I don't get TD'ers who are angry about Emily Kinney coming back. But I suppose that's because they're not TD, they're just Beth fans. Please rest assured that this is not just any old dream sequence. It's specifically the third time that Beth has appeared in someone else's hallucination, satisfying the rule of three.
First, she appeared for Tyrese, whose funeral was disguised as hers.
Next, she appeared in passing for Rick, just another faceless ghost from his past, but we all knew who she was.
Now, she is appearing for Maggie, who recently confessed to Negan her impossible dream that Santa comes and fixes all her broken toys.
What is the setting of this dream? The city at Christmas time. This kind of repetition has never been done in TWDU for any other allegedly dead characters.
And just in case anyone has forgotten...
Dawn didn't do it.
These loose threads demand to be tied. Now is not the time to cry and rage. Now is the time to sit back, bathe in the validation, and wait for our girl to come home. It's gonna be a Greene Christmas for us.
*Note that I will be posting my own voice recordings of these posts on my youtube channel, for your optional convenience. Since they're just audio recordings, you should keep this post nearby, so you can refer to my visuals if needed. Alternatively, you can just read the post, or scroll along as you listen. Enjoy!*
As a way of keeping things going, I've decided to put together a little series of Team Delusional posts called "Strange Things." Each of these posts will go through an episode of "interest" to Team Delusional and point out a number of "strange things" contained within: questions, observations, oddities, etc.. These posts are less about theories and more about fostering renewed interest in old material, to inspire research, and to point out lingering, unanswered questions. With so many new voices in our fandom, this seems like a good time to keep the discussion going and to discover updated points of view via fresh eyes.
For my first post, I want to look at episode 10.18 "Find Me." Here are some strange things.
Why is Daryl so on edge? If you watch this episode again, you'll notice that Daryl is noticeably, extremely on edge the entire time. At some points, he even appears to be fearful. For example, when he and Carol first enter the woods, he seems extremely concerned that they might get separated. Even Carol takes notice and tries to make a joke, but he is serious. Daryl is not typically fearful, so any time he expresses fear or anxiety, we should take interest in his context and environment. Daryl's fears also seem to have psychological roots. He isn't afraid of death or pain or walkers or people. He's afraid of his past, and the memories and hallucinations that haunt him. As is actually confirmed with Beth in "Still," Daryl's fears are almost entirely internal. So what is he so afraid of in "Find Me?"
What does Dog see? In "Find Me," Dog seems closely attuned to something in those woods, but more interestingly, I think he's closely attuned to something inside of Daryl. Whether it's in a protective capacity or an extension of Daryl's impulse as a "wanderer," I'm not sure, but Dog seems to understand something in this episode that we do not. Watch him closely, as Dog seems related to the sequence with the railroad spikes, which I'll get to in a minute. Dog is sort of like a guide, helping us navigate the darkest depths of Daryl's subconscious. Dog will once again lead Daryl down a "rabbit hole" at the end of "Acheron, Pt. 1" and then again in "Hunted." At the beginning of "Rendition," Dog is once again a direct vector to Leah. Dog is closely linked to Leah, as he "belonged" to Leah first. In some ways, they are one. It might explain why, when we first see Leah, her face is hidden, and her "red" hair blends in with Dog's red coat.
What do the railroad spikes signify? This is one of the most mystifying parts of "Find Me." In the present, after Dog takes off and leads Daryl to the empty house where he apparently once lived with Leah, Daryl encounters three railroad spikes hammered into a tree as he enters the clearing. These spikes seem to mean something to him, as he stops to look at them with consternation.
Later, in the flashback in which Dog appears in the woods and leads Daryl to Leah for the first time, the sequence of events is set off by two railroad spikes, also seemingly hammered into a tree, which Daryl, once again, regards with consternation.
Both instances are accompanied by the same otherworldly, haunting music, which swells up in the background, suggesting they're somehow related, and that something bizarre is going on.
At the time the episode aired, the repetition was so curious to me, I wondered if it wasn't the beginning of some sort of trauma loop for Daryl. I initially wrote about it as a "Three Prongs" theory, before I realized they were probably, actually railroad spikes. Perhaps he put the spikes there himself. It was around this time that we were theorizing that Leah could be a pure hallucination, due to the woolly nature of this episode, and certain things Norman hinted at in interviews, saying it wasn't what it "seemed." But when we learned that Leah was real, the theory changed, became muddy. We can see that the first time Dog leads Daryl to Leah, in the past, there are two spikes in the tree. The second time Dog leads Daryl to Leah, in the present, there are three spikes in a different tree. But the story is told out of order, so the sequence is as well. It was counting down to something in reverse. 3...2...? This lead me to believe that there had to be an instance of a single spike somewhere, hammered into a tree, which we haven't seen yet, completing the sequence: 3...2...1, or 1...2...3.
In terms of whether or not the spikes actually exist, Daryl acknowledges them, which would suggest they are real, or at least they are real to him. In any case, we still don't know why they're there, or what they mean, only that they seem to be a part of some bizarre sequence of events involving Daryl's psychotic break and also Dog that invariably lead Daryl to Leah.
Daryl's (in)sanity. In "Find Me," we learn that Daryl wandered the river, looking for Rick, for over five years. Aside from periodic visits from Carol, who would bring him supplies, suggesting that the Kingdom and ASZ are reasonably nearby, Daryl is completely alone for much of that time. Certain fragmented aspects of Daryl's flashbacks suggest that this may have, in some ways, fractured his perceptions of reality, placing him into a state of possible psychosis. We know from "Chupacabra" that Daryl is prone to hallucinations in times of instability. His psychology contains significant cracks that can be exploited and worsened by extreme mental stress. This is not new for him.
