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During one scene near the beginning of Season 10 Episode 7 of The Walking Dead, the camera focuses in closely on Daryl and the large scars on his back, including an X-shaped scar. Here’s a look at where that scar came from.
The X Scar Was Explained Last Season
The source of the scars was a big mystery on The Walking Dead for a while last season before the question was finally answered back in March 2019. First, if you recall, Michonne has the same X-scar too.
Michonne X Scar
And Daryl has one also, that we saw last season too.
In the Season 9 episode “Scars,” we finally learned how those X-scars came to be through a series of flashbacks.
Years earlier, Michonne had reunited with an old friend from her past before the apocalypse named Jocelyn. Jocelyn was protecting some kids and they were all invited to live in the community. But Jocelyn eventually kidnapped Judith and some other children, trying to brainwash them into joining an army of children she was affiliated with.
Pregnant Michonne and Daryl went to hunt down Jocelyn and find Judith. They were caught and the children branded Daryl and Michonne with X’s. This is how they marked their targets before killing them.
Daryl and Michonne escaped and Michonne was able to kill Jocelyn. But the brainwashed children wouldn’t back down and Michonne had to kill most of them in order to save Judith and some other children from Alexandria.
This was why Michonne guarded her community so closely and was so scared of strangers. Daryl appeared to have weathered all of that better, but he didn’t have to kill the children like Michonne did.
Daryl Has Other Scars Too
The scars first appeared in Season 9, first on Daryl and then it was revealed that Michonne had a matching scar too. But Daryl has other scars that date back further than the infamous X-scar.
Here’s a look at an older screenshot of a younger Daryl and the scars that he had:
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Younger Daryl had an X-scar already near the top of his back on his shoulder (as he still does), but he did not have the X scar over the lower left side of his back. Here’s a photo of the upper part of Daryl’s back for comparison, shared on Twitter. Only the lower scar is new.
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His earlier scars were from when he was beaten as a child. He and his brother Merle talked about it before in older episodes, when Merle said he didn’t know that Daryl was beaten by his dad, and Daryl told Merle that the same thing would have happened to him if he had stayed.
But the X-shaped scar on his lower left back was new and introduced in Season 9.
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