“This is our home.” -Carl
“This is a tomb.” -Daryl
“That’s the deal, right? The people who are living are haunted by the dead. We are who we are and we do what we do because they’re still here. In our heads. In the forest. Whole world is haunted now. And there’s no getting out of that. Not until we’re dead.” -Tyreese
“When you look at it, in the cold light of day, you’re pretty much dead already.” -Shane
This is clearly Rick’s story. It’s also a story about death. While the ensemble cast is used to illustrate different angles of the current themes, often personifying different sides of the current debate – those debates can usually be tied back to Rick and his internal struggles, especially those around adapting to this new world where the dead outnumber the living.
Take, for example, the following stories: Shane’s doubts that Rick can keep Lori and Carl safe, the Governor’s battle with the evil inside himself, and Hershel’s temporary loss of faith. They all mirror the internal conflict Rick is dealing with at the moment. In the first case, Rick and Lori are arguing about Rick’s persistent need to always go off and be the hero and put the needs of the group over those of his family. Shane is killed off the show when Rick finally puts an end to this conflict by committing to putting his family first. In the second, the Governor’s internal struggle with a darkness reflects Rick’s fears that he is losing the good part of himself in his commitment to do whatever it takes to keep his family safe. The Governor is killed off after Rick makes the choice to find the peaceful, rather than violent, solution in inviting the Governor’s group to come and live with them in the prison. In the third, Hershel loses his faith and says to Rick that his faith “was a sham” and that he “was a fool” to have believed. This occurs right after Rick is forced to put down Sophia and is questioning his own leadership choices that had his people endangering their lives, “looking for a ghost.”
This is the first of three articles inspired by summer rewatch of the series. This first one focuses on Rick and his connection to death. With each season, as Rick’s emotional point of view has evolved, the tone of this show has shifted and its treatment of death has altered. These articles – to be published over the next week as we wait for the premiere – will be spoiler-free, assuming you’re caught up with the past seasons. But I obviously can’t guarantee that there won’t be spoilers posted in the comments.
Season 1 – The Mission
As I began a series rewatch this summer, the thing that struck me most about season 1 was how much purpose the group had. They still had hope and they were goal-oriented. For Rick, the initial goal was to find his family. Then the goal, for the whole group, became finding a place of safety so that they could start to rebuild their lives. The darker themes – the things you have to do to survive, that there’s a killer in everyone, and that you can lose yourself and not be able to come back – hadn’t really presented themselves on much more than a very superficial level. The first hint of what to come appeared when the group left Merle handcuffed to the top of an Atlanta building. Rick's guilt over this – and his determination to do the right thing – meant leaving his family lightly defended for a period of time while he, Daryl, T-Dog and Glenn went to Atlanta to try save Merle and recover some dropped weapons. The result of Rick’s decision was that the group was left under-protected when a herd of walkers invaded their camp and several in their group died.
The second big moral dilemma centered around a debate whether to kill Jim after he was bitten by a walker. Rick ended the discussion with the declaration “We don’t kill the living.” That statement would be later thown back at him by Dale in season 2 when the group decided to execute Randall, a teen who they feared would compromise their safety if they let him go.
But for the most part, the world was more black and white when it came to the living and the dead. Death was something to be avoided. Rick was thankful that he had woken up from his coma. And walkers were monsters.
The clarity of their situation however became clouded in the finale as Jackie made the decision to end her life and Dr. Jenner told Rick that they were all infected and would turn when they died. When Rick told Jenner he was “grateful” for giving them another chance by giving them a chance to escape the CDC building, which was set to explode, Jenner sounded prophetic when he said, “The day will come when you won’t be.”
Season 2 – A Choice
Shane embraced a darker route. He became fixated on Lori and Carl and changed when he chose to kill Otis. He came to represent a segment of people who seem to lose all of the humanity they once had in their mission to survive. We see it again later in with the Governor, and again in season 4 with Joe and his gang, as well as in many other groups encountered along the way. The title of the series, The Walking Dead, includes the suggestion of movement. The rootless people who choose the path Shane was following have no ties and wander, and come to resemble walkers in their actions. Michonne also briefly becomes more walker than person after the death of her son and becomes another “monster,” as she tells Carl in the season 4 finale.
But season 2 was about letting go of the past and taking stock of their new world. The group learned the hard way that little girls who go missing in the woods don’t have happy endings anymore, they all had to make choices of what they were willing to do to survive, and that the living might become a bigger threat than the walkers. They also continued to struggle with whether it was better to give up and die, or to bring new life into the world.
