After seeing the blind prophet in the Daryl Dixon S3 trailer, I fell down this rabbit hole and now I'd like to take you all with me.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon is an apocalyptic allegory for The Odyssey
The Odyssey is told in twenty-four “books”, or what we might refer to as a chapter, and tells the tale of Odysseus in two parts:
First, the ten year account of the Trojan War.
Next, the ten years Odysseus spent lost at sea trying to get home to Ithaca and Penelope.
On his journey, he encounters cannibal giants, a cyclops, sirens, the lotus-eaters, sea monsters, a spiteful goddess who turns men into beasts, a blind prophet, several temptations to his marriage (Circe, the nymph Calypso, and the Princess Nausicaa) and speaks to the spirit of his dead mother. Odysseus communes with the gods (particularly Athena, his patron goddess) through birds, visions, and dreams. He is unique in that his story focuses heavily on homecoming. So few Greek heroes ever get to go home.
Homecoming, Wandering, Guest-friendship, and Tests are all major themes. The first several books of the Odyssey are told from the perspective of Odysseus' son, Telemachus, who along with his mother and Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, is having to host the 108 boorish suitors vying for her hand in her husband's extended absence. Penelope's faith is being tested just as much as her husband's. Nevertheless, he has been gone so long that she must remarry and so she sets forth a task for her suitors: anyone who can beat a test of archery with her husband's bow will win her hand.
Ten years after the fall of Troy the prison, Daryl finds himself adrift, blown off course in a strange land. He listens to a man mourn his late wife, lamenting that it would have been their tenth anniversary. Our hero yearns for home and love. He yearns for Ithaca and Penelope.
His losses have left him jaded. He is a bad guest to the first people he meets and is immediately punished for it; robbed and left for dead until the nymph Calypso the nun Isabelle finds him and nurses him to health. He doesn't want to stay with her, he wants to go home ‒ but she reminds him of home in a way. She reminds him of someone.
So he stays.
The Gods The nuns don't want Calypso Isabelle to keep Odysseus Daryl because he is a mortal faithless.
Calypso keeps Odysseus in a secret cave where they make love every day, but every night he goes down to the beach to weep. Unable to bear watching him suffer, she promises to take him to a port where he can catch a boat an island where he can build a boat.
Isabelle got to keep Daryl longer than Calypso kept Odysseus. Isabelle comes with him to the underworld the catacombs so that he can sacrifice a black sheep looking for information on how to get home. Sidenote: it does not bode well for Carol that she later also follows Daryl down into the underworld looking for information.
As this is an allegory and not a perfect 1:1 retelling, I'm going to heavily utilize bullet points going forward in order to best illustrate the point.
Daryl/Odysseus:
Daryl was scarred by his boorish father as a boy / Odysseus was scarred by a boar as a boy / the “little Jimmy” pig story is most likely Daryl's true tale, meaning that Daryl owned a pig as a child that left him with lifelong emotional scars.
Communes with the gods/God through dreams and visions
Tests of Faith, Tests of Character
Hidden identity
He beats the other men at the garage (the boorish suitors who were heckling and ultimately murdered the young lover) at a test of archery
Before we move on to Genet/Circe, I have to take a moment and emphasize the importance of pigs both in The Odyssey and in The Walking Dead universe. Pigs represent the lowest of all beasts. They foreshadow the fall of the prison, our metaphorical Troy. Penelope's suitors are explicitly described as "boorish" i.e. piglike. Genet, before ripping out Codron’s eye and making a cyclops out of our Remus/Romulus-proxy, tells the story about her mother's “pig” of a boss. Aaron and Father Gabriel kill and cook a boar before a villainous stranger forces them into a deadly game of Russian roulette. When Dr. Edwards and Beth are having their profound conversation at Grady about the divinity of art, and how it transcends, rises above, makes us more than “beasts”, all juxtaposed by The Denial of St. Peter watching over them, they are sharing a sparse meal of guinea pig. And who could forget Little Jimmy?
Pigs, to both Homer and the writers of The Walking Dead, signify the absolute worst of humanity.
Genet/Circe:
Absolutely despises the arts and humanity, seeks to turn all men into beasts
Misogyny on legs: women do not trust her, and she doesn't like them either
Men eat out of the palm of her hand
Spiteful and bitter to her core; wants to punish the world, men specifically, for past crimes inflicted on her person
A master poisoner done in by her own poison
Commonly depicted drinking from a goblet
Isabelle/Calypso:
Does not want to let our hero go
In many versions of the story, Calypso kills herself after freeing Odysseus from the prison of her love
The very name “Calypso” means “to conceal”. Daryl trains with Laurent in a secret cave, and is as despaired as Calypso was for Odysseus when Laurent disappears from it.
