‘The Walking Dead’ Recap: Life on Easy Street
Warning: The recap for “The Cell” episode of The Walking Dead contains storyline and character spoilers.
What’s worse than eating a dog food sandwich? Having a peppy little tune called “Easy Street” blasting on a loop into your earballs, depriving you of a moment to think or sleep. That’s just part of what Daryl Dixon is experiencing as a prisoner of Negan at the Saviors’ Sanctuary, the warehouse-like complex where Daryl is being held, naked and filthy, in a lightless cell.
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With next week’s fourth episode of the season, “Service,” set to catch us up on how Rick Grimes and the rest of his group are dealing with Glenn and Abraham’s deaths when Negan makes his first visit to Alexandria, “The Cell” is all about life inside the Saviors compound, and a grieving, guilt-ridden Daryl, who turns out to have a lot more in common than he might have thought with grieving, guilt-ridden Savior Dwight.
Dwight in Charge
Why are people so willing to go along with Negan’s rules? The opening moments paint one picture, as Dwight, one of Negan’s top right-hand dudes, watches TV (episodes of Who’s the Boss?, which is kinda funny considering it’s deadly clear who’s the boss in Dwight’s world), plays Nok-Hockey, downs liquor, indulges in his figurine-carving hobby, and takes what he wants from the other Saviors’ supplies to make himself a tasty egg sandwich with fresh veggies (and mustard… is that a thing, egg and mustard sandwiches?). Of course, perks aside, Dwight still has to kneel anytime Negan walks by, and there are constant reminders of the messed up world he operates in. While he’s enjoying his egg and mustard sammie, he watches the yard just outside the Saviors’ compound, where men in gray sweatshirts painted with giant letters battle walkers who are tethered and spiked to the ground.
Then Dwight makes another sandwich, spreading A-OK dog food on a bun. He whistles while he walks it to a cell and delivers it to Daryl Dixon, who sits on the ground of the windowless cell, filthy, totally naked, and shaking. He grabs the sandwich Dwight offers and starts eating it, as Dwight exits and locks Daryl in.
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It’s a pattern Dwight will repeat, until he adds another layer to Project Break Daryl: He starts to play, over and over, an upbeat song called “Easy Street.” Lyrics: “We’re on Easy Street/And I feel so sweet/’Cause our world is but a treat/Right here on Easy Street/And we’re breaking out the good champagne/Sitting pretty on the gravy train/I’ll sing every sweet refrain/Right here on Easy Street.” The song blares continuously at Daryl, preventing him from sleeping, and after the third or fourth time you hear it, you have a new appreciation for the power of the earworm as a torture device.
And Dwight continues to add to the mix. During his next visit to Daryl’s cell, he throws his food on the floor and throws one of those lettered gray sweatsuits at Daryl’s head. His bares a giant red “A.” When he visits Daryl next, he takes him from the cell to the doctor’s office, where Dwight runs into his ex-wife, Sherry, now the current wife of Negan. Dwight spots a pregnancy test on the table, and Sherry shakes her head to let him know it was negative. “Well, maybe next time,” he tells her. She recognizes Daryl from their run-in in Season 6’s “Always Accountable,” and tries to warn him, “Whatever they say, just do it.” Dwight tells her not to talk to him, and after she leaves, Dr. Carson tells Daryl his injury will heal if he lets it, and that “Negan’ll take care of you. Trust me.”
Dwight leads Daryl out to the walker yard next, and pushes him against the fence for a closer look as he tells him he can “be like them or me… or them,” meaning Daryl can become a walker, be like Dwight, or be like the guys in sweatsuits who are fighting the walkers in the yard. He takes Daryl back to his cell and urges him to make it easy on himself.
“I ain’t never gonna kneel,” Daryl promises.
“I said that, too,” Dwight says.
Daryl: “Yeah, I know.”
Dwight: “See, that’s the thing, man. You don’t. But you’re gonna.”
Dwight leaves and locks the cell, starting up “Easy Street” as Daryl covers his ears with his hands.
Negan’s the Boss
“He’s going apes–t,” Negan says of Daryl, who’s kicking at the door of his cell. Negan’s chatting with Dwight, telling him he’s impressed by his hustle in trying to break Daryl. “Dwightie Boy,” as Negan condescendingly calls him, tells Negan he thinks Daryl is close to a meltdown.
Negan offers a reward: a “little blast from the past with you-know-who.” When Dwight fails to take the bait and respond to Negan’s taunt about Sherry, Negan says he was just kidding, that Dwight should lighten up. He tells him he can pick whoever he wants, as long as she says yes. Dwight still doesn’t respond, which prompts Negan to take another run at him. He asks if Dwight’s junk is on the fritz after Eugene clamped down on it. Dwight tells him he’s fine, he’s cool, but he’ll pass on the offer of a date.