For Rick, the big questions were what would survival cost him, and was he really as committed to making it work in this new world as he was letting on?
Rick faces a brush with death again early on in season 2 – not his own this time, but Carl’s. While there weren’t any long-term physical consequences of Carl getting shot, the event set in motion changes in Shane that would have a ripple effect by changing Rick and inspire insightful conversations between Rick and Lori on whether they really wanted to continue living.
After Rick was shot, Lori expressed doubts that it was the best thing for Carl to survive. She said she thought of Jackie and realized that Jackie won’t have to go through all of what they were dealing with. For Rick, he was on the side of living because when Carl woke up, the first thing Carl talked about the deer – the thing of beauty he was looking at before he was shot. The event also triggered discussion of faith with Hershel, with Hershel telling Rick that he considered what was happening just another plague that man will need to overcome.
The decision of whether to choose death was explored with two other characters – Andrea, who had chosen death at the CDC and Beth, who wrestled with the decision but in the end decided to live. Finally, the choice of live vs. death played out with the news that Lori was pregnant. She was faced with the choice whether to bring a new life into this world or terminate it.
By the end of the season, all of the characters in the group had chosen life, except for maybe Dale who said he didn’t want to live in such an ugly world and Shane who chose a dark path. But Rick said something interesting to Lori in the season finale – when telling her that he let Shane lead him along even though he realized Shane would try to kill him, he said that he “just wanted it over.” In the context of his words, Rick seems to be talking about the animosity between the two, but Rick could have as easily been killed as Shane, so his words also express a wish that appears to be, at least in part, suicidal.
Season 3 – War
The third season saw an emotional shutting down of Rick. Feeling the fallout from having to kill his best friend, combined with the death of Lori, Rick, for the first time, starts to edge more to toward the dead/walker end of the spectrum. Emotionally he cuts himself off. He rejects everyone outside of their group and is visibly hardened. He begins to hallucinate the dead, seeing a vision of Lori leading him outside of the prison fences, to where the walkers are, and of Shane during a battle at Woodbury. He receives phone calls from the dead and tries to negotiate a pact to join them.
The Governor parallels where Rick is at this time in his life. Just slightly father gone than Rick, clear parallels are drawn between what Rick is turning into and the man the Governor has become. They are both authoritarian leaders. They are both willing to do whatever it takes to protect their families. They have both murdered. And they both can’t bring themselves to trust each other.
There’s a war-drum sound effect whenever the confrontation between the two escalate. Andrea assumes the role of peacemaker, and she’s killed off the show when the battle between the two plays out and Rick’s internal conflict is resolved by Rick making the peaceful decision of letting the Woodbury citizens in.
In the finale, Rick pulls back out of concern for his son and to be there for his daughter. With Hershel’s guidance, Rick sees that Carl has hardened after Carl shoots a Woodbury boy who was lowering his weapon, and Rick transforms into version we see him as in season 5 – farmer Rick.
Season 4 – Finding Purpose
On the walker front, there are some interesting developments. We’re introduced to Lizzie and Mika, two children transplanted from Woodbury. Lizzie believes that walkers are people – just different – and that they want to her to change. While it’s easy to point to mental issues with Lizzie, a lot of what she says parallels what other characters are saying.
Carol – while on the opposite side of the walker point of view than Lizzie – also champions change to adapt to their new world. She herself has gone through a huge transformation since the earlier seasons when she was a timid wife to an abusive husband. She now finds her strength in making the hard decisions and teaching vulnerable children to protect themselves.
Lizzie lectures Tyreese on letting the walkers live. She tells him, “Sometimes we have to kill them. I know that. Sometimes we don’t.” This mirrors advice that Hershel had given Carl earlier in the season, when they were out in the woods and Carl moved to kill a walker who was too weak to be a threat. Hershel told Carl not to kill the walker, and that sometimes you don’t need to.
With Rick, we see the start of an acceptance of the world as it is. With the loss of the prison and Hershel (and Judith, according to what Rick knows), Rick comes to accept that he's changed and is okay with it. He says he was was holding onto the way things were for the children, but he realizes now that's not going to happen. In the end, with the refocused Rick, we see a new strength and singularity of purpose that leads us into season 5.
The next two articles will take a look at the use of the natural environment on the show. Look for them later this week.
To read other parts in this series:
Part 2 - Fantasy Land
Part 3 - Dead Flowers
Screencaps from Screencapped.net.
