The 'Walking Dead' Brain-Dead Move of the Week: Fool Daryl Twice, Shame on All of Us
Every week on The Walking Dead, someone does something stupid that needlessly endangers the lives of themselves and others. Here, we commemorate those decisions in the hopes that they won’t be repeated. But of course, they know they will be.
Hoo boy… this week was just one big parade of stupid, wasn’t it? We could easily spend our time here detailing how dumb it was for Abraham to get right up in the face of a zombie with a rocket strapped to its back, or making fun of the bad guy who got his arm chomped by a walker that was trapped by a rock and couldn’t even move. But instead, let’s turn our attention to our good buddy Daryl and his ill-fated decision to start trusting people.
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You see, Daryl used to be a lone wolf who wouldn’t let anyone get too close to him. (Which is just as well, because can you imagine how bad he stinks by now?) But the past six seasons have turned him into a big softie, and now he’s willing to open his heart to three scruffy strangers in the woods. Side note: As soon as we saw these three, we knew at least one of them wasn’t getting out of this episode alive.
Woods Guy takes Daryl prisoner at gunpoint, but Daryl escapes when the girl with the Single White Female haircut collapses and distracts them. Great, he’s free! Except… Daryl notices the bag he took from them contains insulin. And he knows this because the cooler is labeled as such, in very large print. The zombie apocalypse: We don’t have food or shelter, but we still have label makers, dammit!
So Daryl feels bad and goes back to return the insulin to Woods Guy. He does take the guy’s gun as payment, and is about to run off when a roving band of even worse guys drives up. So then Daryl decides to team up with Woods Guy to fight this new enemy — and even hands him back the gun he just took from him! After the battle, Woods Guy asks Daryl why he came back, and Daryl actually replies: “Maybe I’m stupid, too.” Uh, yeah, pretty much!
Even with the insulin, Single White Female doesn’t last long; she dies in maybe the most idiotic zombie death we’ve seen on this show so far. (She was laying flowers at the grave of two dead friends, only they turned into zombies and bit her just as she kneeled down? Just colossally dumb.) So it’s just Woods Guy and his anonymous lady friend with Daryl as he offers to take them back to Alexandria… and also tells them way too much about himself in the process.
When Daryl turns back around, Woods Guy is holding him at gunpoint — again! A gun that Daryl gave back to him! As penance for his stupidity, Daryl has to hand over his beloved crossbow, and can only watch as these two drive off on his motorbike. In the immortal words of Otter from Animal House: “You f–ked up! You trusted us!”
So Daryl learns the hard way that you can’t trust anybody in a zombie apocalypse. Especially people you just met. Who have previously held you hostage. Well, at least now he has a dumb little figurine to remind him of that!
The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.