At the beginning of the flashbacks, Daryl meets little Dog wandering in the woods, perhaps a symbol of his own childhood innocence, which he cannot hang onto for long. Time passes in a confusing fashion. Years seem to go by in an instant. At one point, he encounters an overturned boat.
When he picks up the boat to look underneath, the walker doesn't look like Rick, or anyone he knows. He then stomps in the walker's skull in a sudden fit of rage. His chaotic mental state is communicated by quick, jittery jump cuts, which you must watch to fully appreciate. At this point, we know that Daryl is not in his right mind. Something is wrong, and we cannot trust what we're seeing.
We then immediately cut to the storm, which I believe symbolizes Daryl's full psychotic break from reality. He loses the map, all evidence of his search, which once again enrages him, and then his camp appears to be struck by lightning. Daryl hobbles away with his crossbow mysteriously, looks up into the sky and almost smiles, appearing to have some sort of epiphany.
Later in the episode, we will see Daryl walking in the woods once more, with the map intact, in his back pocket. Is it a new map? Did the storm actually happen? Was all of that imagined? We don't know.
The intermingling of Daryl's casual wandering, calm existence at the riverside camp, and then periodic upswings of psychosis and rage make the entirety of these flashbacks feel very unsettling. It is clear that Daryl was not in his right mind during that period of five years, which calls into question the verity of what happens in the episode. This means that we should treat everything we're seeing as a kind of symbolic dream sequence. Nothing should be read literally or taken at face value, least of all the character Leah.
Leah as "supernatural." I think it was @frangipanilove who talked a LONG time ago about Leah as a kind of witch of the Underworld, a supernatural creature. If the river is the Acheron, it stands to reason that she could be Hecate, whose temple stands on the banks. She could also be Circe, the temptress who swindles Odysseus's men on the island of Aeaea, turning them to swine, and with whom Odysseus lives as a lover for a year, not that far off from how long Daryl stays with Leah in those woods.
Leah also has Biblical significance, as her name derives from Genesis and the origin story of Jacob. In the story, Jacob meets Rachel, a farmer's daughter, and immediately falls in love with her. He agrees to work on her father's farm for seven years in exchange for his daughter's hand in marriage; however, when their wedding night finally comes, Leah, Rachel's older sister, comes to him instead, in *disguise,* and he marries her by mistake. After seven more years, Jacob is finally able to marry Rachel as well.
Though she doesn't initially appear to be "evil," Leah is a mysterious woman with military-style tattoos and a kind of superhuman control over Daryl. When he first enters her house, he enters through the backdoor. Keep in mind that any time someone enters through the "backdoor" in this show, not everything is as it seems. Recall that in "Alone," there was no backdoor. Daryl sealed the backdoor. There was only one way in or out. Daryl's first encounter with Leah involves him killing a walker in her living room while she throws a literal, disembodied arm at him. Then, after she holds him at gunpoint and asks him what he's doing on her "land," an odd question considering that land ownership means close to nothing anymore, this tiny woman somehow gets big, gruff Daryl tied to a chair. After some back and forth, Leah frees Daryl with her green(e) Swiss Army Knife and lets him go, but she will not tell him her name. The director then uses this cross dissolve transition in which Leah is posed as a visual parallel to the river itself.
Leah as a nameless creature once again parallels Dog, another essential "nameless" creature, making the episode feel all the more dreamlike, in which everything is simply a representation of something else. Leah will not develop a name until she and Daryl get too close for comfort in a hollow tree trunk. The highly pressurized experience of hiding from walkers in a "trunk" with a woman spooks Daryl, who tells her to stay away from him. "Name's Leah," she says before she storms off. But how much of this is real?
All of this is to say that that much of "Leah" as we see her in "Find Me" seems to be made up as Daryl goes along. She's an amalgamation of both Carol in the present and Beth in the past, and aside from some small specifics like her tattoos and the picture of her and a little boy she calls Matthew, we know very little about who she actually is. The whole episode seems to leak into itself, with callbacks, repetitions, and symbols that feel related and important but with no coherent explanation as to why. This is why I believe "Find Me" is foreshadowing for events we haven't yet witnessed on Daryl's journey.
Daryl's scar. It's in "Find Me" that we first see Daryl with his telltale scar, which crosses down through his eyebrow and all the way to his cheek. It's fairly dramatic, and it appears to be made by a knife. We still don't know how he got the scar, but it has become more prominent over the years, taking the shape of a fullblown crucifix. How Daryl got the scar could tell us more about this mysterious time in his life, and his relationship with Leah. I will talk more about this in my post about "Rendition."
The Solar Eclipse. In the episode, Leah and Daryl look at a solar eclipse, which feels massively symbolic. Since it's a solar eclipse, that means the sun is being blotted out by the moon. It seems to echo the sort of "liminal" space we're in at the moment, and also that the "brighter" part of Daryl's story may be hidden for the time being, but it will be revealed soon.
Echoes. There are multiple moments in "Find Me" in which Leah and the situations Daryl encounters with Leah seem to "echo" past conversations and experiences that Daryl's had, particularly with Carol and Beth. Some of them are immediate imprints of conversations we see with Carol earlier in the episode. For example, the conversation about not letting the dead "catch up."
There's also two fish-spearing scenes, in which both Carol and Leah experience "beginners luck." Even the composition of these shots is similar, suggesting further intentionality and prompting deeper analysis.
While looking at the eclipse, Leah also echoes Beth's line, "Don't you think that's beautiful?" This line is echoed quite often throughout the series, by multiple characters, communicating its overall importance to the theme of the show. It is rooted in Beth.
*Edit (not included in the video): This is not the only Beth echo. Recall the example above of Daryl and Leah hiding together in a "trunk" from walkers. As a direct though symbolic callback to "Still," this is one of our strongest indicators that Leah is in some way a Beth "proxy."
