The Walking Thread

[Content Note: Violence. Spoilers are lurching around undeadly herein.]


Daryl and Blonde Girl fall asleep standing up. From boredom.
Oh boy. This episode. This fucking show. Last night, my pal Veronica Arreola (@veronicaeye), who is my biggest Walking Thread supporter, tweeted at me:


LOL FOREVER. Like, genuine laughter, because Veronica is witty and clever, which is an entirely different reason than I laugh at The Walking Dead.

Anyway. We pick back up in the Season of Disjointed Stories about Dispersed Grimes Jailians with Daryl and Blonde Girl, whose name I still literally cannot remember, even after an entire episode with her.

Daryl and BG hide in the trunk of a car while zombies try to get in. Eventually the zombies wander sluggishly away, and Daryl and BG set up camp in the woods and eat a snake. BG is all, "Fuck this snake!" and marches off, declaring she wants to drink some booze. (Ha ha sure.)

She's never had any booze, because her zealot conservative dad forbid it, and told her that moonshine would make you go blind. "Like touching your lady parts!"—Hershel, presumably. She is, however, familiar with the famous drinking game "I've Never," because she used to watch her friends play it. LOL. Oh, BG. You must have been the life of the party in the good old days!

Stomp stomp stomp. Woods woods woods. BG is on a big-time booze mission, and Daryl is along for the ride, because, absent any other Straight White Patriarchs, he's obliged to assume the role of protector. They find a zombiepocalypse-busted country club, and BG locates a bottle of cooking wine. (Delicious!) But she has to use it to kill a zombie. (Damn.)

All the lady zombies in the country club are wearing pearls (lol) and the gentlemen zombies are wearing cardigans (lol), so you know they're rich. And Daryl seems real mad at these rich zombies. I feel an Important Commentary on privilege (and how sad it is that there are straight white men who lack class privilege) coming on. Oh goody!

BG finds a pretty yellow blouse and white cardigan in the country club gift shop and puts them on. I don't know why on earth she wants a sweater, unless it's to mop the gallons of sweat from Grimes' brow if she ever sees him again, but whatever.

Her new duds aren't pristine for long, though, because Daryl uses a golf club (SYMBOL OF RICH WHITE PEOPLE EVERYWHERE) to pound the fuck out of a rich country club zombie, and sprays blood all over BG's new clothes. Sad trombone.

BG makes her way to the country club bar, where Daryl throws darts at pictures of rich people (LOL OMG), in case you hadn't quite gotten the message that Daryl resents rich people yet. BG discovers the only booze left in the place is a bottle of peach schnapps, and then starts crying, presumably because she doesn't have any orange juice to make a delicious Fuzzy Navel. Or maybe because she misses her dad. It's hard to say.

In any case, Daryl smashes the bottle and tells her, "Ain't gonna have your first drink be no damn peach schnapps." Because that's a drink for GIRLS, not a REAL drink, geez. So now Daryl is on a mission to find her some manly booze, which is a real turnaround from when he SHAMED THE FUCK OUT OF BOB for nicking a bottle of booze during the medicine run.

Eventually, Daryl and BG stumble across a ramshackle home and moonshine distillery, which Daryl recognized from a million zombie-shuffles away, because his dad had one just like it. His dad also apparently had a ceramic brassiere (which is also an ashtray?) that he used to put on top of the TV for shooting practice. We're really getting a good feeling for why Merle was a garbage nightmare here.

Blah blah they drink the moonshine and play "I've Never," which becomes another exercise in HITTING US OVER THE HEAD WITH HOW DARYL WAS POOR AND HATES RICH PEOPLE IN CASE YOU HADN'T NOTICED. So subtle, this show.

Daryl is an angry drunk and pisses inside the shack and yells a lot. He drags BG outside and yells more and she yells back and they manage to have a whole fight until hug-time make-up yay-yay without any zombies showing up.

"Well, we are attracted to noise, but, little known fact, we're repelled by passive-aggressive bullshit."—President Ulysses T. Zombie.

That night, Daryl and BG have a heart-to-heart about changing and leaving your past behind, and not being too hard or too naive, or something. The dialogue is terrible even by The Walking Dead garbage dialogue standards, and, having watched this episode right after watching the latest episode of True Detective, where every word is as rich as a dipshit with a gold-plated car elevator, I was laughing real laughs of deep laughter at the juxtaposition.

While I was simultaneously crying fake tears on the inside about how now even Daryl has been reduced to nothing more than a petulant patriarch who needs a spanking.

In the final moments, BG suggests they burn down the shack, i.e. the SYMBOL OF DARYL'S DARK PAST. In case you missed that Important Symbolism. So they do. Using the booze, i.e. the SYMBOL OF BG'S NAIVE PAST. In case you missed that Important Symbolism. And then they flip off the shack while it burns. Ha ha sure.

Next week: Maggie, Sasha, and Bob!