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frangipanilove · 8 months ago

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LC6M187; “Lincoln Continental”or “Lucifer/Christ”?

Shane's "22" Necklace Revisited

This is a post that's been years in the making. In fact, the themes around Shane, Beth and the Venus/Lucifer/Morningstar symbolism were among the first that caught my interest when I got into TD. I could relate it all to Beth in a general sense, but I always wanted something more tangible. Sure, Lucifer means Light Bringer, and we can easily tie that to Beth. But it's also very surface level. I needed something deeper, something more like a smoking gun, and the other day, I think I found it.

The other day I was rewatching scenes from season 1 in preparation of this post, about the XH6-S781 licence plate, when I suddenly saw a familiar licence plate in a scene I hadn't been aware of, and everything clicked into place.

The LC6M187 licence plate on Shane’s Jeep Wrangler, from 1x3 Tell It To The Frogs.

It's the same as the one we see in on the car 5x2, the one Carol and Daryl use to chase after Officer Lichari's Dodge Magnum. I've written a couple of posts on that here and here. My hypothesis is that the LC in LC6M187 stands for Lincoln Continental, which is a nod to the car Daryl and Beth hid in in 4x12 Still.

LC6M187 is the licence plate on the car that directly lead Daryl and Carol to Noah, and by extension to Beth, in 5x6 Consumed.

We see it for the very first time in 1x3 Tell It To The Frogs, on Shane's black Jeep Wrangler, and we see it along with Carol's yellow Jeep Cherokee and T-Dog's Dodge Van. I talked about the Dodge Van with the XH6-S781 licence plate here, and I'll probably do a separate post on the symbolism around the yellow Jeep Cherokee soon-ish (I did talk about it some here).

At the campsite we see Carol's yellow Jeep Cherokee, T-Dog’s Dodge Van and Shane’s black Jeep Wrangler

One thing that’s abundantly clear, is that the overarching theme of 1x3 TITTF is "death" and "resurrection". More specifically, it's about Merle’s “death” and Rick’s “resurrection”. Rick, believed by his family to be dead, "resurrects" and reunites with his loved ones.

Merle, on the other hand, “disappears”, and isn’t seen again until season 3, when he “resurrects” as one of the Governor's henchmen (except for a brief appearance in Daryl's hallucination in Chupacabra). Death and resurrection are two sides to the same story, you can’t have "resurrection" without “death".

I’m not the first to point out the parallels between Merle and Beth, and I believe the LC6M187 license plate further confirmed these parallels, since we specifically see Daryl learn about Merle’s fate as we see the license plate in the shot very clearly. The story being told around the car is one of death and resurrection.

We actually first see the license plate as Daryl returns to camp after a hunt, calls for his brother and learns that he’s been left behind on a rooftop in Atlanta, exposed to the elements and to walkers. However, Rick intends to go back for him, along with Glenn and T-Dog.

Daryl joins in.

And of course, when they get there, Merle's “just gone”.

This reminds us of what many of us believe went down after 5x8 Coda. We don't know the details, but many of us theorize that for some reason, they had to leave Beth behind (and like I’ve mentioned, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the back of Officer Lichari’s Dodge Magnum), with the intention of going back for her, only when they did, they found she was “just gone”.

Let’s talk about Shane for a minute. In this old post I wrote about Shane’s 22 necklace, and in it I promised to write more on the Beth/Shane entanglement...

...and then I just never did. In my early days of being in TD, while I was still figuring out the Sirius symbolism, I did see a lot of symbolical entanglement between Shane and Beth, though I couldn’t quite articulate what it meant. I caught a lot of Morningstar references, references to Christ as the Morningstar, as well as references to Morningstar as a representation of the Devil. I read up the astronomy of the ancient Greeks, who identified Venus/the Morningstar as Phosphorous and Eosphorous, meaning the Light Bringer (Venus is a planet, not two stars as they believed).