There's also this:
Leah also tells Daryl that she raised her "son" Matthew after her "sister" (close friend) died in childbirth. This story echoes the situation in which Beth raised Judith after Lori died in childbirth. Mysteriously, however, it also foreshadows Isabelle raising Laurent after her literal sister dies in childbirth. This communicates a strong intentionality on the part of the writers, ie: They're doing this on purpose. It also places Leah at the center of a strange triad of surrogate mothers, all of whom are involved with Daryl. Only with Leah, her "son" has sadly died.
This could exist to highlight Daryl's own frustrating role as a surrogate father (never a father of his own children) and/or for reasons we don't yet fully understand. 🤔
Leah's story. Leah's story in and of itself is extremely odd. Rewatch the scene to really feel how bizarrely specific it is, almost as if they're trying to help us to place certain events on the timeline through the use of known variables (like the "day that Dog was born") and to give us very clear, certain pieces of information that we might need or want to remember later. It communicates that when Daryl first meets little Dog, that would have been shortly after Matthew died, and Leah was already in the woods alone. It also communicates that Leah's story about how she "separated from her family" after some sort of walker inundation happened about two years after Rick's disappearance. There are also certain aspects of Leah's story that could echo the events of the Missing 17 Days.
Daryl's Note. Daryl's note seems to sum up the entire thesis of his potential "happy ending," ie: "I belong with you. FIND ME," accompanied by a simple map to his camp, where "x" marks the spot.
This note is mysterious, because we aren't sure why Daryl goes back to Leah. It could be foreshadowing for why he goes back to Isabelle. He is lonely, and he believes this may be his last shot at true love, so he is willing to settle if that's what it takes. It does communicate that Daryl desires romantic love, that it is something he wants to experience, deeply. It also echoes the story he tells Andrea in "Bloodletting," about the time he wandered into the woods and no one came to "find" him. Some believe that this story may be the culmination of what's going on in Daryl's season 3 flashbacks. Will Beth actually be the one to "find" Daryl?
There are probably a lot of things I missed or glossed over in this post. The truth is, "Find Me" is one of those episodes that keeps on giving. Every time you watch it, you'll discover things you previously missed. It's full of strangeness and goodies, but very few answers. Ultimately, I believe it and the Leah arc in general may be a foreshadowing episode for events to come in Daryl Dixon season 4. It communicates a clear focus on Daryl's psychological instability in times of grief, as well as Daryl's deepest desires, which involve romantic love, safety, and a stable home.
Thoughts? Leave a comment or send me an ask. If you have a specific episode you'd like me to address in this series, let me know! The next episode I plan to tackle will be 5.8 "Coda." 💫
After seeing the blind prophet in the Daryl Dixon S3 trailer, I fell down this rabbit hole and now I'd like to take you all with me.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon is an apocalyptic allegory for The Odyssey
The Odyssey is told in twenty-four “books”, or what we might refer to as a chapter, and tells the tale of Odysseus in two parts:
First, the ten year account of the Trojan War.
Next, the ten years Odysseus spent lost at sea trying to get home to Ithaca and Penelope.
On his journey, he encounters cannibal giants, a cyclops, sirens, the lotus-eaters, sea monsters, a spiteful goddess who turns men into beasts, a blind prophet, several temptations to his marriage (Circe, the nymph Calypso, and the Princess Nausicaa) and speaks to the spirit of his dead mother. Odysseus communes with the gods (particularly Athena, his patron goddess) through birds, visions, and dreams. He is unique in that his story focuses heavily on homecoming. So few Greek heroes ever get to go home.
Homecoming, Wandering, Guest-friendship, and Tests are all major themes. The first several books of the Odyssey are told from the perspective of Odysseus' son, Telemachus, who along with his mother and Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, is having to host the 108 boorish suitors vying for her hand in her husband's extended absence. Penelope's faith is being tested just as much as her husband's. Nevertheless, he has been gone so long that she must remarry and so she sets forth a task for her suitors: anyone who can beat a test of archery with her husband's bow will win her hand.
Ten years after the fall of Troy the prison, Daryl finds himself adrift, blown off course in a strange land. He listens to a man mourn his late wife, lamenting that it would have been their tenth anniversary. Our hero yearns for home and love. He yearns for Ithaca and Penelope.
His losses have left him jaded. He is a bad guest to the first people he meets and is immediately punished for it; robbed and left for dead until the nymph Calypso the nun Isabelle finds him and nurses him to health. He doesn't want to stay with her, he wants to go home ‒ but she reminds him of home in a way. She reminds him of someone.
So he stays.
The Gods The nuns don't want Calypso Isabelle to keep Odysseus Daryl because he is a mortal faithless.
Calypso keeps Odysseus in a secret cave where they make love every day, but every night he goes down to the beach to weep. Unable to bear watching him suffer, she promises to take him to a port where he can catch a boat an island where he can build a boat.
Isabelle got to keep Daryl longer than Calypso kept Odysseus. Isabelle comes with him to the underworld the catacombs so that he can sacrifice a black sheep looking for information on how to get home. Sidenote: it does not bode well for Carol that she later also follows Daryl down into the underworld looking for information.
As this is an allegory and not a perfect 1:1 retelling, I'm going to heavily utilize bullet points going forward in order to best illustrate the point.
Daryl/Odysseus:
Daryl was scarred by his boorish father as a boy / Odysseus was scarred by a boar as a boy / the “little Jimmy” pig story is most likely Daryl's true tale, meaning that Daryl owned a pig as a child that left him with lifelong emotional scars.
