One of the most compelling aspects of The Walking Dead comic was watching Generic Good Guy Rick being slowly but completely ruined by a lawless world. He started off as a cliche small town sheriff, sure, but only because it was fun to explore exactly what it takes to break Andy Griffith’s mind and make him eat the rest of Mayberry. The character had to begin as a featureless paragon of virtue so we could watch anarchy tear him down to a baser level, but it’s not that way in the show: TV’s The Walking Dead had Shane survive two full seasons, and that was a mistake. He was cast as the reckless bad boy antihero from the start, and as much as that archetype might ravenously devour the panties of zombie apocalypse fangirls everywhere, watching his descent from amoral to evil just wasn’t compelling TV.

In adapting the comic, The Walking Dead writers decided to split the Rick character up into Good Guy Rick and Bad Guy Shane, and had them bounce off of each other, rather than having one single character wrestle with opposing moral concepts. But now Shane is dead. Do you see what they’ve done? They’ve accidentally written themselves into a corner, and now they have no choice but to make Rick actually grow as a character! They’re going to be forced to continue Shane’s antagonist role within Rick himself, rather than having him sit on Rick’s shoulder in a little devil costume and whisper cartoonishly evil suggestions in his ear, like he has been.