WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 10, Episode 20, "Splinter," which aired Sunday on AMC.
In the latest episode of The Walking Dead, titled “Splinter,” Princess, Yumiko, Ezekiel and Eugene are captured by the soldiers in white. After being separated from her new friends, Princess is thrown into a dark train car, and it’s not long before she starts to relive the events from that night, and it causes her to panic.
It was Princess' fault Yumiko was hurt. She had made things worse, so now she needed to help. While trying to escape from her solitary locomotive confinement, she breaks a piece of wood off of a plank in the wall and gives herself a splinter. That small piece of wood in her finger sends her down memory lane, and the road is not as bright and cheery as her personality.
During one of her many hallucinations in the episode, Princess talks to Yumiko in the next train car. The splinter reminds her of another time -- long ago before the world fell apart -- when she had a splinter. It got infected, and she to stay home from school. But Princess did not like that because “home was no Bueno.” Soon enough, she convinced her mother to go back to school, but the infection came back worse than ever. Her stepfather wouldn’t even let her eat at the dinner table. So, she told him, “No way man. You can’t push me away. This was my house first.” His only response was to hit her across the jaw, and even after that, her mother refused to take her side. She ate dinner alone in the garage.
This one event from her childhood stuck with Princess. However, these types of incidents are never isolated, and her abusive home-life totally explains her character. This episode really starts to unmask everything that she has suppressed. Near the end of the episode, Princess tells a guard, “Small dark spaces just do bad things to my head,” but it’s not entirely the small space or the darkness. It’s being alone with her thoughts and wondering why she always ends up on her own.
It is clear that because of her past experiences and rough home-life people push Princess away, and she blames herself. In The Walking Dead Season 10, Episode 15 “The Tower,” when Ezekiel, Yumiko and Eugene first find her, Princess describes her perspective on the world and people, saying, "The city was so empty. But then I realized, this isn’t that different from how I felt before all this. This one time someone told me, ‘You’re hard to love.’ So, maybe it’s me. Maybe I deserve this.”
She is alone in life, but the problem is that she feels abandoned. “Splinter” is a microcosm of Princess’s whole life: She was neglected by her family before the fall, then in the city by herself and now again in the train car. Princess against the world. Princess fending for herself. Princess always choosing to put on that tough-girl face even when people keep putting her down and rejecting her. Her cheery personality is a mask that she chooses to wear because she wants to convince herself, just as much as others, that she is likable and she belongs somewhere. That is why she is so eager to trust her new friends. They gave her a chance, so she cannot abandon them -- even if it means risking her life to help them.
0 Comments