Communes with the gods/God through dreams and visions
Tests of Faith, Tests of Character
Hidden identity
He beats the other men at the garage (the boorish suitors who were heckling and ultimately murdered the young lover) at a test of archery
Before we move on to Genet/Circe, I have to take a moment and emphasize the importance of pigs both in The Odyssey and in The Walking Dead universe. Pigs represent the lowest of all beasts. They foreshadow the fall of the prison, our metaphorical Troy. Penelope's suitors are explicitly described as "boorish" i.e. piglike. Genet, before ripping out Codron’s eye and making a cyclops out of our Remus/Romulus-proxy, tells the story about her mother's “pig” of a boss. Aaron and Father Gabriel kill and cook a boar before a villainous stranger forces them into a deadly game of Russian roulette. When Dr. Edwards and Beth are having their profound conversation at Grady about the divinity of art, and how it transcends, rises above, makes us more than “beasts”, all juxtaposed by The Denial of St. Peter watching over them, they are sharing a sparse meal of guinea pig. And who could forget Little Jimmy?
Pigs, to both Homer and the writers of The Walking Dead, signify the absolute worst of humanity.
Genet/Circe:
Absolutely despises the arts and humanity, seeks to turn all men into beasts
Misogyny on legs: women do not trust her, and she doesn't like them either
Men eat out of the palm of her hand
Spiteful and bitter to her core; wants to punish the world, men specifically, for past crimes inflicted on her person
A master poisoner done in by her own poison
Commonly depicted drinking from a goblet
Isabelle/Calypso:
Does not want to let our hero go
In many versions of the story, Calypso kills herself after freeing Odysseus from the prison of her love
The very name “Calypso” means “to conceal”. Daryl trains with Laurent in a secret cave, and is as despaired as Calypso was for Odysseus when Laurent disappears from it.
Carol/Telemachus:
Book One of The Odyssey: Athena disguises herself as Telemachus to enact divine intervention on Odysseus' behalf. What jumpstarts Daryl's journey? Static on the radio causes him to misunderstand the context of Carol's message and puts him in the mindset that someone long gone has returned.
The Book of Carol/Book Two of The Odyssey begins with Carol/Telemachus confronting the men at the garage/the boorish suitors before setting off on a quest to find Daryl/Odysseus.
Divine intervention comes in the form of lightning destroying their ethanol stores and forcing them to leave immediately on a one-way trip to Europe. He is the voice telling her to breathe. Her meeting with Ash is fated.
With their shared domestic abuse trauma bond and Carol’s role as Daryl’s proxy-mother, the son/father dynamic in The Odyssey has been inverted here. Instead, the mother is on a quest to bring her son home.
Ash Patel/Nestor, King of Pylor:
In Book Three of The Odyssey, Telemachus travels to Pylor to seek counsel with King Nestor and board a vessel in search of his father.
Like Ash, Nestor is kind and generous. He allows Telemachus/Carol to board his vessel but is unable to provide any information as to the whereabouts of his father/Daryl.
In Book Four of the Odyssey, Telemachus arrives in Sparta and learns of his father's adventures. Compare with Carol arriving in France and learning of Daryl’s adventures.
King Nestor is typically portrayed as a wizened old warrior appearing to give advice to the hero of the tale. His entire archetype is Hershel Greene-coded in my opinion. Therefore, I do not believe it is any coincidence that his vessel landed in Greenland.
Anna Valery & Quinn/Persephone & Hades
Anna used to hate her mother (Demeter) for holding her back from the seedy life of a Parisian nightclub singer, but comes to understand that she was just trying to protect her
Anna and Quinn have an intense love/hate relationship, landing far more on the side of hate
Quinn attempts to make another Persephone out of Isabelle
The imagery of her death; being taken willingly by the dead without a sound, proud and regal. Queen of the underworld
Losang and the Nest/the Lotus-Eaters
The lotus-eaters offer Odysseus fruit and wine made from the fruit of a lotus flower that are so sweet it makes them forget about home.
Losang's sweet fruit is born from his false tree of knowledge; the possibility that his corrupt religion could offer a safe, good life to Daryl, Isabelle, and Laurent. He cultivates a false sense of security and attempts to plant the seed that Laurent does not need Daryl.
Other elements of note:
Zeus sends down two eagles to rip each other apart in front of the boorish suitors as an omen of revenge. This motif is married to the Remus/Romulus symbolism and can be viewed in Daryl's relationships with both Quinn and Codron.
The Guerrier capturing men/walkers in shipping containers to bring from the U.S. to Europe are the cannibal giants imprisoning Odysseus and his men. This is also a direct throwback to Terminus.
The bioluminescent walkers are another allegory for the lotus-eaters. The fantasies and hallucinations they offer are fatally attractive.
Divine intervention occurs repeatedly, over and over again.
Daryl teaching the men at the Nest how to shoot while Isabelle watched from above was a foreshadowing of Penelope's Test of Archery.
Eun and Hana's desire to keep Ash as a sex slave is a parallel to Odysseus' numerous (debatable) unwilling affairs, as well as a commentary on the extreme lengths an individual is willing to go for the sake of home and family (Ithaca and Penelope). The plan to repopulate Greenland with Ash's spawn is a nod to his allegorical counterpart, King of Pylor. Greenland here is Pylor.
The man at the garage who turned in the young lover's body for gas was named Juno, after the Roman goddess of marriage. Daryl is later trapped in a shipping container with this man, and takes the time to free him even though he doesn't like him; another test of character.
What does all this mean for the rest of the series? I have my own predictions.
There are only so many trials left. We're getting closer and closer to Ithaca and Penelope. Daryl still needs to speak with the blind prophet to find out how to get home. We've yet to meet Nausicaa, the Phaeacian Princess ‒ a beautiful and charming individual who in some versions of the tale entices Odysseus, and in others marries Telemachus. In my opinion, this will be Carol’s teased lover. But that still leaves us wondering…
Who is Penelope?
