On the Road Again Season 7 Episodes
Like so many episodes in The Walking Expressionless's 7th season, "Swear" is essentially a short story focused on a unmarried character: Tara Chambler, last seen joining Heath on a two-calendar week supply run in Season Half-dozen'due south "Not Tomorrow Withal." This week'southward episode rejoins the duo at the tail end of their expedition, equally 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 journeying back into the happier pre-Negan days of The Walking Expressionless. Due to her extended absence, Tara doesn't know that the Saviors take since forced her friends into indentured servitude. She doesn't know Glenn and Abraham have been murdered. And nearly 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'due south episode explored what information technology's like to be a meaning widow in the zombie apocalypse.
But while Tara and Heath are blissfully unaware of the new horrors that have descended on the Alexandria survivors, they're having bug of their own. Struggling fruitlessly for supplies despite ii weeks of scavenging, Heath is beginning to lose hope. "I get information technology now," he says. "If it'southward you or someone else, you lot cull you. You have what you lot can, you accept out who you have to, and you become to keep going. Nobody'southward in information technology together. Not anymore." And Tara—one of the few optimists left in this particularly grim universe—considers his whole speech and calls it bullshit.
This is the best episode of The Walking Expressionless and then far this season, presenting us with ii very understandable perspectives on the universe and inviting us to contemplate both of them. Over the course of "Swear," Tara's moral compass is sorely tested. Afterwards an meet with a huge group of walkers on a booby-trapped span, Tara falls over the edge, waking upwards unconscious on a mysterious shore. (Heath's fate is unclear, and remains so every bit the episode ends.)
When Tara awakes, she discovers that she'southward stumbled onto the fringes of a very secret customs. Her fate is in the easily of 2 women who detect 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 manner. (As usual for The Walking Dead, the younger children—who have less context for what the world was like before the zombie apocalypse—are quicker to default to mercilessness in the face up of potential danger.)
In the end, Cyndie wins out, and Tara creeps into the outskirts of the settlement to detect a relatively peaceful community of survivors—all of whom are women. Merely when Tara sets off one of their alarms, she discovers that the grouping is also prepared to defend itself. Armed with an impressive array of attack weapons, the grouping hunts Tara downward—but when Tara gets the risk to kill one of her pursuers, and opts to negotiate instead, they concur to hear her out before they gun her down.
At dinner that evening, Tara meets Natania, the grandmotherly leader of the community. She lays out the options: The community more often than not kills strangers on sight in an attempt to remain hidden—merely Tara, past refusing to kill her pursuer, has earned herself a spot within their ranks. This offering doubles, vaguely, equally a threat: If Tara turns them down, they may have no selection merely 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 you proceed seeing anybody as an enemy, then enemies are all you're gonna discover," she suggests. "Sooner or after, y'all're gonna need a friend" Only the customs is reluctant to risk its safety by revealing its beingness to another grouping. Every bit Natania explains, the group isn't all women past 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 age of ten as a consequence. Even so, the prospect of an alliance is intriguing enough to send a small contingent of representatives to scope it out.
But Tara isn't quite ready to trust her would-be captors nevertheless. When she gets the chance, she runs away once over again—and is once once again saved by Cyndie, who vows to aid her escape to safety on the status that she never comes back. "Nobody'due south evil. They just decide to forget who they are," Cyndie says, trusting Tara when she swears non to come back. "Some people are evil, Cyndie," Tara replies. "I've seen it. That's why I accept to get back now"
And then she leaves. Free from danger—as much as anyone can be complimentary from danger in the zombie apocalypse—Tara revels in small, human joys on her style back to Alexandria. Stopping at a souvenir shop, she fifty-fifty grabs a bobblehead of a doctor, presumably planning to give information technology to Denise, the manner you 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 grin—only to acquire, via the grief-stricken Eugene, that Denise has been murdered past the Saviors—she of a sudden has a very serious option to make. The guns owned by the women'south community could plough the tide of the state of war with the Saviors. Is it worth going dorsum on her give-and-take to ensure her survival, as Heath so recently suggested?
In structure, "Swear" resembles The Sopranos' famously wrenching "Employee of the Month," in which Dr. Melfi is forced to make up one's mind whether to sic Tony Soprano on the man who raped her after he gets off on a technicality. In the end, she doesn't—a noble, painful refusal to resort to vigilante justice in the confront of horror, no thing the personal cost.
Tara's choice isn't quite that stark; Denise is expressionless, and the merely affair she would gain by launching a violent attack on the Saviors is the meager satisfaction of revenge. (I wonder how this same scenario would play out if Denise were alive and being held captive by the Saviors, with the tantalizing possibility of a rescue mission dangling in front of Tara.) But grief tends to bleed into illogic, and information technology's easy to imagine a scenario in which Tara went back to raid the women's army camp, justifying her theft by 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 near whether she stumbled onto whatever guns or armament they could employ during her 2-week sojourn, Tara shrugs: "I didn't see anything like that out in that location." The women'due south community will remain undercover and safety, and Denise'southward murder will—at least for now—go unavenged.
The success of "Swear" is in the delicate moral conundrum it raises, and Tara's complex, ultimately life-affirming response to it. With the exception of Dwight/Darryl two-hander "The Cell," this is what has been missing from The Walking Expressionless in Flavor Vii, which is overly infatuated with the cartoonish Negan. Forget the visceral unpleasantness of Negan's violence, or the ugly philosophical underpinnings behind it, and you'll find an even simpler problem: Cruelty like Negan's just isn't interesting. There'due south zippo to enjoy virtually information technology, and nothing to say about it; it merely sits there, forcing you to simmer in the unpleasantness until he mercifully vacates the screen over again.
Information technology'south possible that The Walking Expressionless volition eventually slip behind Negan's smirking facade and give us a reason to observe him interesting (though his past-the-numbers origin in the comics doesn't inspire much confidence). But until and so, I'll go along holding out for episodes like this 1, which uses the trappings of the zombie apocalypse to tell a story that's genuinely human.
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Source: https://www.gq.com/story/the-walking-dead-season-7-episode-6-recap-on-the-road-again
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