I guess all of the question of Daryl and his love interests finally gets answered. We know he likes to play for at least one team LOL

 

He was talking about Rick not Merle

 

that's it Daryl, blame Carol for Connie.

 

Dang! Getting hurtful up in here!

 

That was a super boring episode sorry!

 

agreed I said that 25 minutes earlier

 

Daryl found out what his special purpose was for!!!

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/cd79603a-6488-4eb5-817e-007bdc99891a

Not a bad episode as far as bottles go, which have never been my favorite. Liked seeing dog as a puppino, and we even pinpointed a time frame for Daryl's mysterious facial scar. Yet still not a cause! . I liked Leah as a character. Interestingly, a total solar eclipse passed by the east coast in August of 2017, which would have been the very approximate time frame that Daryl was with Leah, however, it would have only been visible as a total eclipse around 300+ miles south of the general Virginia/Alexandria area. One thing I didn't love this episode was the repeated passage-of-time updates on the screen. I think they were a bit overused, and it may have been more natural to show time has passed using cues rather than words. But overall, I give it an 8.1.

 

Ehhh. Honestly this was a pretty poor episode. Don't think the Leah character worked very well. This was a situation where they really needed to spend more than one episode building up these characters attachments to one another. In the end her getting upset and seemingly leaving just because a guy was hesitant to commit to a relationship with her seemed pretty far fetched. That is real world drama. Not drama of people who have been living in a post apocalyptic world for over a decade.

And the whole thing about the dog connecting them to one another was a pretty poor idea in my opinion as well. Daryl couldn't have been that far away from the place for the dog to just come out on his own and find him and he would have known how far he was from the place. If they didn't want them to get together right away they should have just had them become trading partners instead of using the dog to connect them to one another.

Looks like another episode next week with only two actors in it.

 

Ok I looked back at that scene and they did show a picture broken and some chairs knocked over which could have indicated some struggle. Still if they we're trying to imply someone took her that is still a pretty forced ending since throughout the entire episode they say that they were the only ones they have seen (minus Daryl's flashback scenes with Carol) and they didn't build up anykind of human threat during the episode at all.

The ending just seemed like a way to get the character out of the story.

 

For the most part the episode didn't work for me. This relationship for Daryl was odd. It really doesn't make sense to me that she would issue him an ultimatum simply because he was going out to look for Rick. So what? She'd been living alone for years anyway.

What was intriguing too about the Daryl/Connie potential matchup was how he hadn't been with anyone for the duration of the show, but she was breaking through to him. So then to have this other relationship offscreen felt weird and out of place.

I did like Daryl blaming Carol for Connie. She was out of control last season and deserved it.

 

To be honest this episode makes me question if Daryl is a good choice to lead a new series.

 

This. Completely agree with every word.

Flashback or no flashback - how could we possibly care about this relationship? Set up in five minutes and lasting five minutes? With a complete stranger? Most people who actually care about Daryl getting into a relationship, would either be rooting for him to find and be with Connie or finally get together with Carol. I don’t have any particular issues with Leah per se, (bit of a Danielle Rousseau character from Lost?) but I just couldn’t bring myself to care. Perhaps I could have dug this story if Connie wasn’t in the picture now, with such a painstakingly slow burn. We were always meant to believe it’s because Daryl hasn’t had a relationship in ten years or maybe ever, then voila! Here’s Leah! So Connie now is a painstakingly slow burn because Daryl is not fully over Leah, or he’s too scared to try again with someone else, with his track record of losing people.

I’m reserving some judgement to see how this will fit into the great scheme of things.
But as Daryl is my favourite character, I feel a little cheated that this is what we have gotten as his first relationship in ten years (real time and nie it turns out to be be about 7 years in story time). It also goes completely against what Norman wanted for his character in the hundreds of interviews he’s given on the subject. The awkwardness of physical relationship. But maybe it was very awkward. We just didn’t get to see any of it, lol.

