The Worst Decisions from AMC’s The Walking Dead – Part I
By Liam O'Leary
Season 1: Glenn drives an alarm-blaring car back to camp.
There were a decent number of dumb decisions to choose from in season 1 — It was expected, considering how early in the apocalypse it was — but, none of them had such devastating consequences as Glenn’s decision to drive the Challenger (And its obnoxious alarm), all the way back to the group’s camp outside of Atlanta. As far as “impact” goes, nothing in that first season can compare.
Sure, Merle shooting random walkers got half the group stuck in Atlanta, and sure, Lori’s decision to have an affair with Shane had much more long-lasting reverberations, but, Glenn’s careless decision wound up hitting the group far worse than Merle’s and far faster than Lori and Shane’s.
On a side note: I love how subtly the show handled the folly of Glenn’s decision. In the series’ very second episode, “Guts”, Glenn uses the Challenger’s alarm to draw away the herd surrounding the department store the group is trapped in. In the next episode, “Tell It To The Frogs”, Glenn arrives at the camp, and Shane yells at him for potentially drawing the walkers, but, we never see it happen in that episode. And then, in the next episode, “Vatos”, long after the group (And we, the audience) have forgotten about Glenn driving the alarm-blaring car directly to the camp, the herd finally catches up. It’s brilliant foreshadowing. Sorry, I just had to get that out.
As I was saying, Glenn’s carelessness wound up getting Ed, Amy, and Jim (Eventually) killed, along with countless other members of the Atlanta camp.
Why was this so dumb?
Because, once Glenn had lost the walkers, he could have just waited for everyone else in the truck, let them pick him up, left the Challenger behind (Somewhere well away from camp), and let the herd eventually catch up with it and just go crazy until the battery ran out, long after the group had returned to camp. Would the herd have found the camp eventually? Maybe, but, by the time they did, the group might have seen them coming and been able to avoid them. It’s not like Glenn didn’t know the walkers would follow the sound, the group was counting on that, so, he should have known that they would keep following him, wherever he went, until the sound stopped.
It became a mess that could have easily been avoided…