Then when seson 4 rolled around, TPTB placed Beth in the center of the Sirius symbolism, which we saw particularly with the white one-eyed dog from Alone. As Sirius is also a Morningstar, I hypothesized that the Venus/Morningstar symbolism and the Sirius symbolism were synonomous. I still believe that.

After Slabtown, we all got obsessed with the "Get Well Soon" clock and how to interpret it.

I knew I believed one of the interpretations of the Slabtown clock involved Shane, because depending on how you read the numbers, the 10 minute marker and the 2 hour marker is the same, meaning you could use 10 and 2 interchangeably. I theorized that the clock therefore could point to episodes 2x2, 2x10, 10x2 and 10x10 (also read this post). You could for exemple argue that it pointed to episode 2x2 Bloodletting, which was when Beth first appeared on the show. But it was also a number linked to Shane, through his necklace.

Later, I also realized that the Slabtown clock could be pointing to episode 10x11 (if you read 10 - one one), which was called Morningstar, and that was a bit of a lightbulb moment; the number 22 is tied to the Morningstar reference in Revelation 22:16.

Isn’t it fascinating how the number of the verse also corresponds with Shane’s necklace?

But Morningstar has also traditionally been a reference to the Devil. That’s an interesting duality, which is perfect for TWDU, and it is something that helps explain the symbolical entanglement between Beth and Shane.

So, Lucifer is in the Bible used as one of the names of Christ, it means "light bringer". It has also been used, especially in literature, as a name for the Devil, Lucifer Morningstar. There’s an interesting duality in the name Lucifer, one iteration referring to Christ, the other referring to the Devil, and it was in that duality I picked up on the symbolism entanglement between Shane and Beth.

They had the same symbolism around them, but in Beth’s case, it was Christ symbolism, in Shane’s case it was the symbolism of the Devil. Where the LC on the LC6M187 license plate on Shane’s black Jeep Wrangler indicates he’s a Prince of Darkness, the same LC on the licence plates seen on other cars points to the resurrection sybolism of the Lincoln Continental from Still, it refers to the resurrection symbolism of a Christ figure, the properties of the Light Bringer. Light and darkness. You can’t have resurrection without death, they’re two sides to the same story.

Beth’s a Sirius figure, she’s associated with fire. We watched her light a fire in Still, she lit a stack of cash on fire to burn down the moonshine shack, she’s associated with yellow, as in her yellow polo, and Yellow Jacket Creek. Shane’s black Jeep Wrangler indicates darkness.

To say that Beth is a Light Bringer is nothing new at this point, it's been abundantly clear since 4x12 Still.

But keep in mind what happened immediately before the scene where she lit the fire:

We see Beth and Daryl "resurrect" from the trunk of the Lincoln Continental (LC) after having escaped death by walker horde the night before. And when we see her start the fire in the next scene, she does so by using the side mirror and a shard of glass from the headlights of the Lincoln Continental. Actual hardware from the car that saved their lives, the car that's been referenced by all the LC licence plates. It's a car that's tied to resurrection, and Beth immeditately establishes herself as Lucifer, the Light Bringer, using tools provided by the car, to light a fire. This is textbook Lucifer Morningstar symbolism.

And this is where an alternative way of interpreting the LC6M187 licence plate reveals itself.

Because remember what I said about the duality in that Lucifer refers to both Christ and the Devil? Could the LC, in addition to being a reference to the Lincoln Continental, also be a reference to Lucifer and Christ?

Could it be, that in the case of the Lincoln Continental from Still, the LC means Lucifer as Christ, marking Beth as the Light Bringer, the Morningstar in its Christ iteration?

As the seasons went by, I came to realize that the entanglement between Beth and Shane in reality was entanglement between Rick and Shane. Rick is the original Christ figure, the original Sirius figure, the original Morningstar. And the reason it comes across as though Beth’s tangled up in all of that, is because she’s so heavily paralleled with Rick. Whatever resurrection symbolism we've seen around Rick, we've also seen around her. And we've watched Rick "resurect" twice now, so...