I can’t even give a score to this episode, it left me so disheartened. On my first watch, there were only two things I liked, besides Daryl finally losing it with Carol who was super annoying in this episode:

1. Daryl chucking a fish at Leah’s door, trying to be nice. Hilarious. I don’t even care that he probably wouldn’t have done that, no matter how much a caveman he could be. It was very funny.

2. I loved how he said to Carol “I know where I’m supposed to be”. This was a nice contrast to not being able to decide when Leah had asked him.

I feel a bit bad about how strained Daryl and Carol are, I love their friendship so much. But I’m sure they will figure their shit out, so I’m not too worried. Carol though, was she just expecting Daryl to move on like nothing had happened? All her joking around was way over the top, I thought. Maybe she was literally trying too hard.

So what’s next? I hope Angela Kang will make sure the Connie/Daryl reunion will be something spectacular and Daryl will finally be able to commit to a woman before she dies or disappears... Or should we get our brains rewired to accept this new (well, apparently old) relationship, that might resurface sometime in the future? Hm.

I will need to rewatch, to chase away (or enhance) this feeling of disappointment. The problem is, even if I look at the Leah/Daryl love story in complete isolation (suspending my Connie expectations), I’d still be disappointed. Because I think I might have liked it. I might have really liked it. If it had been given time and space to grow.

 

Unfortunately I have a bad feeling that this type of episode is what we are going to see a lot of with the Carol and Daryl show. AMC is probably going to go a lot cheaper than they did with TWD so many of the episodes will probably consist of Daryl and Carol just walking around the woods.

 

Hmmmmm...not my favorite but I didn’t dislike it either. I’m the outlier when it comes to Daryl and his romantic emotions. I think it’s a false assumption that he’s never had any prior to Connie.

I tell you it was going down with Beth on the night the dead raided their little mortuary, which was why he made a rash decision to open the door like he did cause the blood had left his brain for other parts.

Now we see that he formed an attachment, over time, with a lone female he met in the woods while searching for Rick. Why not? He was alone, not “home” and this woman came from a similar back ground. Made perfect sense to me.

Where it began to fall apart somewhat was when Leah gave him the ultimatum of where did he see himself belonging? Why was she so resentful of him going down to the river to look for his “brother”? Why didn’t she go help him? Did she catch a glimpse of him talking to Carol and think he had another woman? Why didn’t he suggest she go back with him to one of the settlements?

So many unanswered questions that couldn’t be resolved in one bottle episode. Leah’s disappearance was also too much of a mystery. That made no sense at all. It suggested foul play but I would have preferred to have seen her demise, Bonanza style somehow, with Daryl having to bury her with her son. That might explain why he hesitated to dive right in with Connie but why he also started to warm up to her.

I also didn’t care for the continued argument Daryl seems to be having with Carol. Bury the hatchet already and not in each other. You can lose people you care about too fast in this world.
Didn’t this little “adventure” reinforce that?

 

Yes. He was certainly falling for her. The relationship had so much potential. But they shut it down by Beth getting taken (just when he’s decided to stay with her in the mortuary and play house) and then they killed her off in the most ridiculous death in the history of the show. So we had three seasons of Daryl being depressed about losing her (and blaming himself).

Yes, it makes sense - absolutely. I agree. Just it seems rather a big deal to find it out in retrospect, and having it rushed like this.
The situation is in fact very similar: just when he is about to settle down with her, she gets taken.

Excellent questions. The ultimatum demonstrated how damaged they both were. Daryl couldn’t go back to live with his people, he couldn’t face the Rick shaped hole back with his family. He couldn’t bare seeing the pain in Michonne’s face either. So he doesn’t go back to live with them. And he can’t bring himself to talk about it with Leah either. He finds her a distraction, a safe haven from his pain, and he wants to keep them separate. So Leah doesn’t get it, or incapable of getting it because she has so many unresolved issues of her own. The ultimatum makes sense to me: she wanted Daryl to commit to her, open up more, and he wouldn’t. She was ready for a life together with Daryl and he kept his walls up, It is just such a pity that we were not shown more of this, just required to connect the dots.

Then just when he thinks he’s finally ready to settle down with her, she gets taken.

