‘The Walking Dead’ Open Thread: He’s Korean!

This post discusses plot points from the February 17 episode of The Walking Dead.

Is morality a luxury? One might think that, in a world overrun by zombies, setting up an ethical code should take a backseat to survival. But the strongest moments in Sunday’s othewise lackluster Walking Dead made the opposite case, using a breakdown in the relationship between brothers Merle and Darryl as a case study in why morality would and should be a central concern in a post-apocalyptic world.

The brothers begin feuding in the woods, as the meager spoils of their hunting efforts lead Darryl to question whether they shouldn’t make a beeline back for the well-stocked prison. But the real rift emerges when they spy a small group of survivors fighting a losing battle against a group of walkers. Darryl sees people in trouble who need his help. But Merle sees useless dead weight to whom he owes nothing. “They ain’t never cooked me a meal,” he sniffs.

However close Darryl and Merle may have been at one point (even morally speaking, as they apparently planned to rob the prison group when they first encountered it), the conflict over the embattled group on the highway reveals how far they’ve grown. Darryl believes human life is something worth protecting irrespective of utility. Like a normal person, he believes leaving people to die when you can save them to be a grave moral ill. It’s such an important part of his moral character that he barely hesitates to run in, crossbow blazing, and save the day. Merle is left little choice but to follow his brother but, in a nice touch, he saunters towards the battle in a fashion resembling nothing more than a walker’s shuffle, his move away from humanity reflected in his actual movement.

Darryl finally snaps after Merle attempts to stick up the terrified survivors for food. Demanding “an enchilada” from the Spanish-speaking “beaners,” Merle’s moral ugliness is on full display, and Darryl can’t take it anymore. He points his crossbow at his brother, demanding Meryl let them go and deciding to march back to the prison irrespective of what his brother wants. Merle’s Randian selfishness has made him toxic, so untrustworthy and morally repellent that his own brother can’t stand to be alone with him.

The underlying point here is that morality isn’t just a luxury in this world: it’s something people need, both a survival adaptation and, more importantly, one of the only things that makes their apocalyptic life worth living. Last week, it seemed like family ties were the most powerful motivating force for survivors, shredding group bonds as if they were paper. But Darryl’s move back to the prison suggests ethics run deeper than blood. Merle’s utter lack of humanity makes it impossible for Darryl to depend on him; he needs to be with people who place the same value on his life as he places on theirs to survive in a world where no one can really provide for themselves.

In a clever bit of dialogue, this point is directly connected to Merle’s racism. When Darryl sets off for the prison, Merle pleads with Darryl that he might not be welcome: “I tried to kill that black bitch…damn near killed that Chinese kid.” Darryl’s pithy response — “he’s Korean!” — points to the fact that he’s bothered to get to know these people, while Merle’s refusal to see them as anything other than stereotyped cartoons keeps him out of a community defined by shared trust. Human kindness isn’t a relic of a bygone world. It’s a necessity.

But Darryl’s moral revolt isn’t just about the fact that he can’t trust Merle in a tight spot. Darryl appears to simply not want a life in which he either leaves innocent people to die or thieves from them. In his mind, Merle has abandoned the very things that make life good and valuable, the values and beliefs that make humans noble and underpinned their brotherly love itself. “I may be the one walking away,” Darryl tells his brother, “but you’re the one who’s leaving.” As they’ve both returned to the prison by the end of the episode, the central question going forward is whether Merle can return from this moral exile as well.

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‘The Walking Dead’ Open Thread: Don’t Cast Me Out

This post discusses plot points from the February 10 episode of The Walking Dead.

If the first half of the Walking Dead’s third season was about defining morality as care for your group, the midseason premiere took a step back to ask “what makes you part of the group?” In both the prison and Woodbury, the consequences of war shook the foundations of group structure, revealing seemingly unbreakable bonds to be fragile and calling into question the leadership structures everyone had been taking for granted.

The episode picks up right where the midseason finale left off, with Darryl and Merle set to fight for their lives and Woodbury’s amusement. The Governor’s decision to pit the brothers against each other gives Merle an opportunity to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s a Woodbury man. Reassuring whispers to Darryl aside, it’s not clear whether he would have committed fratricide in a bid to rejoin the Governor’s team had it not been for Rick, Maggie, and Glenn’s assault weapon-equipped intervention.

But it turns out the Prison Expeditionary Force’s efforts were for naught. A rescued Merle proves as poisonous as he was in Season One — his racism reemerges, asking Darryl if he had “gone native” when he sees Michonne with the group, and he sets about spilling everyone’s Woodbury secrets (Andrea is there!) in the fashion most likely to set off a civil war. Rick, rightly recognizing the threat to be too grave, kicks Merle to the curb, but loses Darryl in the process. That Darryl won’t abandon the brother who almost killed him for the group that saved his life shows just how circumstantial the group bonds are. Blood trumps from the moment, though it seems from the preview that Darryl and Merle won’t be having an easy time of it alone in the walker-infested wilderness.

Back at the prison, Carol greets Darryl’s decision like a death (“He’s gone? He’s gone?”) It wasn’t just their cute, ongoing flirtation — Carol saw him as a kindred abused soul, damaged and controlled by Merle in the same way she was by her late, unlamented husband Ed. “Men like Merle get into your head,” she says. “If Ed walked through that door right now, breathing, and told me to go with him, I’d like to think I’d tell him to go to hell.” For Carol, Darryl’s decision makes her question whether her new family’s connection is strong enough to help her past the mental shackles put up by domestic abuse.

Tyrese and his group have a less introspective dilemma, locked away by strange, seemingly unstable people. There’s a beautiful scene of what looks like Tyrese and co. bonding with Hershel, only to end with Carl locking the door on what’s revealed to be the visitors’ cage. These four battered survivors, who increasingly resemble a “darkest timeline” mirror to Rick’s group, recognize how precarious their situation is. Two start advocating for armed revolution, but Tyrese won’t hear of it. “It’s survival of the fittest,” they say, but Tyrese simply says “this isn’t what we do.” Tyrese may be the last man on Earth whose moral code hasn’t been warped by the apocalypse, seeing his group as only a part of humanity rather than the only part worth saving.

So when Rick denies his bid to join the broader prison group in spite of Hershel’s advice, it stings. But it’s increasingly unclear how much sway Rick’s decisions hold anymore, as he collapses into hallucination-induced ramblings in the midst of the confrontation. Together with his earlier “phantom voices on the phone” episode, his vision of (presumably) Lori on the balcony suggests a growing break with reality that might require a reassessment of his role as group leader.

A similar reassessment is already underway in Woodbury, where an icily furious Governor broods in his office, refusing to take control of an increasingly terrified, anarchic population. So Andrea steps into the void, delivering an impassioned impromptu speech about Woodbury as a communal and moral ideal that seems to unite the residents. As the Governor, who just moments ago had dismissed “a visitor here, just passing through,” looks on, it seems as if he’s starting to see her a partner, the needed velvet glove for his hardening fist. As in the prison, the stage in Woodbury is set for big changes, with potentially explosive consequences as the conflict between the groups deepens.

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