The Walking Dead: World Beyond: Who ISN’T The Worst?

2) Gary Plaskett

We’ve seen some pretty terrible parents in the Walking Dead universe, and, while I said Gary might be the worst…he also might be the best.

I know that’s confusing, but, bear with me. When you look at many of the others: Pete (Whom I compared Gary to a week or so ago), Ed, Daryl and Merle’s dad, Alpha, we never really saw (Or heard of) them being anything but terrible. The same can not be said for Gary.

What was clearly one of the central theme’s of Silas’s flashbacks in episode eight, “The Sky Is A Graveyard”, was the internal conflict Silas had between the man who had, essentially, forced Silas to kill him, and the good dad he remembered from his childhood.

In fact, two of Silas’s “flashbacks within a flashback” show him clearly having a good relationship with his dad when he was younger, with Gary first patching up his son after scraping his knee, and later, with his dad enthusiastically trying to demonstrate to Silas what concerts were like before the outbreak occurred. There was not even the slightest whiff of anything being awry between father and son; Rather, it looked like they had a very normal, healthy relationship.

The reason I’m saying all of this is that this shows that Gary was not an inherently evil person. He clearly had rage issues, and had a violent streak, but, we also saw that he could be very warm and fun-loving, and someone who, odd though it might sound, clearly valued family. Think about it: Both times we saw Gary spaz out on Silas, it was when he thought Silas was disrespecting the family; First, when Gary thought Silas was ignoring him about getting his mother a Christmas present, and then, when he believed Silas was leaving the kitchen a mess, specifically yelling about Silas “disrespecting the house [Silas’s] grandparents left for us”.

Was his way of dealing with people “disrespecting” his family good? Hell, no. But, you can also see that Gary wasn’t a man who abused people for the sake of it, like Ed, or behaved as if he didn’t care about his family at all, like Alpha. Was he a volcano? Yes, but, we could also see that there was a good man somewhere deep down inside.