The Walking Dead: Lennie James Explains Morgan’s Alexandria Jail

At the end of last Sunday’s episode of The Walking Dead, the audience caught a glimpse of what Morgan was up to back at Alexandria while Rick and the group slaughtered some Saviors in their sleep. He’s building a jail.

The aikido practicing character strongly believes in refraining from killing others. It’s not necessarily something he believes in for the sake of others, though, as much as it is something he refrains from for his own sake.

“Morgan is not killing because he’s good at it,” Lennie James explained to ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview. “He got really good at it. It was all consuming and it’s almost like he’s an addict to a certain extent and he knows that if he has just one drink, it may well lead him all the way down the road into a binge.”

The struggle of not wanting to kill but still wanting to help is what lead Morgan to build the jail cell in Alexandria according to James.

“It’s kind of like conscientious objectives during times of war who say that they don’t want to fight but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to help the struggle so will become medics or stretcher bearers or whatever,” James explains. “Just because Morgan is saying that he doesn’t want to kill people, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to do something to protect the Alexandrians. He knows just from past experience that this town is going to need a jail and it’s going to need to be one that is more secure than the one he was in and particularly the one that the Wolf was in. Having seen how easy it was for the W man to get away, Morgan believes the one thing he can contribute to the group and possibly, strangely, maybe save lives, is by building a cell.”

The jail cell is a staple of the Alexandria community in The Walking Dead comics. In fact, Negan ends up in prison after he and Rick go to war. He is repeatedly visited down in his dark cell and, in the most recent issue, escaped. We’re a long ways from Negan possibly being locked up in jail, seeing as we still have to meet the character, but Morgan sees a more humane future without a 100% execution rate of Alexandrian offenders.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 PM ET on AMC.