When it came to The Walking Dead, fans loved to root for the heroes, mourn the characters who didn’t survive, and absolutely lose it over the villains. And let’s be honest. Some of those villains made you want to throw your TV right out the window. But one of the series’ most hated baddies? It turns out they were actually… right.
Yep, while fans were screaming “how could you?!” and furiously tweeting their outrage, this character made decisions that, in the harsh, walker-filled world, made perfect sense. This is something I spent a significant amount of time thinking about. Believe me. At first, I thought they were just another selfish, reckless villain. Someone who made bad choices for drama and chaos. But the more I replayed their actions in my head, the more I realized something important. They weren’t as bad as everyone made them out to be.
Sure, they did some truly nasty stuff. Sure, they backstabbed, threatened, and generally made life miserable for everyone around them. But in a universe where hesitation could get you eaten and moral high ground was basically a death sentence, being right often looked a lot like being terrible.
Shane Walsh’s brutal decisions in The Walking Dead made more sense than fans admit
When you think of Shane Walsh, the first things most fans remember are his anger, jealousy, and the constant tension he created with Rick Grimes. He was impulsive, violent, and willing to cross lines that Rick or any “morally upright” character wouldn’t dare. For a lot of viewers, that made Shane the villain. They considered him a selfish, dangerous, unpredictable threat to the group. And on the surface, that’s fair. He did some truly terrible things.
But if you strip away the fan outrage and really look at Shane through the lens of survival in the apocalypse, a different picture emerges. Shane was one of the few characters who completely understood the world they were living in and acted accordingly. While the others hesitated, debated, and clung to pre-apocalypse morality, Shane was thinking like a survivor.
He understood something most of the group refused to admit. That the apocalypse didn’t reward niceness or morality. It rewarded decisiveness, pragmatism, and the willingness to do what had to be done, no matter how ugly it looked. His methods were harsh, yes, and often morally gray, but in a world overrun by walkers and ruled by unpredictability, hesitation was far more dangerous than ruthlessness.
Remember when Shane shot Otis in the leg when they were running from a horde of walkers in the second season? Most viewers saw that moment and instantly hated Shane for it. They saw a man betraying one's own by coldly sacrificing Otis for his own benefit, and it felt unforgivable. But if you step back and look at the situation through Shane’s lens, it starts to make sense.
They were running low on ammo, and it was either risk both of them getting torn apart by walkers or make a brutal, calculated choice to save at least one life. The chances of both of them surviving were slim. What would you have done in this dire situation? Shane didn’t have the luxury of moral debates or second-guessing. He had to act, and he had to act fast.
Even when he threatened to kill Dr. Jenner with a gun in the CDC headquarters in the season 1 finale. He didn't do it for the heck of it. His life and his group's lives were in danger, so he did whatever he had to do to gain control over the situation. It might not have been the best or most “moral” choice, but in that moment, he was acting out of survival instinct.
So, yes, many of Shane's decisions were extreme, morally ambiguous, and even horrifying to watch, but they were grounded in survival. Now, the same can't be said of his actions when it came to Rick and Lori. Those were driven by jealousy, desire, and ego rather than necessity.
The Walking Dead can be streamed on Netflix right now.