On the Road Again Season 7 Episode 27
Like so many episodes in The Walking Dead's seventh season, "Swear" is essentially a curt story focused on a single character: Tara Chambler, last seen joining Heath on a 2-calendar week supply run in Season Six's "Not Tomorrow Yet." This week's episode rejoins the duo at the tail end of their trek, as they prepare to head back to Alexandria with the meager supplies they've managed to scavenge.
This limited perspective allows us to take a brief journey back into the happier pre-Negan days of The Walking Dead. Due to her extended absence, Tara doesn't know that the Saviors have since forced her friends into indentured servitude. She doesn't know Glenn and Abraham have been murdered. And most importantly, she doesn't know that her girlfriend Denise—who previously promised to tell her she loved her when she returned—has been killed by Dwight.
And this week's episode explored what it'south similar to be a significant widow in the zombie apocalypse.
Simply while Tara and Heath are blissfully unaware of the new horrors that accept descended on the Alexandria survivors, they're having bug of their own. Struggling fruitlessly for supplies despite two weeks of scavenging, Heath is get-go to lose hope. "I get it now," he says. "If it's you or someone else, you lot choose you. Yous have what yous can, yous have out who y'all accept to, and you become to proceed going. Nobody's in it together. Non anymore." And Tara—one of the few optimists left in this particularly grim universe—considers his whole spoken language and calls information technology bullshit.
This is the best episode of The Walking Dead then far this season, presenting us with 2 very understandable perspectives on the universe and inviting u.s. to contemplate both of them. Over the form of "Swear," Tara'south moral compass is sorely tested. After an encounter with a huge group of walkers on a booby-trapped span, Tara falls over the edge, waking up unconscious on a mysterious shore. (Heath's fate is unclear, and remains so as the episode ends.)
When Tara awakes, she discovers that she'southward stumbled onto the fringes of a very cloak-and-dagger community. Her fate is in the easily of 2 women who discover her on the embankment: Rachel, an adolescent who wants to smash her head in, and Cyndie, a young woman who wants to give Tara water, food, and a spear to defend herself before they send her on her fashion. (Equally usual for The Walking Dead, the younger children—who accept less context for what the world was like before the zombie apocalypse—are quicker to default to mercilessness in the face of potential danger.)
In the end, Cyndie wins out, and Tara creeps into the outskirts of the settlement to discover a relatively peaceful community of survivors—all of whom are women. Simply when Tara sets off 1 of their alarms, she discovers that the group is also prepared to defend itself. Armed with an impressive assortment of assault weapons, the group hunts Tara down—but when Tara gets the chance to kill i of her pursuers, and opts to negotiate instead, they hold to hear her out before they gun her down.
At dinner that evening, Tara meets Natania, the grandmotherly leader of the customs. She lays out the options: The community generally kills strangers on sight in an endeavor to remain hidden—but Tara, by refusing to kill her pursuer, has earned herself a spot within their ranks. This offer doubles, vaguely, as a threat: If Tara turns them downward, they may take no option but to kill her, to ensure she won't spread the word.
Tara proposes an alternative: An alliance with the Alexandria survivors, designed to oppose the Saviors. "If yous continue seeing everyone as an enemy, then enemies are all you're gonna find," she suggests. "Sooner or later, yous're gonna demand a friend" But the community is reluctant to risk its rubber by revealing its existence to another group. As Natania explains, the group isn't all women by option; when they originally encountered the Saviors, they attempted to resist—and when the Saviors crushed them in battle, they killed all men over the historic period of ten as a event. Nevertheless, the prospect of an brotherhood is intriguing plenty to send a small contingent of representatives to scope it out.
Just Tara isn't quite set to trust her would-be captors yet. When she gets the chance, she runs away once once more—and is once again saved by Cyndie, who vows to help her escape to prophylactic on the condition that she never comes dorsum. "Nobody's evil. They just determine to forget who they are," Cyndie says, trusting Tara when she swears not to come back. "Some people are evil, Cyndie," Tara replies. "I've seen it. That'due south why I have to get back now"
And so she leaves. Free from danger—as much every bit anyone can exist free from danger in the zombie apocalypse—Tara revels in small, homo joys on her way back to Alexandria. Stopping at a souvenir shop, she even grabs a bobblehead of a doctor, presumably planning to give it to Denise, the mode yous bring a loved one a gift after a long vacation. And when Tara struts back to Alexandria wearing a pair of goofy pink sunglasses and a grinning—only to learn, via the grief-stricken Eugene, that Denise has been murdered by the Saviors—she all of a sudden has a very serious option to brand. The guns endemic past the women'southward customs could turn the tide of the war with the Saviors. Is it worth going dorsum on her word to ensure her survival, as Heath and then recently suggested?
In structure, "Swear" resembles The Sopranos' famously wrenching "Employee of the Month," in which Dr. Melfi is forced to decide whether to sic Tony Soprano on the man who raped her after he gets off on a technicality. In the terminate, she doesn't—a noble, painful refusal to resort to vigilante justice in the confront of horror, no affair the personal cost.
Tara'south choice isn't quite that stark; Denise is dead, and the only matter she would gain by launching a violent assault on the Saviors is the meager satisfaction of revenge. (I wonder how this same scenario would play out if Denise were live and being held convict by the Saviors, with the tantalizing possibility of a rescue mission dangling in front of Tara.) But grief tends to bleed into illogic, and it's easy to imagine a scenario in which Tara went dorsum to raid the women'south camp, justifying her theft past the righteousness of her cause, or the possibility of retaliation for her escape.
Instead, she lies. When Rosita insists on trying to make things right, grilling Tara about whether she stumbled onto whatever guns or armament they could employ during her ii-week sojourn, Tara shrugs: "I didn't see anything similar that out there." The women's community will remain underground and safe, and Denise's murder will—at least for at present—become unavenged.
The success of "Swear" is in the delicate moral conundrum it raises, and Tara's circuitous, ultimately life-affirming response to it. With the exception of Dwight/Darryl two-hander "The Jail cell," this is what has been missing from The Walking Expressionless in Season Seven, which is overly infatuated with the cartoonish Negan. Forget the visceral unpleasantness of Negan'due south violence, or the ugly philosophical underpinnings behind it, and yous'll discover an even simpler problem: Cruelty like Negan'south just isn't interesting. There'south zip to savor about it, and nothing to say nigh it; it just sits there, forcing yous to simmer in the unpleasantness until he mercifully vacates the screen once again.
It'southward possible that The Walking Dead will somewhen skid behind Negan's smirking facade and give us a reason to observe him interesting (though his by-the-numbers origin in the comics doesn't inspire much confidence). But until and so, I'll keep belongings out for episodes like this one, which uses the trappings of the zombie apocalypse to tell a story that's genuinely human.
Source: https://www.gq.com/story/the-walking-dead-season-7-episode-6-recap-on-the-road-again
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