We’re on easy street, and it feels so sweet, ’cause the world is ’bout a treat when you’re on easy street. Those infamous (and probably flashback-triggering) lyrics from “Easy Street,” the song from The Collapsable Hearts Club used to torture a captive Daryl (Norman Reedus) on The Walking Dead, almost made a comeback in Sunday’s Fear the Walking Dead. In “Honey,” former Savior Dwight (Austin Amelio) interrogates Ranger Reg (Dennis Fitzgerald) over the whereabouts of Virginia (Colby Minifie), who he plots to track down and kill so that nothing is standing in-between him and wife Sherry (Christine Evangelista).
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Before Dwight and Rollie (Cory Hart) menace a hooded and guts-covered Reg with a snarling dog, their prisoner is forced to listen to a looped recording of David Wilkins song “Yesterday, Tomorrow and Today.” But the episode, which addresses Sherry and Dwight’s deep-rooted trauma inflicted upon them by Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), considered a return to Easy Street as another callback to Dwight’s time at the Sanctuary.
“It was our fantastic music supervisors. They gave us some options and we liked that one,” showrunner Ian Goldberg told Entertainment Weekly about the song choice. “We liked, tonally, that it felt like a cousin of ‘Easy Street.’ That was what we liked about it.”
Added showrunner Andrew Chambliss, “We did entertain for a little while using ‘Easy Street,’ but it just felt like in the apocalypse, finding some form of media that had ‘Easy Street’ on it would be next to impossible.”
Jim Bianco, the songwriter behind “Easy Street,” previously admitted to Independent UK that utilizing the tune on an unending loop — used to torture Daryl in-between feedings of dog food sandwiches often delivered to him by Dwight — was a “work of genius.”
“I didn’t really understand why a show like The Walking Dead would want to use such an upbeat over-the-top, in your face ‘happy’ song but now I understand — to torture someone, of course,” Bianco said. “I think the show used it brilliantly; framing such an upbeat song as a torture device is a work of genius by the music supervisor.”
It was Sherry who freed Daryl before fleeing the Sanctuary herself, ultimately heading west and landing in Texas. It’s there she joined the group of masked Outsiders — a gang of strays put out by Virginia — and fueling her vendetta against the settlement leader is a lack of closure: Sherry didn’t get to witness her abuser be defeated and jailed by Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln).
“I understand that pain, that real trauma and almost this PTSD where she feels like has to do something in order to break this hardened feeling that she has deep within her,” Evangelista told ComicBook.com about Sunday’s episode. “And so she puts herself on this mission, she spearheads this renegade group just to try to really ultimately heal herself.”
Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. New episodes of Fear the Walking Dead premiere Sundays at 9 pm ET/8c on AMC.
