The Walking Dead: Top 7 fatherly lessons learned from Rick Grimes
By Liam O'Leary
6) “It’s not the same.” (Season 3, Episode 16, “Welcome To The Tombs”)
This one is…something of a weird one, as it’s a lesson Rick clearly taught Carl, but, not one that we saw him teaching, so much as we saw Carl after he’d been taught.
At the end of season three, before Rick, Michonne, Glenn, Maggie, and Daryl would return to Woodbury to take in Tyreese, Sasha, Karen, and the remaining Woodburians that The Governor abandoned, Rick confronted Carl about killing a teenage soldier in the Woodbury army who was putting down his weapon.
It seemed that Carl learned the lesson Rick taught him in season two about being armed and needing to defend himself (Which I mentioned earlier) a little too well, as he reminded Rick of his carelessness that led to Dale’s death and led to Rick giving him that lesson in the first place, to which Rick reminded him: “It’s not the same.”
However, as far as Carl was concerned, it sort of was: He saw that failure to kill the swamp walker (And its subsequent killing of Dale) as no different than Rick’s failure to kill Andrew when the group arrived at the prison, which ultimately led to Lori’s death, and Rick’s failure to kill The Governor when he had the chance, leading to him eventually killing Merle, and it was something that Carl did not want repeated.
However, by the beginning of season four, this callous streak in Carl seems to disappear, in fact, when Rick is hiding his cache of weapons outside of Terminus in the season four finale, “A” (Which I referenced a little while ago), Carl told Michonne that he was afraid that he was still the same person who gunned down that teenager. The fact he’d gone from not caring about that killing to being afraid that he hadn’t changed shows that, despite his fears…he had changed.
Clearly, at some point in the interim, Rick had impressed upon Carl the need to save lethal force only for those people who clearly were intent on hurting the group, and only when it was absolutely necessary. The fact that, after season three, Carl became the conscience of the group shows just how effective that lesson was.
Just because the world around us is hectic, chaotic, bleak, or brutal, doesn’t mean we should let it make us that way, too.