7x06 Swear

8.4/10. I’m not sure I could tell you much about Tara prior to this episode. I knew that she came to our humble brood via The Governor. I knew that she was with the group that met up with Abraham, Rosita, and Eugene after the prison fell. I knew that she was dating Denise. But otherwise, like so many of the show’s secondary characters, I’m hard pressed to think of any way in which she’s been fleshed out enough to really register for me.

Until now.

That’s the strength of The Walking Dead’s increasingly sprawling ensemble and piecemeal method of storytelling. There is room to take a character like Tara, who’s heretofore been a supporting player at best, give her the spotlight for an episode, and deepen our understanding of who these people are and what’s at stake by the time the real Negan-challenging fireworks of the season start to go off. In just a single episode, Tara went from being another nondescript survivor to shooting up my list of intriguing and endearing characters.

Part of that is just getting to spend more time with her. Tara is funny in a way we’ve seen only in small doses (at best) in prior episodes. There’s an unassuming charm to her, a way that she doesn’t let anything phase her. She’s quick with an amusing remark, but never seems flip about it, just casual. Tara clearly takes the situations she’s been thrust into seriously, but manages to be one of the few people on this show with a sense of humor about it all. That levens scenes where she’s the focus and gives her a distinguishing spark when she gets to be the center of attention.

But part of it comes from the moral choice she makes in “Swear,” when given every reason to go another way. It’s heavy-handed as usual, but in the episode, The Walking Dead poses an ethical question about humanity, that’s really the same one it’s been mulling over since the first episode of the series -- when the institutions around us fall, do we retain our humanity, our empathy, our altruism, or do we become craven, purely self-interested, and apt to take what we need without regard to the consequences.

That sounds grandiose (and it’s the eternal question zombie stories have been asking since at least Romero), but it works here as an echo of the story the series told in “Not Tomorrow Yet” where we saw our heroes slaughter a group of Saviors at an outpost in the middle of the night. There is a push and pull in the episode between characters who may even want to be good but feel that the harsh circumstances of the world as it is require a fair amount of cruelty and looking out for one’s own as a form of self-preservation, and those who believe that trust and kindness are still possible.

That comes through in the parallel stories “Swear” tells. The first is the story of Heath and Tara going on the scavenging expedition Tara mentioned last season. Heath is still processing the events of the raid on the Saviors’ compound. It’s become a watershed moment for him, one that threatens to turn the tide in his mind, from a belief that society could rebuilt and others could be welcomed, to a belief that you do what you have to do to survive. Tara tries to rebuff him on the latter idea, but it’s clearly weighing on him as they go out into the world.

The second involves Tara, after some unknown incident later in time, washing up on a beach where she’s found by a pair of scouts from another group. (For the ease of reference and due to their water-adjacent confines I’m going to refer to them as the Pescatarians.) When she wakes up, follows the scouts home, and is caught in the process, she finds a community where trespassers are shot on site and outsiders are not tolerated.

Even there, however, there is a conflict between those who want to maintain that stricture and those who believe there is room for kindness and empathy. Their leader, Natania, does not seem like a cruel Negan-style dictator, but instead explains that their harshness comes from the group’s experience with Negan. She tells Tara that they were once the Saviors’ victims, that every male above the age of ten was lined up and shot by Negan’s goons, and that their efforts to run away and attack and kill anything that even resembles a threat is an effort to ensure that they can live in peace and that nothing like that will ever happen to them again.

Despite that rule, Tara is helped repeatedly by Natania’s granddaughter, Cyndie. Cyndie stops another of the Pescatarians from killing Tara when she was passed out. She leaves food and water for Tara on the beach. She saves Tara from her compatriots after Tara makes a run for it and shoots oncoming walkers from aware to allow Tara to make her escape. Natania is desperate enough to invoke a certain amount of brutality in the name of protection, while Cyndie is still committed to notions of mercy and trust.

The contrast is clear, and while Negan does not appear in this episode, “Swear” serves as, perhaps, an even greater indictment of him and his terrible lieutenants than even the horror of the season premiere. “Swear” gives you the impression that the Pescatarians were and perhaps are good people. Despite their rules, they try to find a way to let Tara live; they have reasonable justifications for their way of doing things, and they do not seem cruel for the sake of cruelty like The Saviors. But they have been made to be this way by the horrid acts of others. It’s a horrifying version of the prisoner’s dilemma, where not acting with such vicious self-defense leaves you open to The Saviors of this new world.

Rachel, the little girl who travels with Cyndie, is a symbol of the real damage Negan and his infectious attitude toward the new order. Again, none of this is subtle, but Rachel takes pleasure in killing walkers; she trains a gun on Tara and appears willing to pull the trigger. The ethos of dealing swiftly and mortally with outsiders has seeped into young people with no context of how things were before. The threat, then, is that this way of life will be passed down, until no one can recall a time of cooperation and community.

And yet, there are signs that all hope and trust is not stamped out yet. Tara’s ticket into the compound is the fact that she had the chance to shoot one of her Pescatarian pursuers and chose to spare her. Despite a tease that Heath is going to take his new self-interested philosophy to heart and leave Tara to the walkers (who emerge from beneath a mound of sand, in the show’s latest creative spin on the zombie attack), he returns to help Tara fight. And Cyndie, despite repeated admonishments from Natania to stay out of it, risks her own life to save Tara from her fellow Pescatarians.

When Tara escapes, “Swear” delivers a slow, melancholy sequence of Tara finding her way back to Alexandria. It’s an outstanding collection of scenes, backed by a meandering clean guitar and beautiful images of Tara making it through rough hewn stores and upturned boat until she manages to make it back. The change in her expression from when she watches the gates open to when she sees Eugene’s face is affecting, and the symbol of the doctor bobblehead that she gazes at and holds tightly in her hand convey the state of pain she’s in upon learning what happened to Denise.

That’s what makes her eventual choice all the more meaningful. Tara has every reason to give up the Pescatarians to Rosita. They tried to kill her simply for trying to go back without them. They have weapons and ammunition that could be used to help stage a rebellion against The Saviors. Her girlfriend was killed by Negan’s goons, and she’s in a place where she’s not apt to make the most sound decisions, where it’s easy to make a decision that helps get vengeance on the people who murdered someone you love.

But she doesn’t. Whether it because of her promise to the Pescatarians not to, or because of the beliefs she pleads with Heath over, she stays quiet about the people she met on her unexpected detour. She makes a choice, against brutal self-interest and for being good, even to people who aren’t necessarily so good to you.

In a season with so much cruelty, so much difficulty, so much reason to throw your hands up and do whatever you need to do to survive, “Swear” tells the story of someone presented with chance after chance to give into those demons, to let Negan’s philosophy ooze its way into everyone and everything he touches, who stays steadfast. Tara is funny, resourceful, and clever here, but more than that, she’s a beacon of hope, a walking reminder that even in the harsh environs and cruel personalities The Walking Dead presents, there are still people unwilling to sully their souls, hoping for a better day, even in the worst of times.