Connecting The Walking Dead: ‘The Wrong End Of A Telescope’

1) The Source Of Silas’s Rage?

After tickling at it for the previous two episodes, this week’s World Beyond finally gave us a taste of just what Silas can be like when he loses control.

As Silas and Iris found themselves trapped in the basement of the Hvass High School, Silas was forced to kill an empty with the sharp end of his massive wrench, and, after resorting to violence once, the floodgates began to open. Telling himself that the dead never stop coming, Silas flew into a rage, beating an empty to death with his bare hands(!), ending with him looking down at his bloody knuckles, eerily similar to what we saw of him during his flashbacks of his time in Omaha.

But, the real meat of this came afterwards, when talking to Iris, who tried to reason with him that he was not a monster for his actions against the empty, when Silas, remembering how others in Campus Colony talked about him behind his back, laid it all out on the table and asked Iris: “Do you think I killed my dad?”

First of all, this would suggest that the person we saw flashes of Silas pummeling in his flashbacks wasn’t a fellow student, but rather, his own father. This raises a lot of questions, the most obvious being: Why?

Well, I could think of only one good answer: Silas’s dad must have been abusive.

Why else would an otherwise normal teenager, apparently, be suspected of murdering his own father?

He wouldn’t be the first character in The Walking Dead universe who had an abusive father, as this idea immediately made me think of one of Walking Dead’s most popular characters: Daryl.

As we learned in the Walking Dead season three episode, “Home”, Daryl suffered serious abuse at the hands of he and older brother Merle’s father, which contributed to both men’s violent and antisocial nature. It would make perfect sense that this would be the reason Silas shows both of these traits, and why he’d lash out in a violent, uncontrollable rage against him.

But, we’re not quite through here, yet. You see, after coming to this realization, I remembered a conversation between Hope and Silas in the previous episode, “The Tyger And The Lamb”, where Silas told Hope that he didn’t miss his mom. At the time, I wondered why; Having heard that his mother testified against him, I’m starting to understand.

If Silas was being abused by his father, one would think that his mother knew about it, even if she wasn’t willing to admit to herself. The fact that she, apparently, didn’t bring this up in Silas’s defense, and, instead, chose to testify against him, suggests that she either approved of it on some level (Maybe thinking it was some extreme kind of “tough love” or something?), she was willfully ignorant of it, or, didn’t want to admit that she’d allowed her son to be abused, either way…it doesn’t look too good for his parents.

If I’m right, hopefully, Silas winds up more like Daryl, and less like Merle.