In ‘The Walking Dead’ recap, Morgan and Carol are introduced to the Kingdom and a leader named King Ezekiel…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
One of the earliest themes that was explored on ‘The Walking Dead’ — TV show and the comic book for that matter — was the idea that everybody in this world needs a leader.
In the beginning, Rick was a reluctant leader who didn’t want people following him, but it was clear as time moved forward that he was a natural at it. People wanted to follow Rick because he led them to a place of promise and hope — no matter how miniscule it might have seemed at times.
Negan is a very powerful leader — a dictator of sorts — and his larger than life presence and willingness to do what the other guy won’t makes him a very charismatic person to follow. Negan is also rather frightening and if you remember a scene from the classic film “A Bronx Tale’ when Sonny explains to C about his power over the neighborhood and how he’d rather be loved than feared — “it’s fear that keeps them loyal to me.” That’s Negan.
In the case of King Ezekiel — he’s giving the people someone they can believe in and someone who will protect them. Sure his back story is a little ludicrous and he’s way over the top but we are living in the zombie apocalypse here after all. This entire world is over the top. King Ezekiel has carved out a place for himself, but not out of some desire to rule. Instead, he’s a benevolent leader who wants to provide for his people and give them someone to depend on.
It’s one of the reasons why Ezekiel is such a beloved character in the comics and why after one episode on ‘The Walking Dead’, it’s easy to see why he will be loved on television as well.
With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of ‘The Walking Dead’ titled ‘The Well’….
The King’s Court
After being rescued by Morgan and some soldiers from the Kingdom at the end of last season, Carol is being transported back for help for her gunshot wounds when the group encounters some walkers. While Morgan and the others fend them off, Carol is having fever dreams, going in and out of consciousness, while seeing visions of walkers transforming into living, breathing people and then back to being dead again.
She finally passes out and when she wakes up two days later, Carol finds herself inside the Kingdom with Morgan awaiting the chance to give her a guided tour.
Morgan explains that this place is a community not all that unlike Alexandria — although he’s hidden that place from these people to this point — and he starts to explain that the leader here is a man known as King Ezekiel. Morgan takes Carol to have an audience with the king and that’s where she meets his highness and his pet tiger named Shiva.
King Ezekiel is like something ripped from your local Renaissance Fair — he’s royal and regal, and complete with a British accent — which leads Carol to a somewhat strange reaction. She’s immediately taken by this king and in between blushes and timidity Carol even manages to call him “your highness”.
In other words, Carols is turning back into Suzy Homemaker for the sake of putting on a good show for the king.
After her audience ends, Carol calls bullshit when speaking to Morgan and nearly bursts out in laughter after his over the top performance. Carol tells Morgan as soon as she’s healthy enough to leave, she’s getting out of this sideshow and returning to her path to nowhere in particular.
Enter the Saviors
Since Carol has been laid up, Morgan has been helping out at the Kingdom with whatever job they might need him to accomplish. His goal today is to help King Ezekiel and some of his men herd a group of pigs into a room where they will feast on a rotting corpse. Ezekiel makes it clear that they want the pigs to feast on the corpse because these animals aren’t going back to the Kingdom and there’s no reason to waste their food supply on the soon to be slaughtered beasts, who will be taken away.
Out on the hunt, a kid named Ben also gets his first chance to kill a walker, but he can’t quite get the hang of using a machete. On the way back to town, Ezekiel asks Morgan to train Ben with the bo staff — he hasn’t been good with a gun or a machete, so perhaps his problems have been with the choice of weapon rather than an unwillingness to learn. Ezekiel explains that Ben will become a crucial part of his court one day and he needs the boy to learn.
Morgan agrees to take the boy under his wing and starts teaching him how to swing the staff before the group heads back out that day to make the delivery with the slaughtered pigs. It appears the Kingdom is another community under the thumb of Negan and his Saviors and the animals were part of their weekly delivery to him.
Ezekiel seems rather subservient to the Saviors, even telling one of his men to stop winning a fight after he gets into a war of words that turns physical with one of Negan’s goons. After the exchange is made, the leader of the group tells Ezekiel that next week will be for produce so don’t hold back or be late or Negan will be forced to kill someone.
While all of this is happening, Morgan clutches his gun because he knows all about the Saviors and how dangerous this group really can be. Back in town, Morgan sits at dinner with his new protégé Ben where he learns a little bit more about the boy and the Kingdom’s relationship with the Saviors.
First off, Ben is caring for his little brother because their father died while out scavenging for supplies working for King Ezekiel. His father and Ezekiel were very close so that stands to reason why Ben is so important to the king.
Ben also explains why King Ezekiel deals with the Saviors, keeps it a secret from most of his people and doesn’t ever fight back. It seems King Ezekiel is fighting the lesser of two evils with this deal. He knows the Saviors have more men and more guns and if he told his people about them, they’d want to fight back and eventually they’d lose. So rather than start a war they can’t win, Ezekiel just deals with the Saviors and keeps his people safe rather than slaughtered.
Don’t Bullshit a Bullshitter
Throughout the following days after waking up, Carol starts making her way around the Kingdom while making nice with anyone and everyone who talks to her. She’s one step away from making cookies and handing them out to everybody with this homemaker routine. Of course, Carol is secretly hording supplies like clothes, food and knives so she can make her grand escape to get out of this place.
Finally, Carol makes her move and when Morgan arrives to her room to bring her dinner, she’s gone.
On the way out of town, Carol runs into King Ezekiel, who has been keeping an eye on her ever since she arrived in town. It seems while Carol may have fooled everybody else with her too nice to be nice routine, he saw right through it.
You can’t bullshit a bullshitter he tells her.
That’s when King Ezekiel drops the British accent and tells her the truth — he was a zookeeper, who helped Shiva when she was injured under his care and she’s been loyal to him ever since. When the zombie apocalypse first started, Ezekiel saved her from captivity and took her with him and she’s never so much as flashed a claw in his direction but did manage to protect him from the dead ever since this whole mess started.
Over time, people started to follow Ezekiel — he was a guy walking around with a tiger on a leash after all — and he decided to adopt this new persona as a way to give them hope for survival. In his spare time away from the zoo, Ezekiel was a community actor who played Macbeth and other kings so using the British accent just came natural.
And then a funny thing happened.
People started to follow him and they found hope and they found a purpose to live and to fight back against this world that was telling them to give up. He put on a show and now everybody plays a part. Carol agrees to keep his secret but more than anything she just wants to go. Ezekiel offers her a compromise — she can go away but not away.
Instead of leaving the Kingdom and just wandering the Earth like Jules in “Pulp Fiction”, she will move into a house just outside the gates and walls of the community. There she will have the privacy she wants and the solitude she needs, but still won’t be far from people who would gladly help her out if she needed it.
Morgan gives her a ride to the new house before he heads back to the Kingdom where it seems like he’s found a new home and a purpose. Carol barely gets a fire lit inside when she gets a knock at the front door and roar of a tiger letting her know that King Ezekiel has arrived. When she opens the door, King Ezekiel greets her with a smile and a pomegranate — the same fruit she turned down when he offered her a snack after they first met.
This time, Carol smiles back.
‘The Walking Dead’ returns next Sunday night at 9pm ET on AMC.