Yes! That’s my main grief with the episode. But apparently we will get more on this story, So hopefully it will all make more sense when we get to see the bigger picture.

I thought it was interesting. Daryl communicated his forgiveness and loyalty to her at the back of 10B. But here Carol was pushing things by trying to be overtly cheerful, back to being good old pragmatic Carol, appearing to be over what happened, her actions justified, Connie sad collateral damage, etc, and it pushed Daryl over the delicate edge. Because he never really let it rip with her over this. So now he did. All caught up in reliving the past as well. He lost Beth, he lost Leah, and now he lost Connie too, but at least he couldn’t blame himself for that.

Wise words.I think Daryl is in fact very good at burying the hatchet with people. Dwight, Negan... Carol too. But in this episode Carol really pushed his buttons, how she kept saying she was right about what she did, and all he could think of losing Connie.

 

What would've been more interesting and fun about a Daryl flashback episode is if they brought back Michael Rooker. Daryl could have been alone in the woods imagining him, having conversations and coming to terms with some of his past etc, while looking for Rick. They did a similar thing last season with Carol and Alpha. The hardcore fans are the ones left now and they would've enjoyed seeing Merle one more time, rather than some new random person.

 

At first I thought this was conceved as a pandemic episode. Then on Talking Dead I learned this backstory was something they had planned for awhile. There is a piece of dialogue in the previous season where Carol said to Daryl something about "keeping her dog." Melissa McBride didn't get that piece of dialogue and they told her it was something for the future with some relationship Daryl had during the years inbetween.

I'm unsure about the spinoff at this point. I guess it depends on where they leave off in the main story and who, if anyone, accompanies them.

 

Exactly, it's not that Daryl had a relationship but how the writers presented it all, particularly with the way they played the Connie situation. It's also something that we need to see on screen, since forming bonds is difficult for Daryl.

It'd be like having Gabriel who plays everything by the book and then we find out that offscreen he killed Dante. The audience needs to see that happen when there is a big character moment or they'll feel cheated.

 

It depends on what you consider rushed. I’d have to go back again and add up those time stamps but it was more than a year before Daryl actually moved in. It was painfully slow like trying to tame a feral cat. His interactions with her initially were so sporadic you couldn’t have filmed that in “real time” as part of the main story line. This relationship also occurred, I believe, during the show’s time jump after Rick’s disappearance. There was a lot going on with our characters we weren’t privy to.

I think finding out in retrospect is fine. Daryl keeps his feelings close to the vest. He’s not one to go blubbering on about some woman he met in the woods. I liked finding out he had a secret romance. Made me think, what else don’t we know about this character and what will happen if he finds either Leah or Connie ......or both?

I agree Leah was an emotional bandaid for Daryl but as you said they both came from dysfunctional families and had “issues”. Probably why he didn’t answer her immediately which she might have taken as rejection.

The question still remains shrouded for me about why she gave him the ultimatum at all. The time stamp said it was 10 months after we were given to believe they’d become a “couple”. What made her think all of a sudden she needed to know where his loyalties lie. Now remember, she’d been living successfully on her own in the woods so she’s probably as stealthy as Daryl. I suggested in the other thread that she may have caught a glimpse of him talking with Carol and not being able to communicate her feelings any better than he, was afraid something was going on where he might decide to leave her. OR maybe he was spending more time down at the river going farther and farther out. Maybe she got the idea in her head that one day he just wouldn’t return and she wanted to know how committed he was to their relationship because neither one of them were completely comfortable with opening up with each other. A I won’t ask any questions if you tell me you want to be here sort of situation.

One last possibility that’s been brought up is that she might have found herself pregnant. She wanted to know if Daryl wanted to be with her before she told him the news because she didn’t want him to stay out of obligation but because he wanted to be with her.

Oh, there's definitely more story to mine here if the writers choose to go there. They want to make us crazy in the meantime, lol.

Those closest to us are the ones that truly know how to push the right buttons but I hate to see the two of them rehashing this over and over. Carol's prediction that their luck has run out gives me a terrible feeling.