We really saw this quite clearly in Slabtown, where Dawn, a Morningstar reference, was Shane to Beth’s Rick. Like Shane, she was a cop, her name indicates Morningstar symbolism, and she’s the reason Beth “died”, like Shane was the last one to see Rick before he "died" at the hospital.

Notice the scissors sticking out from Dawn's shoulder. That's another interesting exemple of the entanglement between Shane and Beth. As a weapon of choice when attemting to assert yourself in confrontation with someone carrying a gun, a tiny pair of scissors would probably be my last choice. Why did TPTB do Beth so dirty?

Because symbolism.

We all remember Beth sacrificing herself for Noah in Slabtown, right? He was injured, and much slower than her. He wasn't going to make it without her intenvening. And she did. But in doing so, she ended up trapped, while Noah escaped.

In 2x3, Shane was in a similar situation. Carl had been shot, he needed medicine, and Shane and Otis went out to find it. Inevitably, they ran into a walker horde, and Shane sacrificed Otis so he himself could get away. As he returned to the farm alone, he knew he had fundamentally changed. We get a scene where he shaves his hair off, and transforms into something Devil-like before our eyes. He went "full Shane", as became the meme around the fandom. It means he surrendered to and embraced the Devil side of his Lucifer properties.

And, I want to address the fact that what we see in 2x3, of Shane shooting Otis in the foot, effectively sacrificing him, was entirely told through flashbacks. Meaning, the actual events happened in the previous episode, which was…. Yep. 2x2. Another representation of the 22/Lucifer/Morningstar symbolism and the duality it entails. I’m side-eying that heavily.

We see Shane holding the clippers in his hand in this pic. The 22 necklace is also visible. There's a parallel to Beth here, hiding the scissors up her cast:

Her unconventional choice of weapon to bring to a gunfight is only sufficiently explained through symbolism. Clippers and scissors are tools used for similar tasks. Beth used them after sacrificing herself for Noah (for the second time, no less), Shane used them after having sacrificed Otis.

We also get this representation of the 22/Lucifer/Morningstar symbolism on the trunk of one of the Grady cars in 5x8 Coda, proving the symbolism around Shane's necklace extends beyond Shane himself. And again, remember this was introduced all the way back in season 1. The symbolism goes back to the very beginning.

We've also seen the 22/Lucifer/Morningstar symbolism several other times over the years, such as in 10x13 What We Become, which I've talked about here. Here we see a “22” next to a "11" or a "one one", as we remember from Noah's T-shirt.

Returning to the LC6M187 licence plate for a moment. In season 2 we see yet another one of these license plates on a Ford Mustang, in the exact same shade of yellow as Carols Jeep Cherokee and Beth’s yellow polo.

It’s the car where they end up leaving supplies and a note to Sophia, hoping she’ll return. She didn’t, but if she had managed to return to the Mustang with the supplies, they would have found her and she would have survived. The car provided an opportunity for survival had she managed to return to it. The symbolism of the license plate is still, as in 1x3 TITTF, one of death and resurrection.

The next time we see this license plate is in 3x15, when Merle sacrifices himself so that Michonne and TF can live. Remember we literally became aware of the LC6M187 license plate in 1x3 TITTF, as Daryl learned about Merle being left behind in Atlanta, and when they went looking for him, he was "just gone". Presumed dead, except he wasn't. He “resurrected” in season 3. It’s fitting that it also is a car with this particular license plate that takes him to his sacrificial death. Death and resurrection. Merle did something very Christ-like in his final moments. He sacrificed himself for his brother's new family.

The next time we see a representation of the symbolism of the LC6M187 license plate is in 4x12 Still. We see Beth and Daryl survive a walker horde by hiding in the trunk of a car, a Lincoln Continental. The LC6M187 licence plate itself doesn’t appear in this scene, but my hypothesis is that the LC of the license plates are direct references to this particular Lincoln Continental, and that it was established as resurrection symbolism all the way back in 1x3 TITTF, under showrunner Frank Darabont.

