One Walking Dead character that has been hanging around since day one, but we really don’t know anything about is Theodore ‘T-Dog’ Douglas. IMDB doesn’t tell us much.
Theodore Douglas, more commonly known as T-Dog, is a Atlanta survivor first encountered by Rick early in the series.. He is a man willing to fight for his allies and has a kind heart as seen trying to rescue Merle Dixon, twice but failed to do so.
Poor T-Dog is pretty much just the token black guy at this point, he’s seemed to have no purpose so far except to add a little color to the show (yes that was an intentional pun), and allow Daryl to prove he isn’t really a racist by saving him. But there are a few things we have found out.
We know he has some honor. When he drops the handcuff key on the roof stranding Merle, he takes the time to do what he can to keep Merle safe from the walkers by chaining and padlocking the door. Let’s not forget the first impression we get of Daryl from the discussion around the campfire, the news of Merle would be better coming from a white guy. And yet when Daryl returns to camp, T-Dog mans up and admits his fault in dropping the key.
T-Dog also steps up to make it right by going back to save Merle. But honor aside, T-Dog has some demons to deal with.
He has his own racist streak, “I don’t see anyone else stepping up to save your brother’s cracker ass.” And after uttering his racist statement he has the nerve to make matters worse by saying Daryl doesn’t speak his language. Kind of makes you wonder if maybe T-Dog and the Dixon brothers hadn’t already had some problems prior to the roof incident.
We get a glimpse of that racist streak again on the highway when the group is out looking for Sophia. T-Dog pretty much says that Rick, Shane and Daryl aren’t going to lift a finger for him because he is black. Dale tells him that Rick and Shane have done alright by him and that Daryl has saved his life more than once (Daryl will save him again by giving T-Dog Merle’s atibiotics).
So it’s clear that there has been a lot more interaction between Daryl and T-Dog than we know about. We have seen a lot of ‘changes’ in Daryl over season 2, Daryl has grown beyond being the token redneck while T-Dog is still pretty much the token black guy. It would have been awesome to see some character development with T-Dog and I thing that the writers missed a big one here. Yes Daryl needed to grow but I think they wasted a lot of time focusing on the Daryl/Carol interactions. Carol is a stagnant character that has not grown one iota during the past season.
I would much rather have seen more interaction between Daryl and T-Dog since they really do have a lot more in common than Daryl and Carol. This abuse survivor angle just does not wash because Daryl does not choose to be a victim of his abuse, Carol does. Daryl and T-dog however were both dealing with the issues of tokenism and race. The issues were already there waiting to be explored. Carol however is a non issue, her determination to be a victim should have gotten her killed or ostracized long before now.
Daryl and T-Dog are both determined to survive and would have to deal with their issues to do so. It seems that they magically have, which is unrealistic in my view. Seeing Daryl and T-Dog working through their issues would have been much more interesting than watching Carol prove just how good she is at playing the victim, not to mention provide T-Dog (another character created for the TV series) with some much needed character development.
Just Stuff that interests me 