Tales of the Walking Dead – Davon

By: Kelly Kearney

In this season’s penultimate episode we meet Davon, who after getting hit over the head wakes up handcuffed to a zombie. How did he get like this, and how does he know this hungry walker? He spends the next hour flipping through flashbacks like pages in a book trying to jog his memory and figure it out before the locals in town accuse him of murder. 

Wakey-Wakey! 

Handcuffed to a talking zombie (Chelsea Reuter) we meet Davon (Jesse T. Usher), a man on the run from a torch-carrying mob who appears to be hunting him down in the woods. In a quick flashback that plays like an overexposed grindhouse film from the ‘70s, Davon remembers a woman with a kind face and living in  a house adorned with familiar drawings on the walls. His peek into the past doesn’t last long when the hungry walker attached to his hand starts chomping its way toward him. The animated carcass forces Davon to pick up his prosthetic leg and beat the creature into submission. If waking up hooked to a rabid face eater isn’t bad enough, things get worse when out of the darkness a  little girl (Fiona Kate Caruso) approaches him claiming she needs his help. The two must know each other and so when he hears her calling out for her mother he offers his help. That changes when the child turns on him and yells out, “Davon! It’s him! He’s here!” and we start to see lights moving in the woods and they’re coming right for him. Davon has no clue what’s going on or why these torch-carrying townspeople are after him but he knows he has to run and his cuffed zombie friend isn’t making it easy. The dead woman wakes up and in his struggle to break free he starts to hear the woman talking to him. The zombie calls him a murderer, accusing him of killng her. Is this why the angry mob is looking for him? According to her it is, but can you really trust a talking corpse? Davon got hit harder than he thought if he’s questioning a zombie. Dragging the chatty-dead-Kathy along with him, he manages to wait out the mob by hiding under a fallen tree, eventually making his way to an abandoned boathouse. Everything feels familiar and as he keeps looking for a way inside, he discovers a photo of his family tucked in his boot as well as a set of keys dangling from his zombie friend, who tells him her name is “897.” So, not only is he suffering from talking zombie hallucinations but those hallucinations seem to be speaking in riddles? Davon cannot make sense of any of this until he notices the house number, 897. The realization triggers another flashback and this time it’s of two French Canadian women who chopped  off his leg!

7 Weeks Earlier…

The familiar address and the two women flood Davon with memories of the first time he woke up in the house. The two women rescued him after what  can be assumed was a walker bite to the leg. When the groggy patient asks one of the women for his boot, she instead hands him the photo she found tucked inside of it. 

Back to the present and Davon and his sidekick head inside 897’s garage where he finds the gorey evidence of some sort of massacre. Blood and flesh litter the floor and so does his missing boot. Walker 897 croaks out Davon’s worst fear when she says this is the scene of his crime and where he killed her! Hearing this catapults him back to the past in a series of confusing flashes with the very much alive zombie woman says to him, “sometimes murder is mercy.” Was this a mercy killing too? Davon seems too gentle of a man and not your typical psycho-killer. So, why did he take the life of a woman he seems to have fond memories of? To get a better view of the house and what happened there, Davon grabs a hacksaw and cuts his zombie friend free, laying her body down on the dining room table. Everything about the house is so familiar to him and it reminds him of the two women–Nora (Loan Chabanol) and his very lively zombie partner, Amanda (Embeth Davidtz). He also has visions of a teenage boy named Arnaud (Gage Munroe), and all three sitting at that same table eating a meal  During that dinner a conversation sparked about the scar on Arnaud’s neck. Amanda explains he got it when his father ventured beyond the safety of the wall and never came back. That death would traumatize most kids but Arnaud seems to have a more practical take on death in the apocalypse, and his doting mother is proud of him for it. 

After realizing who Amanda is, Davon apologizes to her having realized they were at one time probably friends. Across the room, the piano catches his eye and it flashes him back to a very heated moment with Nora while teaching him how to play. The two have loads of chemistry and seem to be smitten with each other; not that either of them says so. It’s all longing glances and soft smiles as Nora encourages him to continue practicing the lessons and one day he will be as good as she is. In the background of this memory we see a shadowy figure spying on them but the image doesn’t stick with Davon longer than a moment. Leaving the piano and those romantic memories behind, he makes his way to the second floor of the house where he bandages his head and remembers the time he was patched up in the house, Amanda handed him a pair of glasses–not his, those were broken, and told him he is in a French community in Maine and he is safe. He questions that when he tells Amanda he ran into a man in the woods who shot at him from afar. He never returned fire because in a world that seems to have adopted a kill or be killed ideology, Davon believes there are always better options than violence. Amanda disagrees and reiterates her idea that sometimes killing is the only option and can even be merciful. Where has he heard this before? He reaches back into his memories, to a time he heard that same line whispered through the house vents by a child he found chained up in the basement! Everything gets confusing from then on as the memories of the past flood the present with one moment standing out above all the rest. Davon remembers stabbing this whispering child in the head before Amanda placed a black hood over his own and repeated that same mercy-murder line. This horrible truth forces him to think back to a happier time when he foraged for wild strawberries for a salad Nora was craving. Davon isn’t about that fruit mixed with veggies life, but it is clear he would do just about anything for her. The way she looks at him when she sees the kind gesture says the feeling is mutual. 

A Crushing Reality

After a myriad of flashbacks we finally land in the present where Davon’s black hood is removed to reveal the angry mob from the woods. Tied to a gravestone, the people are hurling accusations of murder at him, screaming about their missing children they assumed he killed. Nora is there too, and the romance between the two has been replaced with a seething rage as she joins in on the attacks. Her son, Garen (Mason Bienvenue), is missing too but this passive man couldn’t have killed his love’s son–not to mention a whole town of kids! All of it seems too impossible and Davon tries to explain this but he can’t break through the people’s rage. Enter Arnaud carrying his mother’s body out of the house and drops it at Davon’s feet accusing him of killing Amanda too. Davon continues to deny and says if he did do it,and that’s a big if,  there must have been extenuating circumstances. Arnaud disagrees and presumes Davon killed his kind and beloved mother after she discovered his other crimes in the basement. Confused and desperate to break free from his binds, Davon has no answer the mob wants to hear. They demand to know what he’s done with the rest of the children but other than one image of the boy from the basement, none of their accusations make any sense to him. The crowd screams and reaches out their hands, palms up. It’s a vote on whether to believe him or punish him for his crimes and as you can guess, mercy isn’t what they’re thirsting for.

Punishment it is! And it is a creative one. We watch as they drag Davon to a van and sentence him to death by-way of crushing. He pleads with them to believe he had nothing to do with their missing children but his cries are drowned out by the sounds of a bulldozer gearing up to crush the van with him in it. In the chaos, the fog clears from his mind, and thinks he remembers seeing Amanda kill that boy in the basement. If they kill him, they will be no better than the person they’ve accused him of being. He begs Nora to help him but she stands down as the others toss him into the van. That’s when he remembers a series of drawings he saw on the wall; each one of a child and presumably the ones he’s accused of killing. The drawings bleed into a memory of those same children chained up in the 897 basement, and now he knows he didn’t hurt those kids, but who did?. Nora refuses to listen and as the bulldozer starts to crush the van, Davon screams out the window that there is another boy and he is still alive! If they kill him they’ll never find the child. The crowd is split on what to do, with some wanting to hear him out but others assuming this is an attempt to save his own life. Eventually, Nora can’t take it anymore and pulls the man driving the bulldozer out of his seat just before he turns Davon into a pancake. Everyone in the crowd starts fighting, which gives their captor a chance to slip out of the van and search for the boy he saw. 

The next morning, he spots Arnaud offering a chained-up Garen a delicious treat to soothe him. He claims his mother used to give him a similar flavored delight when he was scared and promises it will soothe Garen too. Listening to Arnaud triggers a flashback where Davon remembers hearing that child’s voice in the basement rattle off a list of flavors over and over again, just like he hears Arnaud doing now! Now he remembers trying to free Garen from the basement– not stab him, and that’s when Amanda knocked him out. Apparently, Garen got away and when Amanda tried to stop him Davon fought her by handcuffing her to him to keep her away from the boy. She eventually died when she attacked Davon and wound up falling face-first into a bucket of acid. Skinless and dead, Arnaud witnessed the entire event and snuck up behind Davon and knocked him out with a tire iron. This is how he wound up dazed in the opening minutes. He was looking for help!

Now that he is clearer on what is going on in this town, Davon storms the boathouse with a wooden bat and confronts Arnaud who is also armed with a knife. He was seconds from feeding Garen one of those flavorful poisons and tells Davon he knew from the moment his mother and Nora brought him home that he would be a problem. So, why is this teenager killing the town’s children? He says it’s to save them from this new world that will probably wind up killing them anyway. A mercy killing–his mother would be so proud! Not that Amanda approved of what her son was up to, it’s just that she was so protective of him after his accident beyond the wall that she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him again. That same mob who came for Damon would have come for Arnaud, so she protected him at the cost of everyone else’s children. Backing away from Arnaud’s knife, Davon leaves the boathouse and that’s when he hears the moaning sounds of the dead beneath his feet. There he finds a trap door built into the ground of the woods, and when he pulls the make-shift hatch back he sees two zombified children squirming in the dirt pit. Arnaud is keen on tossing him in there along with his other victims, but that’s when Nora and the others show up just in time to see Garen escaping the house. He fingers Arnaud as the real killer and person who kept him captive, and in return, Arnaud throws an epic tantrum–screaming about what a liar Garen is. For all his dramatics, nbody believes him–the evidence is too damning. With the town ready to fire up that bulldozer, Davon decides to act as a mirror reflecting the townsfolk’s vengeful ways. He reminds them that they were seconds from killing him–an innocent man just the day before. “Would you have regretted it when Arnaud killed another one of your children and then realized that it wasn’t even me?” he asks. Doubtful– they were too hopped up on payback to listen to reason. Like the pacifist he told Amanda he was, Davon tries convincing them to give up this killer mindset because they get to decide how they choose to live now. They don’t have to do it this way, they have options. Nora disagrees, and slaps Arnaud and the rest of the angry parents follow her lead, Eventually the killer-teen winds up in the pit of his own undoing–eaten by the gnashing teeth of his victims. The angry mob learned nothing from this ordeal, and as they cheer on the demise of another, albeit evil, child, Davon looks on in horror. Disillusioned but hoping for others like him outside of this town, he leaves the mob to their celebration of justice muttering in French, “I will see.” Maybe he will, and there really are thriving communities beyond the wall who believe in justice without its deadly sword. From the determined look on his face, Davon is sure he will find it.