Then, we come across it again in 5x2 Strangers.

Carol is having second thoughts on just about anything. Daryl catches her attempting to leave in a car they discovered earlier that day. This one had a battery charger(!) in the trunk(!). And a very familiar license plate, LC6M187.

Remember, at this point, Beth is “just gone”. Then, suddenly a car with a white cross drives by. Daryl recognizes it as similar to the car that took Beth in 4x13 Alone. They follow the car to Atlanta.

The car they follow is actually Officer Licari’s Dodge Magnum. It is potentially the actual car Beth was left in after Coda. And interestingly, we see here both the XH6-S781 license plate and the LC6M187 license plate in the same scene for the first time since 1x3 TITTF. And Beth is right in the center of the symbolism, in a way that is impossible to disregard! That seems significant to me.

To my knowledge, we don’t ever see the LC6M187 license plate again, but we've had some references to it, such as from the season finale of season 1 of TWDDD. We see Carol in a blue Ford Mustang, with a license plate with the numbers 502, which obviously points to TWD 5x2, the exact episode when we last see the LC6M187 license plate. And when we last see it, it is when Daryl and Carol are following Officer Lichari’s Dodge Magnum to Atlanta. I’ve written about it here and here.

It’s interesting that we’ve had a few mustangs on the show, and it's interesting that they're all tied up in the symbolism around Beth.

But there was also another Mustang, one I haven't mentioned yet, Lucille's green(e) Ford Mustang from 10x22 Here’s Negan. The 22nd episode of season 10... it’s almost like it was foreshadowed by the Slabtown clock… Feel free to side-eye that, I know I do...

Yup, Negan’s wife Lucille drove a green Ford Mustang, and we did get a great look at the license plate

I’m not going to pretend I’ve got everything figured out in regards to these licence plates. I can offer suggestions and explain how I interpret them, but anybody's is guess is as good as mine.

But Lucille’s Mustang almost has got to be involved in the things I've discussed in this post. First, the names Lucifer and Lucille are closely related, they both refer to "light", in that they're both names that are derived from the Latin word for for light, "lux".

“Lucille" is derived from "Lucy/Lucia", patroness saint of the blind.

Again, Beth is right in the center of this symbolism:

Does the LC of the LC6M187 licence plate stand for Lucifer/Christ, essentially describing the duality of the symbolism that’s tied to both the Christ/Light Bringer and the Devil? Is it a metaphor for the duality of "death and resurrection", of light and darkness?

Rick as the Christ figure, Shane as the Devil.

Beth as the Christ figure, Dawn as the Devil?

On the license plate of Lucille's green Ford Mustang, we first see an X. It likely means “cross”, or Christ, or "resurrection"… or it could mean Roman Numeral 10, as in the season in which this episode occurred?

Then a "V"…

...which incidently is the 22nd letter of the alphabet. That's quite the coincidence, isn't it? In the 22nd episode of season 10... we see a "V" for Venus which is the 22nd letter of the alphabet? "V" for Venus, Morningstar, the 22nd letter, and seen on Shane's necklace? Remember that the Bible verse with the Morningstar reference was 22:16.

Then you see the “11”. Obviously, one interpretation is that it’s a reference to the “one one” on Noah’s t-shirt, or to episode 10x11 (10 - one one) Morningstar. Another could be that 1+1=2, and it refers to the second letter of the alphabet, B... for Beth?

Then there's the "44". Is it a reference to the comic book issue that revolves around Andrea, the Beth proxy, being shot? Or is it a representation of Daryl Dixon, in that D is the fourth letter in the alphabet, so that 44 = DD?

I can't say for sure, and I'm open to sugestions.

#bethyl #team delusional #team defiance #beth greene #daryl dixon #the walking dead #twd #licence plate

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