Following the beats of The Odyssey, it can't be anyone new. Those are just affairs. It has to be someone from Daryl’s established timeline. It can't be Carol because, as we've covered at length, Carol is playing a familial role here and more damning than that, neither of the actors have any interest in developing their characters in a romantic direction, and have said as much on record. Connie is a possibility, I suppose, but Daryl has no reason to yearn for her. He knows where she is, she's not lost to him.
So who is it? Who did he lose? Who does he miss? Who does he yearn for? Why was Isabelle in particular so enticing to him when all the others were left behind?
Who does she remind him of?
And just in case anyone thinks I've gone off the deep end and lost the plot, here's a quote from director Daniel Percival comparing TWD:DD to The Odyssey:
This is probably going to be my most unhinged Team Delusional post to date.
I heard the song "Amazing Grace" the other day and it really made me think about Beth, and Daryl's current arc, and sent me down a thought/research spiral. The lyrics are a perfect representation of what will happen to him when he hears her sing again.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now I'm found
Was blind, but now I see
'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear
And grace, my fears relieved
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed
Through many dangers, toils and snares
We have already come
'Twas grace that brought us safe thus far
And grace will lead us home
So I got curious and went to see if this song has ever been used in the show. It hasn't, but in Fear the Walking Dead there is a character named Grace who has a romance with Morgan. She gives stillbirth to a baby named Athena.
[I haven't actually seen this part of FTWD, this summary is coming from TWD wiki]
This is where Grace gets the idea to name her baby Athena:
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon is a painstakingly faithful retelling of the Odyssey. Athena's allegory appears over and over again within the plot, almost every episode. Athena is Odysseus' [Daryl's] patron goddess and guides his journey every step of the way.
Grace's death was necessary to bring our prophet Morgan back to Alexandria. He wanted to build a life with her but it was taken away from him.
I hope y'all are picking up all the disconnected threads I'm laying down. Gonna have to watch this spinoff I guess 😮💨
Jupiter has been referenced over and over again in Daryl Dixon + Dead City both. Dama owns a Goya painting depicting Saturn eating his son Jupiter. Isabelle's map foreshadows Poseidon and Jupiter, with appropriate corresponding numbers from the Hebrew lexicon. Julia(e)n shares etymological roots with Jupiter, one translation meaning "sky father."
Sharing to bring attention to Terminus' roots, so that others can see this and draw their own conclusions.
This began as a reblog for @frangipanilove's most recent post on the Way of St. James and Daryl Dixon 3.7. But then it got too long, so I made it its own post. Please go read frangi's post first for full context!! This post will respond to frangi's theories about Morgan as the original pilgrim archetype and also the seashell as a proto-symbol of the CRM.
Morgan: Pilgrim/Prophet
Morgan's symbolic pilgrimage is marked in the trees, beginning in 5.1 "No Sanctuary" and ending in 5.8 "Coda." These markers could be coda signs, RR crossing signs, or circumspect crosses.
When Morgan arrives at the "altar" in 5.8, where he makes offerings (good luck, protection, and sustenance), he prays, and he then looks around as if "hearing" or "realizing" something we, the audience do not. He then bursts into laughter, because he also *knows* something that we do not.
(Note that we've seen these "coda markers" quite a lot in Daryl Dixon, throughout all three seasons. They appear like markers on the thematic pilgrimage, which Morgan began ten years ago, and which we've been following ever since.)
Morgan is a prophetic character. He is frequently looking at people strangely, as if he's met them in some other life, and he has many mantras that feel connected to "the future," ie: "Everything gets a return" and "I don't die." Morgan plays a prominent role in Nick Clark's death episode in Fear, in which he frequently looks at Nick with confusion, like he's concerned for reasons he doesn't quite understand. He also tells Nick that things are not going to work out like he thought they would.
Note, too, that, at the end of his arc in Fear season 8, before setting out to look for Rick once again, Morgan abruptly stops in the marshy cemetery, looks back like he might have forgotten something, and then smiles at Mo, sort of like he knows that everything is going to be okay.
This kind of things happens a lot with Morgan, and once you know to look for it, you see it again and again, especially in Fear. Of course all of this originates in TWD 3.12 "Clear," in which Morgan is found by Rick and Michonne, barricaded in a weapons cache in King County, Georgia, in the deep throes of a psychotic break. Morgan has "prophecy" language written all over his walls, ie: it is LITERAL narrative prophecy. How do we know this? Because we know that it was actually written by Scott Gimple, the ultimate of the "powers that be." This, of course, includes the reference to the Green Route, and other strange musings such as "NO KIA'S ON BEF!" which some have suggested could mean "No Kill in Action on Beth."
Morgan is a prophet for Gimple and tptb. This is part of why his presence in "Coda" is so mysterious. He truly does know more than we do.
The Seashells and the CRM
Re: the Way of St. James and the seashell symbol.
Seashells, the symbol of St. James and used often as trail markers along the Way of St. James, are also a prominent visual theme in TWD episode 7.6 "Swear," in which we first see the PPP card and in which Heath is mysteriously "abducted" by the CRM. Oceanside, as a remote, all-female community full of "leftovers" post-Negan, resembles, in theme, the community where Paz takes Elena and the other rescued girls from El Alcazar at the end of DD season 3, which exists primarily to protect female "leftovers" from La Ofrenda. These similarities, as well as the fact that the little seaside town Solaz Del Mar literally translates to "Solace of the Sea," are not coincidences.
"Swear" is, from my perspective, our earliest foreshadowing for the events in Europe, and this suggests some sort of proximity to the CRM. Though it was a standalone episode at the time, with very little bearing on the immediate events of the series, "Swear" was also one of the earliest clues in the flagship that the CRM was near. Especially with the PPP reference outside Solaz, which we've now seen TWICE, and the certainty that PPP is affiliated with the CRM via The Ones Who Live, we can draw the loose conclusion that all of this is in some way related to the CRM in Europe.
