People sometimes complain that The Walking Dead is telling the same story over and over, and where it concerns Morgan Jones, that is not an unfair complaint. Morgan is losing his mind, and if that seems familiar to viewers of The Walking Dead, it should. There’s nothing about his behavior in this week’s episode, “Do Not Send Us Astray,” that we haven’t seen before, often in the precise same way.
Take, for instance, the opening scene, which sees Morgan arguing with the ghost of Gavin. “You know what it is,” Gavin-Ghost says to Morgan. “You were supposed to.”
“You were supposed to,” the ghost of Gavin exclaims again, before Morgan jabs his stick at an apparition.
The scene plays out exactly as it did back in “Here Not Here,” the fourth episode of the sixth season. As the home Morgan was living in during the season three episode, “Clear,” burns down, Morgan yells at an unknown figure, “You were supposed to! You were supposed to. You know, you were supposed to! Don’t lie! You know that you were supposed to!”
The next day, after putting down a dozen zombies and burning their bodies, Morgan begins fighting again with an apparition. “You know what it is,” he exclaims, again, just as the ghost of Gavin says to Morgan at the end of this week’s episode. “You know what it is! You know what it is!”
The cycle is repeating. Morgan is losing his mind, but it’s important to know why he is losing his mind. It all goes back to Morgan’s son, Duane. When Morgan and/or Gavin says, “You were supposed to,” they are referring to Duane. He had a gun, one that Rick had given him in the pilot episode of the series, and he was “supposed to” kill his zombified mother with it. But he couldn’t pull the trigger, and Duane’s mom/Morgan’s wife killed Duane. “You had the knife, you had the gun. You were supposed to. You know you were supposed to,” Morgan mumbled to the ghost of his son back in the sixth season, before knocking over the lantern that burned down his house.
Even now, Morgan continues to blame himself for his son’s death, and after Henry killed Gavin, it all came flooding back, especially now that Henry is missing. It is post-traumatic stress syndrome, and the only way that Morgan could defeat it the last time was by leaving his home and meeting Eastman, who nursed his mental state back to health.
That’s exactly what must happen again now: Morgan must leave, and ultimately, that’s how he will end up with the cast of Fear the Walking Dead.