Negan wonders if they are really cool. Why would he pass on the offer of a date if he was really cool? But Dwight, who is proving himself to be much smarter, less bumbling, than might have originally seemed, particularly in matters to do with Negan, tells his boss he’s passing because he hasn’t earned it yet. He hasn’t finished the job of breaking Daryl. Just then, a voice tells them someone has run away from the compound, and Dwight volunteers to go after him. Negan says that’s grunt work, but Dwight says he wants to do it. “Good boy,” Negan says.
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Dwight and Daryl
While Dwight is out on Daryl’s motorcycle, with Daryl’s crossbow, wearing Daryl’s angel wings vest trying to capture Saviors escapee Gordon, Daryl notes his last food delivery ended with his cell remaining unlocked, and he makes a run for it. As he sneaks down the hallways, narrowly missing running into groups of Saviors, he runs into Sherry, who again warns him. She tells him to return to his cell while he can. “Whatever he’s done to you, there’s more,” she says. “There’s always more.”
Outside the compound, Dwight pushes the bike under an overpass, and a falling walker lands right on him. He drops the bike, which is left inoperable, and Dwight nearly becomes walker chow. Angrier than ever, he spots runaway Gordon up ahead, fighting off a walker. Dwight runs to him and kills the walker, and tells Gordon to start walking back to the Saviors. “There’s nowhere to go,” he tells Gordon. “Everything’s his, or will be!”
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Back inside the compound, Daryl ignores Sherry’s advice and finds his way to a door. He looks out and sees a row of motorcycles, and makes a break for them. But there are no keys, and by this time, a whole lineup of Saviors come out and circle him. Negan soon joins them, carrying Lucille, and starts to ask each of his men, “Who are you?” They each answer, “Negan.” This was his chance, Negan tells Daryl, to realize that Negan is everywhere. He failed. “Which sucks, because your life was about to get so much cooler,” Negan tells him. Now, Daryl has three choices: “wind up on the spike and work for me as a dead man,” get out of the cell and work for points (“but you’re gonna wish you were dead”), or work for Negan and get a brand new pair of shoes and “live like a king.”
“You should know, there is no door number 4,” Negan warns. Daryl doesn’t respond, and instead stares Negan down. Negan lifts Lucille to swing at Daryl, but Daryl stops the swing with his hand. “Wow, you don’t scare easy. I love that,” Negan says, “but Lucille… finds it to be disrespectful. Lucky for you she’s not feeling too thirsty today. But I am.” So he goes off to get a drink, while his men beat on Daryl.
Outside, Dwight is finding Gordon to be as stubborn as Daryl is with Negan. Gordon wants Dwight to shoot him. He’d rather be dead than return to Negan’s rules. “Thug swoops in with a baseball bat and a smile, and we’re so scared that we gave up everything,” Gordon says. “But there’s only one of him and all of us, so why are we living this way?”
“Because look where we are. We were losing,” Dwight says. “Now we’re not.”
Gordon reminds him they were once friendly, and repeats that now there’s nothing left to live for under Negan’s reign. He again refuses to return, and tells Dwight he wants him to shoot him. Dwight, shaken and obviously not as committed to his defense of Negan’s ways, threatens Gordon, telling him he’ll feed s–t sandwiches to his friends and dig up his dead wife and feed her body to the crows if Gordon doesn’t start walking.
He does, and after letting him walk a few feet, Dwight shoots him.
Dwight and Sherry
The exes meet up in a stairwell at the compound. She gives him a cigarette, and he asks if “he” is good to her. She says yes, and asks if Dwight is happy. He says yes, and tells her they made the right choice. “It’s a helluva lot better than being dead.” She agrees, but neither seems to believe it.
Back on Easy Street
Dwight’s ready to go all out to break Daryl, and he’s going to use something far worse than “Easy Street” to do it. When Daryl refuses to eat the sandwich Dwight brings to his cell, Dwight tells him, “You got your friend killed. I got Tina killed. Don’t pretend like you don’t know the score.”
Daryl throws the sandwich in his face, but Dwight continues. “You should be dead! But Negan’s taking a shot at you. You’re lucky, don’t forget.”
Then he tapes a Polaroid up on the wall near Daryl’s head. He leaves the cell and starts playing Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” a song that would make the happiest person cry under the happiest circumstances.
