"This was you, not me!"
SPOILERS
It's the penultimate episode, and we begin with Dale's funeral oration. Dale was the group's heart, and is a true loss. He had a complex relationship with many- Glenn, certainly Andrea, and of course Carl, racked with guilt over his part in Dale's death, but he was in many ways the antithesis of Shane who, of course, shows his true colours and dies this episode. Yay!
Everyone is moving inside the house; at last the two groups are one. Lori has one last heart-to-heart with Shane, revealing that the baby she is carrying could be his; she just doesn't know. In hindsight this conversation could have hinted to me that Shane would die now, and not in the finale, but I remained oblivious.
We have a father and son talk between Rick and Carl that is simultaneously heartwarming and incredibly bleak: what kind of childhood can Carl expect, waiting until his parents probably die, and himself probably unlikely to survive to adulthood? It's symbolic when Rick hands him back the gun; he must put away childish things and be a man.
And so we come to Shane's devious yet probably opportunistic plot to kill Rick, and the final standoff where Shane pulls the gun on Rick and calls him a weak husband and father. And yet it's Rick who finally has the guts to kill, stabbing Shane with a knife. Not coldly, though; it upsets him to have to kill, but he does what he must.
The final scenes feel exactly right; Carl has secretly seen what happened, and pulls a gun, saving Rick from zombie Shane. This is a superb episode in which we wave goodbye to a superb villain, brilliantly portrayed by Jon Bernthal. Roll on the finale...
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