Further, if Morgan was an early proxy or "prophecy" for Codron, then the fact that Codron is seen in such close proximity to the repeat PPP reference in Daryl Dixon (thanks to @wdway for pointing that out), could suggest in retrospect that the CRM/PPP was in proximity to Morgan in season 5. On this note, there are SEVERAL other examples from season 4b-5a (aka: the D.C. al Coda) that suggest certain characters are being followed, watched, and/or lured into traps (re: Daryl and Beth in "Alone"), but that's another post for another day.
There's nothing Scott Gimple loves more than postmodern and self-aware storytelling, which frequently comments upon and recycles itself in new ways. He does this to keep building thematic layers within the same narrative arc, which he tells over and over again as a way of making sure he gets it right in the end. If you really want to understand just how postmodern Gimple is willing to get, watch Tales of the Walking Dead episode 1.2 "Blair/Gina" in which the writers utilize the theme of "morphic resonance" to explain the human (and narrative) tendency to repeat the same choices, actions, and experiences over and over and over again until finally breaking the cycle by reaching the correct conclusion.
In our case, we believe that the "correct conclusion" to the narrative involves Beth being ALIVE. Her death was not real. It did not happen as it seemed. Morgan "knew" that Beth was coming back all the way back in 5.8. It just wasn't yet "time." Now, Codron is here to complete the pilgrimage to the proper end.
Anyway. That's enough rambling for one night lol. Keep calm and bethyl on! 💫
*Note that, at one point, I go WAY OFF post in my recording, so if you want to hear everything I have to say, you should listen as well as read ❤️*
"Coda" is obviously a loaded episode and has been hopelessly scoured over the years. For this reason, in my deep dive today, I'm going to try and stick to questions and observations that I haven't seen discussed terribly often, or things that are related to certain avenues of popular Team Delusional speculation, ie: the hypothesis that the CRM might have been using Grady to gather test subjects for early scientific research. Here are some strange things:
Lamson's Warning. In the first scene of "Coda," Lamson imparts a strange warning to Rick in his final words. He says, "I was gonna iron it over. She's under it, and you've been out here too long." Then, he tells Rick that he his people are all going to die before Rick shoots him in the head.
On its own, this warning is fairly vague. But consider the context. Lamson was so concerned about Rick going into this exchange unprepared that he knocked Sasha unconscious, ran off, and then allowed himself to get run down by his own police car. He died trying to get back to Grady with his hands tied behind his back.
He says, "I was gonna iron it over." What does he need to iron over? "She's under it." This is obviously vague, but it implies that Dawn is under some sort of spell. Who cast the spell? Of course, we assume he's talking about Dawn, but this is only the first time in "Coda" that the writers will use the pronoun "she" in such a way that it could refer to either Dawn OR Beth. So which is it? And what is she under?
"You've been out here too long" is repeated by Michonne in WHAWGO. She says "You can be out here too long." It's perhaps the thesis of season 5. We know they mean like, outside the softening comforts of civilization. The two claims oppose each other to extremes. "She's under it," meaning she's entranced, trapped even, swindled. "You've been out here too long," meaning Rick has become basically feral, like an animal. Lamson finally pleads with Rick that he and his people are all going to die.
What is really going here? The level of fear we hear and see coming from Lamson in this scene, his desperation and willingness to die for the cause, doesn't match the challenge Team Family ends up encountering inside of Grady. There are like six cops and a bunch of helpless wards and a cowardly doctor. Half the cops are mutinous and want their leader dead anyway. After Beth goes down, Daryl kills Dawn immediately, with a single bullet to the head. Based on what we see, Grady poses a minimal threat compared to what Team Family deals with at the prison and at Terminus. Even the Claimers are more threatening, and they don't even have guns.
So Lamson, a seasoned, metropolitan police officer, is looking at a crazed and nearly murderous ex-sheriff named Rick and his wild band of barbaric warriors (including a sniper and a guy who looks like he used to be in a one-percenter MC) and he's...worrying for their lives? I would argue that we're missing something.
Was Bob trying to smooth things over with Dawn to prevent a confrontation that might draw negative attention from a mystery mega-faction of armed overseers? The CRM? Maybe. It would imply that, if there is an arrangement with the CRM, then not all the officers know what's going on. Recall that Shepherd and Lacari want to go in and take Dawn out themselves, which Lamson won't agree to. Meanwhile, O'Donnell and Gorman enjoy free reign under the law. Did they accidentally learn something they weren't supposed to? Are they holding this over her head, exchanging their loyalty for her lenience?
In any case, it's likely that said overseers, this mystery faction was the catalyst for the unknown but clearly catastrophic events of the Missing 17 Days. But until we know more, it simply remains a strange thing.
Confusing Officer Motivations. I did a deep dive into the officer motivations at Grady a couple of years ago with @twdmusicboxmystery and @wdway, but it's thousands of words long and likely needs massive edits, so I won't share that with you today. Basically, I believe the writers have created multiple false dichotomies within the Grady ecosystem in order to distract us, the audience, from the fact that something truly weird is going on. I will go over the bullet points here.
The first false dichotomy that the writers create for us is that of Good cop vs. Evil cop. For example, Gorman and O'Donnell are the evil cops. They abuse the wards and enjoy unfettered access to scarce resources like food and electricity, which they partake in gleefully. Meanwhile, Lamson and Shepherd are the good cops. They do not participate in the abuse cycles that take place inside of Grady an actively try to deter Dawn from taking harsh action, particularly against the wards. This dichotomy helps the audience to choose sides as we follow Beth through the many layers of this hell. Obviously, we want Gorman to die, but Shepherd can live. That's okay. She's "nice," right? Why is this a false dichotomy?
