Lydia has been
imprisoned in Hilltop and is now locked in a cell opposite Henry the
sympathetic who wants to know her life story
She talks a lot about her life just after the apocalypse - and we get a flash
back to her, her dad and her mother and them living in a shelter. In her recap,
her dad was kind of an arsehole, being harsh and uncaring while her mother
tried to comfort her and convince her that the world wasn’t ending while her
dad was uncaring and awful and wanting to run off and generally snarling.
Lydia adds her own
commentary about how her dad was the worst but her mother was strong and did
what she had to - including at one point having to kill a man who was noisily
panicking about being surrounded by scary zombies. Something Daryl thinks was
necessary and understandable to survive since the apocalypse has you make hard
choices. Later her dad ends up killed trying to save her from a zombie
This added to the
lessons Lydia learned from her mother - you had to be hard, you had to be
strong, and other bizarre ideas like “hunger is a gift”. She’s also convinced
that settlements like this cannot possibly last becsause the world belongs to
the dead and instead they have to wander around with zombies, catch blood
poisoning from all the rotting meat and eat earth worms or anything lese they
can just about scavenge without alerting the rotten nastiness around them
This makes perfect
sense
Meanwhile Henry,
listening to all this, decides it’s a great idea to tell Lydia about his
parents and the other settlements in the area - until Daryl intervenes because
they’re supposed to be questioning her and how can Henry possibly be this clueless?
HOW?! Henry insists Lydia is a nice person and Daryl is a big ol’ mean meaning
for not trusting the enemy agent who tried to kill one of them
Henry also sneaks her
out in the middle of the night to eat earth worms (because that’s a thing the
Whisperers do) and nearly get hit in the head by a hammer before she realises
that maaaybe this settlement might actually be here to say
And Daryl confronts her - he recognises the marks on her arms as that she has
been beaten - and guesses rightly that it was by her mother. As a man abused as
a child himself he can see some parts of her story that don’t make sense - how
her father has been cast as the villain but the story is inconsistent.
While I like Daryl
examining his own past (and Henry bringing in Carol and how she cut her hair to
avoid her abusive husband using it as a way to hurt her and has only grown it
out now she feels safe which is a nice touch), I do think that this is somewhat
simplistic - I mean “my abuse didn’t look like that” is not a valid way to
criticise another’s abuse. Nor is pointing to an abuser’s acts of kindness
proof that they weren’t/aren’t an abuser.
With Daryl poking a
different story emerges - Lydia’s father was the supportive, caring, protective
one and all the bad actions Lydia has ascribed to her dad actually came from
her mother. Her mother told her her version of events over and over and over
and over so many times that Lydia herself came to believe them (classic gas
lighting); from simple things like cutting her hair through to the violence and
willingness to leave
And, above all, her
dad’s death - not at the hands of a zombie, but at the hands of Lydia when he
refused to abandon their friends when they were struggling against the newly
raised walker.
Again I’m going with
good but simplistic here -on the one hand gaslighting like this is such a
common abusive tactic - telling Lydia the beatings make her stronger, how they
have to be hard and how weakness is terrible while at the same time stressing
that her dad was the bad guy.
What I consider
simplistic is that Lydia, after years of believing this, could apparently be
turned by a couple of minutes of Daryl’s doubt.
But Lydia now
recognises her mother as the big bad - which is awkward, because her mother
arrives with a strong of Whispers all within easy mow-down-with-nows range to
demand her daughter back
