Merle Dixon

Merle Dixon
The Walking Dead character
First appearance	"Guts"
Last appearance	"This Sorrowful Life"
Created by	Frank Darabont
Portrayed by	Michael Rooker
In-universe information
Occupation	Unknown, drug dealer

Merle Dixon is a fictional character from the AMC television series The Walking Dead, portrayed by Michael Rooker. He is an original character and shares no comic counterpart. He is also a main character in the 2013 video game The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, which focuses on him and his brother, Daryl Dixon, during the early days of the zombie apocalypse.

Television series

Fictional character biography

Merle is the older brother of Daryl Dixon. Due to their lack of a mother (who died in a house fire while smoking in bed, when they were young) and their neglectful and abusive father, Merle raised Daryl, though there were periods when Merle was not around due to his being in juvenile hall. Though the length of time and branch were not stated, Merle served in the military, where at some point he mouthed off to an officer and subsequently punched five of his teeth out. According to Shane and Daryl, Merle was a drug dealer before the outbreak. He is also shown to have been a drug abuser (e.g., in "Guts" and "This Sorrowful Life").

Season 1

Merle first appears in the episode "Guts", along with a group of survivors who had traveled into Atlanta to scavenge for supplies. While atop a department store roof, Merle begins firing a rifle at walkers on the street while the group demands that he stop. Merle gets into a physical altercation with T-Dog (IronE Singleton) after Merle calls him a "nigger" and subsequently beats T-Dog in a brief, intense fight. After momentarily announcing himself leader of the group, Merle is blind-sided by Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), who punches him and handcuffs him to a pipe before Merle can fight back. Merle is put under T-Dog's watch while the other survivors attempt to find a way out of the city. When the survivors do find a way out, T-Dog attempts to save Merle, but accidentally drops the handcuff keys into a vent; this forces him to abandon Merle on the roof. Before T-Dog flees, he chains the rooftop door shut. As walkers begin to invade the building and reach the chained rooftop door, Merle struggles until he notices a hacksaw by the spilled toolbox the others had left behind. He uses his belt to reach the hacksaw and ultimately cuts off his own hand to escape, as the hacksaw blade was too dull to cut through the handcuffs.

Rick and the group return to the camp and explain to Daryl that they abandoned Merle. Daryl, T-Dog, Rick and Glenn (Steven Yeun) decide to return to Atlanta to retrieve him as well as a bag of weapons Rick dropped downtown. Returning to the department store roof, the four see that Merle has severed his own hand with a dull hacksaw but find evidence that he survived the self-mutilation by cauterizing the wound. The four follow Merle's blood-trail through the department store but are unable to find him. Back outside, they discover their truck has been taken.

Season 2

Merle appears as a hallucination to Daryl.

Merle remains missing throughout the second season. He only appears once to Daryl in a hallucination, wherein Merle taunts and mocks his younger brother for giving up on searching for him and reminds Daryl that he is in a group that had left Merle for dead on the rooftop. Merle also berates Daryl for a perceived weakness that Merle blames on the time Daryl has spent with the group.

Season 3

Merle is found to be living in Woodbury, where he has earned the status of the Governor's right-hand man. He has fashioned a knife attachment onto the stump where his hand used to be. He has been hoping to find his brother, Daryl, since his own separation from the group. While investigating an incident involving a crashed helicopter, Merle and a group of survivors from Woodbury encounter Andrea, a fellow survivor from Atlanta, and Michonne, and bring them back to Woodbury, along with the sole survivor of the helicopter crash. Andrea later gives Merle directions to the last location where she had seen Daryl.

Merle is noticeably kept in line by The Governor, a sharp contrast to his nature in the Atlanta group. In "Hounded", The Governor has sent Merle to lead a posse to hunt down Michonne after she leaves Woodbury. He wounds her and she kills members of the posse, but when Michonne escapes into the red zone, Merle calls off the hunt, reporting to The Governor that he killed her. Later on, Merle runs into Glenn and Maggie from the Atlanta group. He asks them to take him to Daryl. They refuse, so he holds Maggie hostage and demands Glenn drive them to Woodbury. After Rick's group infiltrates Woodbury and rescues Glenn and Maggie, Michonne attacks The Governor; furious at losing an eye and his (already dead) daughter to a woman Merle reported as dead, he publicly accuses Merle of treason and reveals that he has captured Daryl. The Governor orders Merle and Daryl to fight to the death, but they are saved by Rick and Maggie, who attack Woodbury. When Merle begins to insult the group, Rick knocks him out. Rick's group decides not to include Merle because of his attitude and his transgressions against Maggie and Glenn, but Daryl opts to leave the group to join Merle, refusing to leave his brother behind again.

Merle and Daryl spend time fending for themselves in the woods. At one point, they come across a family being attacked by walkers and Merle half-heartedly assists in Daryl's efforts to rescue them. Merle then attempts to rob them, but Daryl points his crossbow at him and lets the family drive off before walking off on his own. Merle follows and they get into a physical confrontation, where the depth of their father's abuse is shown when Merle inadvertently exposes scars on Daryl's back. Merle realizes that his leaving home resulted in Daryl becoming the target of their father's abuse. It is also revealed that the brothers had originally planned to rob the Atlanta group. Daryl then leaves to go back to the prison, despite Merle's claims that the group will never accept him.

The brothers arrive at the prison at the tail-end of an assault by The Governor and his men, who have crashed a truck through the prison gate and unleashed a horde of walkers onto the prison grounds. Merle and Daryl save Rick from a close call from attacking Walkers. Merle is promptly locked inside a prison cell, where he shares what he knows about Woodbury and The Governor with the group. He bonds with Hershel and apologizes to Michonne, claiming his attack on her was simply following The Governor's orders.

In the penultimate Season three episode "This Sorrowful Life", Rick confides in Merle, Daryl, and Hershel that The Governor promises to leave the prison alone if they hand over Michonne. Rick plans to do as The Governor requests, and asks Merle to help deliver Michonne to the meeting place at noon. Merle, knowing that Rick will not go through with it, traps and ties up Michonne. However, after he and Michonne talk about personal matters, he lets her go and returns her katana, telling her he has something to do alone. He starts drinking whiskey before using loud music to lure a group of walkers to the exchange site where the Governor is waiting; the music also distracts the Governor's henchmen while Merle secretly takes cover. After shooting several of the henchmen, Merle is caught and beaten by Martinez and two other men, and then injured and winded, fights one-on-one with The Governor. The Governor gets the upper hand and bites off two of Merle's fingers, before shooting him in the chest with a pistol. Later on, Daryl, who left the prison to track down Merle and Michonne after Rick noticed them missing, finds Michonne unhurt and continues on to the exchange site, where he sees a reanimated Merle eating Ben's corpse. Daryl breaks down in tears. Crying, he pushes his now-zombified brother away more than once before stabbing him repeatedly in the head, killing him for good.

Development

Michael Rooker was cast to play Merle. Rooker mentioned that he lost 20 lbs preparing for his return in the third season.

External links

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