It's false because it doesn't matter. Every single officer at Grady is guilty to some extent of standing idly by while physical, sexual, and psychological abuse run rampant in their midst. Further, every single officer at Grady is actually aligned against Dawn, and most would like to oust her and elevate Lamson in her place. This gives them all the same motivation in the end and also rise to our second false dichotomy: the officers vs. Dawn. The truth is, however, that there are no good cops or bad cops at Grady. There are simply awful cops and some slightly less awful cops, all of whom want Dawn dead (except for, perhaps, Lamson, who still seems to hold some amount of loyalty, if not to Dawn's leadership, then at least to the friend she used to be), and we don't actually know why.
I think these false dichotomies serve as distractions for the audience. If we're caught up in minor, interpersonal skirmishes between officers, worried about Beth, trying to figure out who to trust and who not to trust, then we're satisfied with the tension at hand, and we're not looking too deeply into the bizarre arrangement that may actually be driving this whole thing. For example, if Grady is a CRM holding facility, tasked with bringing in potential test subjects for a fledgling research project ca. 2012, and this is something Gimple is not planning to cultivate for some time, then he would want the GA to be content with what they see, ie: Bad cops vs. Good cops in a terribly abusive slave economy. That's terrible. That's bad enough! Right?
Right! I mean, right? Of course it's bad. Yes, it's SUPER bad. The worst. But is that enough? I mean, maybe, until you start asking too many questions. Then it starts to look, not just really really bad, but also really really weird.
Grady's Entire Lack of Purpose. What exactly is the point of Grady? According to Edwards, it used to be a benevolent organization. They would go out and help the helpless. But then, things changed. They only started bringing in the weak and forsaking the strong. People were no longer allowed to leave. Edwards had to euthanize patients who were consuming too many resources without giving anything in return. The point at which the turn happened is a little fuzzy, but it seems to be, in some way, related to Dawn's killing of Hansen and then assuming leadership in his place.
Meanwhile, Dawn tells Beth that she needs her officers to be happy, and that some amount of abuse is expected to benefit "the greater good." But why? What, exactly, do the officers do that benefits the greater good and warrants her leniency? They go out and find food, supplies, sure okay. But, for who? For themselves and for the wards. Okay, but who are the wards? Did they come of their own free will, seeking medical care and safety in return for a short work stint or productive place in the community? ...No. They were brought in forcibly, sometimes unconscious and against their will, then made to work and endure abuse in exchange for food and "treatment," which the officers and doctors provide. They're also prevented from leaving, even if they want to. If they manage to escape, they're hunted down and brought back at gunpoint.
So the officers are going out and finding food and supplies for wards who were brought there against their will. The wards are held hostage and made to endure terrible things in exchange for said food and supplies, and they are not allowed to leave. Grady is a small community of a dozen or so, embedded in a hospital that somehow has ongoing, reliable access to electricity and medical equipment and supplies. Resources are scarce, according to Dawn, which is why they do not hesitate to euthanize patients who are not healing quickly enough. But if resources are so scarce, then why are the officers going out and actively bringing in more injured and weak people who need resources? Especially when these same wards are treated like burdens and sometimes, outright trash.
Unless Dawn is actually a sadist who simply enjoys watching people suffer, a claim for which there's actually zero evidence, then this whole thing makes no sense. And yet, we see that Dawn is willing to make enormous moral compromises in order to keep this totally self-defeating operation going. Why? It makes no sense. Right?
Right. UNLESS there is something else at stake. If there is something else at stake, then it makes perfect sense. We would be willing to believe all of this easily. What do I mean that there has to be something at stake? I mean that, there has to be something important, which affects people deeply, that could be taken away or destroyed if the proper measures aren't taken to preserve it, ie: there has to be a cause that Dawn is so committed to that she truly believes her moral and human sacrifices are necessary, otherwise, none of it makes sense. For example, Negan and Pamela Milton are both heavily morally compromised. They do terrible things to people, but they do these things for a purpose. That purpose is the shelter and protection of hundreds, even thousands of people. Negan, for example, believes that ruling with an iron fist is necessary to ordering a disordered world and running a functional ship. It may not be pretty, but it's coherent, and it works.
So, considering that Dawn is NOT caring for and protecting a large community, including children and families, then there has to be something going on at Grady that Dawn is so committed to that she truly believes all of these sacrifices are necessary and justified. What would be worth the abuse and enslavement of a few in exchange for the benefit of the many? Research, perhaps. Research that she thinks could save the world.
The "Research" Question. In World Beyond season 2, Jadis explains to Lyla that Project Votus, aka Project V, is a research protocol involving human test subjects and the study of the Wildfire "pathogen." According to Jadis, Project V was started by Major General Beale and Lt. Colonel Kublek 2 years after the Fall. That means that the start of Project V, which is largely a mystery to us and has unclear goals, comes at the same time period that Beth was incarcerated at Grady. Is this a coincidence? Possibly. Is it also a coincidence that, at Grady, they serve meals of "guinea pig"? Or that Dr. Edwards is a research scientist who's so terrified of losing his "authority" that he gaslights Beth into killing a rival doctor on his behalf? Is it a coincidence that Edwards is administering heparin, an anticoagulant often used during radiation therapy, to a "concussion" patient? Or that Dr. Trevitt was an oncologist, who would have a specialization in radiation therapy? Maybe! For now, however, all we know is that these things are strange.
Dawn's Argument. Speaking of what's at stake, this one is fairly straightforward. What is Dawn talking about during her conversation with Beth in Carol's room?
A part of what thing? What is so important? Why is it important? What will she remember? Does Beth know what she's talking about? Or is she as clueless as we are? Is Dawn trying to tell Beth that, in exchange for all her "dirty work," she'll anoint her in the alliance to come? Put in a good word? Let her stay with Carol as a reward for her sacrifice? We don't know. BUT. Beth might know. AND. Carol might know. I think that Carol may know more than she realizes. She simply hasn't yet found a way to put it into context. I mean, she's lying right there, and toward the end of the scene, she starts to wake up.
