Connecting The Walking Dead: ‘The Tyger And The Lamb’

1) Silas’s Anger Management

It seems like one of the big focuses for this week’s episode of World Beyond was Silas and his backstory, specifically, the mysterious incident which resulted in his expulsion from Omaha and eventual placement under his uncle Marco’s care at Campus Colony.

While we haven’t gotten the full picture of it, what we did see suggested that, while going to school in Omaha, he got into a fight with another boy and pummeled him, leaving his knuckles (And not his face, meaning his adversary got little to no offense in the exchange) cut, bloody and bruised from the level of beating he dished out. The fact it warranted his relocation to Campus Colony also suggests that this beating was so severe that he was, on some level, deemed a threat to his opponent, if not everyone else. Additionally, it seems that this incident was such that even Silas himself was frightened by the depth of violence he stooped to, prompting him to want to refrain from using violence again, even against an empty.

As I sat in my chair, watching the episode, and saw the scene of Silas sitting in an ambulance, getting his hands patched up, I couldn’t help but think of one person: Rick.

If you remember back to The Walking Dead’s season four finale, “A”, the episode featured Rick, Daryl, and Michonne (But especially Rick), for lack of a better term, killing The Claimers to death. It was one of the most brutal things we’d seen in the show up to that point, with Rick ripping the throat of the Claimers leader, Joe, out with his teeth, and stabbing the last survivor of the group, “Deserved-It” Dan, several times before gutting him.

The next shot we saw after that gruesome event was the next day, with Rick, calmly sitting on the road, his hands soaked in blood.

Now, I doubt whoever Silas beat up did something anywhere near as heinous as the Claimers were threatening to do, but, I can’t ignore the parallel, or what it represents. At that particular point in The Walking Dead, the idea was to show how Rick was transforming, giving a hint to just how deep into Crazytown Rick was going to go in the following season, arguably the darkest we’d ever see him get throughout his run in the series. Could these brief glimpses into Silas’s past be hints that, behind his quiet exterior, there’s an extremely angry and violent young man waiting to get out?

Well, apparently, the answer is “No”, or, at least, not if Silas himself has any say in it. Along with the flashbacks, we also saw Silas take great pains to avoid having to using violence of any sort, even going so far as to try to carry Iris and Elton’s bags just to avoid having to fight any empties. It was clear that Silas did not want to be the kid who pummeled one of his classmates, and wanted to everything he could to avoid going back to being that kid. Seeing that made me think of another Walking Dead character who had, until recently, been trying to avoid reverting to a rage-filled version of himself from a dark part of his past: Morgan.

Ever since his reintroduction to The Walking Dead way back in season three’s “Clear”, we’ve watched Morgan struggle with his rage, and the monster it causes him to become, a monster we saw on full display in season eight of Walking Dead, as he unleashed his wrath on the Saviors, who forced him to break his vow not to kill when they murdered his protege, Benjamin.

Since then, we watched as Morgan tried to reassert that vow, and spent all of the last two seasons of Fear The Walking Dead doing everything in his power to avoid being the man he was before he left Virginia, not killing a single living soul in all that time.

What does this mean for Silas? Does it mean that he has a worse history of violence that we don’t even know yet? Was he always a troubled kid? Is that the subtle message we were getting in that tape from his grandparents? Will he have an uncontrollable rage like Morgan did?

We don’t know yet, but, I like the where things are going.