‘Tales of TWD’ Recap: Jessie T. Usher’s Devon Has Mixed Up, Murderous Memories
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Tales of The Walking Dead Season 1 episode 5, “Davon.”]
The A-Train is back, ba—wait, wrong show. But isn’t it cool to see Jessie T. Usher join the Walking Dead universe?
In “Davon,” Usher plays a character far removed from The Boys’ super-speedy superhero. Davon is a regular ol’ survivor in the walker-verse, aside from waking up in the forest with a mob surrounding him and insisting he committed a murder he has no memory of. You know. Normal survivor stuff.
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Usher’s Davon goes on a tour through his memories as he runs from the crowd, piecing together what happened to him bit by bit at each location. We discover that he wound up in the community, which is in Maine (Stephen King, anyone?), as he was trying to get to Montreal. On the way, he suffered some mysterious injury which led to the lower half of his leg needing to be amputated — we never find out what actually happened there — and he winds up in the care of two women, Amanda (Embeth Davitz) and Nora (Loan Chabonol). They nurse him back to health, and Amanda introduces him to her son, Arnaud (Gage Munroe). As time passes, Davon and Nora begin a relationship, but there’s still a sense that something’s off in their community.
Davon goes back to the house where they were living and goes down to the basement, where he has some strange flashbacks of finding tied-up children. He hallucinates Amanda finding him there, but in reality, the mob that was chasing him tracked him down. They haul him back into the community and tie him to a gravestone, demanding to know what he did with their children. He says, honestly, that he didn’t do anything with them, he doesn’t remember them, and that he didn’t kill anyone. That’s not good enough for the bloodthirsty mob, which almost kills him before he has another well-timed burst of memory and says he knows what happened.
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He finds Arnaud in a cabin, where he tells Nora’s son to pick from several flavors of cake. Based on his memories, Davon now knows that cake was poisoned, and the children Amanda and Arnaud had tied up in the basement they were intending to kill. Davon never killed anyone; when Amanda found him in the basement he handcuffed her to him to stop her from hurting the children, but she fell into a vat of acid and died.
In the present, Davon asks Arnaud how he could do such a horrible thing. To Arnaud, he’s protecting the children’s innocence by ensuring they never have to grow up to do the awful things the zombie-infested world requires of them. “Murder is mercy,” he says. From there, Davon plays it smart — he lures Arnaud out of the cabin and then calls in the mob, while also conveniently discovering a grave with the reanimated walkers of two children.
By now, you probably know where this is headed. Davon’s name is cleared, while Arnaud winds up in that walker pit, being eaten alive by the children he killed. The episode ends with a “classic TWD” speech about being better, although it ends on a note suggesting that while Davon thinks there’s hope for people, there might not be hope for this particular community.
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For me, this episode falls in a solid second place, just behind “Blair/Gina.” Jessie T. Usher does great work, although in his case, it’s hard not to want a little more about the character. The moody atmosphere and setting differentiated it from TWD’s typical “out in the woods” backgrounds. While the ending was somewhat predictable, it wasn’t always clear what was going to happen.
I could’ve done without the talking walker (I know I said I wanted this show to get weird, but there’s such a thing as too weird), and I wish the eerie community had been explored a little more. One-off episodes are a double-edged sword; if you dislike a story or character you don’t need to see them again, but if you have a particularly complex story or character or setting, it’s a bummer to have to cram everything into 45 minutes. In this episode, that strain was clear.
Rating: 3.5/5
Tales of The Walking Dead, Sundays, 9/8c, AMC
