CAUTION: MAJOR SPOILERS ARE IN The Walking Dead – The Cell Review
The Cell is the third episode of season 7 for this year and it’s all about what happened to Daryl (Norman Reedus), after Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) took him back with him to his town in the first episode for this season. This episode is also about Dwight (Austin Amelio), a character we met in season six who has a bit of history with Daryl. We now see them both at Negan’s place and Dwight is put in charge of taking care of Daryl (not in a nice way though).
Daryl has always been one of my favourite characters in The Walking Dead, probably my second favourite after Rick (Andrew Lincoln). While I don’t mind getting a Daryl episode here for episode 3, I was really looking forward to seeing what was going on with Rick’s group. Hopefully we get to find out what’s going on with all of them next week.
In contrast to last week’s episode, this one is far more bleak, it basically involves Negan, Dwight and a couple other members of that group, trying to psychologically break Daryl’s character to a point where he can then become one of Negan’s men. However, even though he’s kept in a room naked (in the beginning), is given some horrible photo to look at, gets forced to listen to the same song over and over again and has to eat dog food sandwiches every day. He surprisingly doesn’t break and when asked what’s his name by Negan, to which he’s supposed to reply “Negan” and then become part of the group, he doesn’t, he says his own name. Daryl has incredibly strong will and didn’t break, to some extent I do hope this is also true of Rick, who I suspect is not completely broken after episode one.
The Dwight character also gets quite a few scenes in this episode. I think they’ve put him in so that we can kind of see how Negan’s group operates. But we do learn about the tragic fate of his sister and his wife once they were caught by Negan at some point during season six. You see that Dwight was kind of broken into working for Negan and there’s this theme that even though it’s really bad there in Negan’s group, at least you’re still alive. There’s a person who has a lot of courage and tries to escape that place and Dwight takes him down for leaving the group. I guess the question for the audience is, is it better to be in there with Negan or be out there with The Walkers?
The Cell is an interesting episode for Daryl’s character and Norman Reedus was given a fairly challenging role in this episode which was mostly devoted to developing his character. We also get to know the horrific conclusion to what happened to Dwight and his small group. I guess this episode further shows how bad Negan is and at this point I really hate that character, I mean he’s a great villain and Jeffrey Dean Morgan is doing some great things with the character, but I still hate him, I hope someone gets him at the end of the season.