Oddities in the Exchange. The exchange scene in "Coda" is perhaps the most bizarre, unexplained sequence in the entire franchise. While I'd love to do a full on shot analysis one day, for now, I'll just focus on the bullet points:
Extreme high angle shots, which capture the entire scope of the hallway, invoke themes of claustrophobia and surveillance, like we're watching from a camera mounted on the wall. These themes are furthered by the low key lighting staggered with bars of unfiltered natural light which is atypical for TWD and make the whole scene feel both low fi and clinical at the same time, like some kind of old fashioned mental institution from a horror movie.
Dutch angles, which are often (though not always) used in correlation with Rick's point of view, suggest psychological madness, or at the very least an unstable relationship with reality. These bizarre camera angles are often used by filmmakers to create a sense of disorientation in the audience. Even just a glimpse can make us dizzy, priming a close watching audience to question the verity of what we're seeing on screen.
Further, use of negative space in key shots, like this one, forces viewers to fill in the blanks, using inference. It's through this that Gimple is able to trick people into seeing things that aren't actually there and remembering events that never actually happened. It's the same tactic he used to trick millions of viewers into thinking that the funeral at the start of WHAWGO is Beth's. As close-watching viewers, we, however, are looking at a shot like this asking ourselves, why didn't he just show us the whole image? Is he hiding something? And what is the significance of these puzzle pieces that he did choose to show?
This scene utilizes the closed captions strategically in ways that we really never see again in the series. For example, in the moments before Dawn asks for Noah back, we, the viewers, don't actually hear anything; however, as Dawn looks down and to her right for a moment, the closed caption suggests that there is "(WHISPERING)."
Who is whispering? Is it coming through the radio? An ear piece? Dawn's fractured psyche? In any case, we can't hear it.
Further, after Beth is shot, we see Dawn, who is clearly surprised, pleading with Rick; however, we don't hear her voice. We hear only some sort of warped, echoey ambient sound, like we're standing in a tunnel. And even though you can clearly see that she's saying something, the closed caption reads simply (SILENT).
If you read her lips, you can see that she is saying one of two things: Either "No, I didn't mean it" or "It wasn't me." Kind of an interesting duality of meaning, don't you think? It's extra weird if she's possibly claiming it wasn't her. Because if it wasn't Dawn who shot Beth extremely high up on the forehead in one single split second while standing about six inches away from her, then who was it?
Note that Gimple creates all of this confusion via incorrect closed captions, sound distortion, missing sound, and disorienting cinematography for the same reason that he creates false dichotomies in the writing of the Grady officers. It's to create distractions and to prevent too many people in the audience from asking too many questions. If he did not plan to bring Beth back for a long, long time, then he would need to do this, because if too many people were stuck thinking like we are, then he'd be in a major bind.
Instead, most of the GA will just figure they missed something and/or accept whatever appears at face value, and anyone who does sense that something weird is going on will typically just leave it at that, claiming that the writing is just bad actually. This provides him plenty of plausible deniability while he then utilizes negative space and illogical physicality (ie: the fact that Dawn could not have shot Beth that high up in the forehead from her position and in that short of a time frame) in order to cast some sense of reasonable doubt over the fact that Beth is actually dead or that things actually happened the way that we saw them go down. It's the same reason we don't see her body up close, we don't see her turn into a walker, and we don't see her burial.
Of course, it's okay if just some of us are asking these questions. That's fun, in fact.
It was just about her. After Daryl kills Dawn, everybody very quickly goes on guard. The Grady cops are ready to shoot. Officer Shepherd, however, shouts for them to hold their fire. Then she says, "It's over. It was just about her."
Her. Who is her in this moment. The obvious answer is Dawn, but what would this imply? It would seem to imply that someone was trying to shoot Dawn, but they shot Beth instead. Then, Daryl killed Dawn, so as long as Dawn is dead, then no more bullets have to fly. But why would this appeal to Rick? Whether or not they shot Beth on purpose shouldn't matter to him, given his current, fairly wrathful state of mind.
Okay, but what if she's talking about Beth. It was only about Beth. Dawn shot Beth, and that's all it was about, and now it's over. Yay! Well, then, that would REALLY piss Rick off. Dawn just killed the beloved daughter of Hershel Greene right in front of him, and this cop seems to get it. Doesn't he at the very least want to know why before he starts inviting them to come join their group?
In any case, we have to ask ourselves: Why does Rick just leave? Why doesn't he retaliate, take prisoners, ask questions, anything? It's been pointed out time and time again that Team Family rarely leaves an enemy base standing. We saw what they did to the Termites, and unlike the cops at Grady, the Termites did not actually succeed at killing any of them. This doesn't make sense. There is literally no explanation for why Rick would suddenly just find it in his heart to leave without question.
Are we missing time between Beth's shooting and the moment that Rick et al exit the hospital? If that's the case, then what else are we missing? Or, are we simply just not seeing things clearly? Are we seeing only what Rick remembers? Is he remembering things wrong?If that's true, then what actually happened? And finally, why is all of this happening in juxtaposition to BETH'S death in particular? Why are there no other character deaths shrouded in so much bizarre mystery?
The best thing about "Coda" is that it remains the most concrete evidence we have that something is off about Beth's death. We can come up with complicated theories and argue symbolism from here until eternity (and we should, because it's fun), but the best actual evidence we have that Beth might not be dead is the fact that her death episode contains more questions than answers. It is just severely confusing and extraordinarily STRANGE, and we have no idea why (yet).
For my next post, I'll be returning to the Leah question by examining episode 11.6 "Rendition." 💫 Thoughts? Let me know!!
