The five best deaths from AMC’s The Walking Dead

Dale

Where so many characters in The Walking Dead are either bitten, consumed by walkers, or killed by hostiles, Dale’s death was, frankly, unique.

While Dale was killed by another person, Daryl, he wasn’t killed because he was bitten or thought to be turning (This is before the group realized that death causes you to turn no matter what, remember), or killed by a hostile, he was killed to end his pain after a walker unintentionally ripped open his guts. Pleasant, I know.

But, why is his death important? Because, just like Sophia before him, his death had impact.

How so? Well, let’s look closer at the circumstances of how he died.

That walker that ripped Dale open didn’t just stumble onto him by accident, it was chasing someone, and Dale got in-between it and its target. That target? Carl.

Carl had found a walker trapped in the mud of a swamp, and, while trying to practice shooting it, he wasted time dawdling, giving the walker the chance to wrest itself free, where it followed him back to Hershel’s farm, found Dale…and killed him.

This would ripple through the rest of the group, but especially, through Rick, Carl, and Glenn.

Carl, feeling guilty about causing the walker to arrive on the farm in the first place, tried to give Shane his gun, prompting Shane to get in Rick’s face, accusing Rick of failing in his duties as a father. This led to Rick sitting Carl down and telling him about the reality of the world they now lived in, and that he needed to have a gun, because there may come a time where there’s no one around to help him. This would begin Carl’s long road over the next two seasons, first becoming ultra-pragmatic — Killing a teenage member of The Governor’s army, even though he was lowering his gun — then, swinging the other way, becoming something of a moral compass for Rick as his father descended further into Crazytown.

Speaking of being a “moral compass”, Dale’s death would resonate deeply with both Rick and Glenn, with his desire to remain civilized and human becoming the model those two would attempt to live by for the rest of their time in the series. For example, Glenn didn’t have his first human kill (Something Dale made perfectly clear he largely frowned upon) until three-quarters of the way through his final season on The Walking Dead, to give you some idea of how seriously he took Dale’s opinions. Rick, meanwhile, after losing so much, bounced between being something resembling normal, and Crazytown for several seasons, but, after Dale’s death, killing people unprovoked remained the realm of Crazytown Rick, and not “normal” Rick.

Even if Dale’s death went largely unmentioned as the series wore on, the fact he became the original moral compass the group would (At least to some degree) follow for the rest of the series shows the kind of impact his death had.