Our favorite moments from season 1 of The Walking Dead

Morgan Can’t Shoot Jenny

Season 1 episode 1: “Days Gone Bye”

Jeffrey says:

While the first season focuses heavily on Rick Grimes waking up to find the world taken over by the dead, there is an incredible moment featuring Morgan in the very first episode. Morgan’s walker wife Jenny was essentially a ghost to him and his son Duane during that first episode, stumbling around outside the house they were staying in.

Morgan goes to the top floor of the house while Duane reads comic books downstairs. Lennie James gives a phenomenal and heartbreaking performance as Morgan tries to shoot his undead wife from the window, but simply can’t go through with it. This is a defining moment for Morgan’s character arc in The Walking Dead and in Fear the Walking Dead.

This particular moment really establishes the emotional toll that living in this world puts on our survivors. Morgan lost his wife to a walker bite and then had to deal with the prospect of losing her again. The idea of shooting a loved one in the head is an impossibly difficult and painful prospect, even if that loved one is a snarling and growing corpse.

The fact that Morgan is unable to go through with it and pull the trigger is a decision that haunts him even now in the present day, largely due to the fact that Duane is later killed when walker Jenny attacks. This one singular scene at the very start of the overall story has had resounding tidal wave effects on Morgan’s long journey and the arcs of other characters on both shows that he has crossed paths with.