Daryl looks at the photo, tears it off the wall and throws it to the floor. It’s a photo the Saviors took at Glenn and Abraham’s death site, a throwback to those grisly Polaroids Glenn and Heath and the rest of Rick’s group found when they invaded the other Savior compound in Season 6. Daryl picks the photo up again and looks at it and begins crying, sobbing so hard his shoulders are shaking.
Dwight listens to him outside the cell for a minute, and then walks away, certain Daryl is ready to kneel.
Who Are You?
Dwight returns to the cell, and finds Daryl crumpled up on the floor, quietly crying, the Polaroid beside him. He takes him to Negan’s apartment, where Negan offers Daryl a glass of water, and then jokes that he probably can’t drink it, because his mouth is all “puffed up like a baboon’s a–.”
He then downloads Dwight’s full backstory for Daryl, trying to convince him that Dwight was once a rebel, too, and now has done a 180. Dwight’s sister-in-law, Tina, needed meds, but had run out of points for them. Negan offered to marry her and take care of her in sickness and in — “Because I’m a stand-up guy,” he says — and she said she’d think about it. Negan is not someone who responds well to “maybe,” and Dwight decided he’d take all the meds Tina needed and flee with her and Sherry. (That’s when Daryl met up with them in Season 6). Negan’s men chased them down, and after Tina’s death, Dwight and Sherry decided to return to the Saviors and beg for Negan’s forgiveness. He wanted to kill Dwight, but Sherry said she’d take Tina’s place and become his wife if he’d spare Dwight. Even Negan comments on how messed up that situation is, but adds that the indecent proposal was only a start to amends being made. Dwight, whose eyes suggest he is barely containing the hatred he feels during this taunting trip down memory lane, also got a hot iron to the face.
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“After all that, he still got on board,” Negan tells Daryl. “And now look at him… one of my top guys! The point being, I think you could be that guy. I think you are ready to be that guy… all you gotta do is answer one simple question: who are you?”
No reply from Daryl.
“Cat got your tongue?” Negan asks. “You just overwhelmed by the awesomeness of this? I’m gonna ask you one more time: Who are you?”
Lifting his head to look Negan right in the eye, Mr. Dixon answers, “Daryl.”
Dwight starts to yell at Daryl, but Negan cuts him off. “It’s cool, D. He made his choice. Ain’t my problem if he made a dumbass choice.”
Dwight throws Daryl back in his cell, and tells him, “You’re gonna wind up in that room or hanging on the fence!” He starts to walk away, when Daryl says, “I get why you did it. Why you took it. You were thinking about someone else.
“That’s why I can’t.”
Dwight leaves and goes to his thinking spot, by the walker yard. He takes a drink from a beer bottle and then throws the bottle at the fence, near a walker with a bucket on its head. One of the sweatsuit-wearing prisoners takes the bucket off, and the walker turns around and growls and claws at the fence, as if its looking right at Dwight. It’s the zombified version of Gordon.
Zombie Bites:
* The song playing in the opening moments of the episode is The Jam’s 1982 hit “Town Called Malice.” Sample lyrics: “Better stop dreaming of the quiet life/Cause it’s the one we’ll never know/And quit running for that runaway bus/Cause those rosy days are few” … i.e., living in Negan’s world.
* The Saviors’ doctor, Carson, may be the brother of Harlan Carson, the Hilltop doctor who Maggie is trying to get to for help with baby Gleggie. In the comics, Harlan has a brother — referred to only by his last name — who became Negan’s assistant
.* One of the many ways the events of the season premiere continue to haunt: the opening credits, which are missing Steven Yeun and Michael Cudlitz, but now include Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lucille.
* A question for standards and practices at all networks: Why is it OK to say the p-word in primetime, but not the f-bomb? This isn’t specific to The Walking Dead, because the p-word is sprinkled way too liberally throughout all of primetime, on network and basic cable programming. But would hearing Negan say “f–k” really be any more offensive than hearing him tell Dwight it’s “happy hour at the pu–y bar, and Dwight eats for free”?
* Negan seems to think his modest warehouse apartment, with its bed on cinderblocks, a few books, and an old microwave, is the lap of luxury, so wonder how he’s going to react when he gets inside Alexandria and sees the tricked out, modern homes Rick and his crew have been inhabiting?
OK, Dead-heads, let’s hear your reactions to “The Cell”: Are you feeling any differently, maybe more sympathetic, about Dwight? Do you think he’s really “cool” with Negan, and committed to being one of his henchman, or can he be turned to the other side and become one of Negan’s most dangerous enemies, as the character is in the comics? And what about Daryl… do you think he can be broken by Negan or Dwight? And do you think he can ever forgive himself for the actions that led to Glenn’s death?
The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.