Carol/Telemachus:
Book One of The Odyssey: Athena disguises herself as Telemachus to enact divine intervention on Odysseus' behalf. What jumpstarts Daryl's journey? Static on the radio causes him to misunderstand the context of Carol's message and puts him in the mindset that someone long gone has returned.
The Book of Carol/Book Two of The Odyssey begins with Carol/Telemachus confronting the men at the garage/the boorish suitors before setting off on a quest to find Daryl/Odysseus.
Divine intervention comes in the form of lightning destroying their ethanol stores and forcing them to leave immediately on a one-way trip to Europe. He is the voice telling her to breathe. Her meeting with Ash is fated.
With their shared domestic abuse trauma bond and Carol’s role as Daryl’s proxy-mother, the son/father dynamic in The Odyssey has been inverted here. Instead, the mother is on a quest to bring her son home.
Ash Patel/Nestor, King of Pylor:
In Book Three of The Odyssey, Telemachus travels to Pylor to seek counsel with King Nestor and board a vessel in search of his father.
Like Ash, Nestor is kind and generous. He allows Telemachus/Carol to board his vessel but is unable to provide any information as to the whereabouts of his father/Daryl.
In Book Four of the Odyssey, Telemachus arrives in Sparta and learns of his father's adventures. Compare with Carol arriving in France and learning of Daryl’s adventures.
King Nestor is typically portrayed as a wizened old warrior appearing to give advice to the hero of the tale. His entire archetype is Hershel Greene-coded in my opinion. Therefore, I do not believe it is any coincidence that his vessel landed in Greenland.
Anna Valery & Quinn/Persephone & Hades
Anna used to hate her mother (Demeter) for holding her back from the seedy life of a Parisian nightclub singer, but comes to understand that she was just trying to protect her
Anna and Quinn have an intense love/hate relationship, landing far more on the side of hate
Quinn attempts to make another Persephone out of Isabelle
The imagery of her death; being taken willingly by the dead without a sound, proud and regal. Queen of the underworld
Losang and the Nest/the Lotus-Eaters
The lotus-eaters offer Odysseus fruit and wine made from the fruit of a lotus flower that are so sweet it makes them forget about home.
Losang's sweet fruit is born from his false tree of knowledge; the possibility that his corrupt religion could offer a safe, good life to Daryl, Isabelle, and Laurent. He cultivates a false sense of security and attempts to plant the seed that Laurent does not need Daryl.
Other elements of note:
Zeus sends down two eagles to rip each other apart in front of the boorish suitors as an omen of revenge. This motif is married to the Remus/Romulus symbolism and can be viewed in Daryl's relationships with both Quinn and Codron.
The Guerrier capturing men/walkers in shipping containers to bring from the U.S. to Europe are the cannibal giants imprisoning Odysseus and his men. This is also a direct throwback to Terminus.
The bioluminescent walkers are another allegory for the lotus-eaters. The fantasies and hallucinations they offer are fatally attractive.
Divine intervention occurs repeatedly, over and over again.
Daryl teaching the men at the Nest how to shoot while Isabelle watched from above was a foreshadowing of Penelope's Test of Archery.
Eun and Hana's desire to keep Ash as a sex slave is a parallel to Odysseus' numerous (debatable) unwilling affairs, as well as a commentary on the extreme lengths an individual is willing to go for the sake of home and family (Ithaca and Penelope). The plan to repopulate Greenland with Ash's spawn is a nod to his allegorical counterpart, King of Pylor. Greenland here is Pylor.
The man at the garage who turned in the young lover's body for gas was named Juno, after the Roman goddess of marriage. Daryl is later trapped in a shipping container with this man, and takes the time to free him even though he doesn't like him; another test of character.
What does all this mean for the rest of the series? I have my own predictions.
There are only so many trials left. We're getting closer and closer to Ithaca and Penelope. Daryl still needs to speak with the blind prophet to find out how to get home. We've yet to meet Nausicaa, the Phaeacian Princess ‒ a beautiful and charming individual who in some versions of the tale entices Odysseus, and in others marries Telemachus. In my opinion, this will be Carol’s teased lover. But that still leaves us wondering…
Who is Penelope?
Following the beats of The Odyssey, it can't be anyone new. Those are just affairs. It has to be someone from Daryl’s established timeline. It can't be Carol because, as we've covered at length, Carol is playing a familial role here and more damning than that, neither of the actors have any interest in developing their characters in a romantic direction, and have said as much on record. Connie is a possibility, I suppose, but Daryl has no reason to yearn for her. He knows where she is, she's not lost to him.
So who is it? Who did he lose? Who does he miss? Who does he yearn for? Why was Isabelle in particular so enticing to him when all the others were left behind?
Who does she remind him of?
And just in case anyone thinks I've gone off the deep end and lost the plot, here's a quote from director Daniel Percival comparing TWD:DD to The Odyssey:
