangely at home. Melissa McBride's deadpan "WTF?" faces are a joy to behold as Morgan takes Carol to see the community's leader, "King Ezekiel," who keeps a pet tiger named Shiva and addresses her as "fair maiden."
The whole thing is ridiculous, and Carol's response makes it reassuringly clear that we're not meant to be buying into this any more than she is. She slips back into the same wide-eyed, cookie-baking housewife guise she adopted in Alexandria, declaring everything to be "wonderful!" while quietly plotting her escape.
The Kingdom does seem pretty wonderful, if a little overly wholesome; it's a self-sustaining agricultural community with its own amateur choir. In contrast to Carol's immediate desire to escape, Morgan seems to have found a place for himself here—especially once Ezekiel enlists him to train one of his men, a bookish type named Benjamin, how to fight with a staff.
By this point in The Walking Dead, we know that any seemingly idyllic and safe community is too good to be true. The Kingdom doesn't quite seem like Woodbury 2.0 yet, and Ezekiel has more self-awareness than The Governor ever did, but it's still hard to feel as though this can end well—a man building himself up both as a king and a kind of god in a world where we already know how completely power corrupts.
The most sinister thing we know so far about The Kingdom is that they're feeding their pigs with walker meat, which seems like really bad news for whoever ends up buying and eating that meat As it turns out, The Saviors are the ones buying the meat, so zombie pork seems karmically appropriate, but are there any repercussions to eating it? We know everyone in The Walking Dead already has the virus dormant in them, so theoretically there should be no harm in ingesting zombie meat.
Also, why introduce a tiger in the first act if it's not going to go off in the third? Ezekiel spent a while talking about how Shiva could easily rip his arm off, break free of her chain, and so on, but she doesn't because she's tame. But what if Shiva gets bitten? A zombie tiger sounds like A) great news for AMC's marketing folks, and B) very bad news for everyone on the show. From the lack of zombie animals on the show so far, it seems like maybe the virus can only be transmitted to humans—but then again, has an animal ever been given a named role like Shiva before? Zombie tiger. You heard it here first.
Although "The Well" is a pretty slow-moving episode, it doesn't make the mistake of dragging out its setup for too long, and thus Ezekiel sees through Carol's "gee golly" act almost immediately. "Never bullshit a bullshitter," he tells her, revealing that his whole vibe is just as much of a sham as hers. His name really is Ezekiel, but everything else is a conscious creation, designed to give people a larger-than-life leader they can look up to (he used to do community theater, which explains the amateur theatrics of his royal persona).
Carol accuses him of "selling people a fairytale," which he acknowledges he is, but is that really any bad thing in a world like this? They agree to keep one another's secrets, and later, once Carol has departed to hole up in a house of her own, Ezekiel shows up at her door seductively holding a pomegranate. Is Carol about to get some (frankly long-overdue) action? That's the kind of cliffhanger we can get behind.
