I never thought a silly show about zombies could spawn a moral discourse such as the one we’re having. Anyway, it’s not just “losing” a relative stranger it’s proactively murdering one.
Even civilizations barely out of the stone age had rules against murder.
It wasn’t a random murder…it was a calculated “him or me/mine” moment. Okay, fine, he broke the rules, then. I guess someone should call the police and have him arrested and give him a trial…oh, yeah…
That it was a calculated murder doesn’t make it any better. In addition to murder, Shane betrayed Otis. How many societies do you know of where betraying and murdering an ally is laudable? Shane keeps silent about what happens because he knows nobody else will agree with him. His silence is a big indicator to me that he knows what he did was wrong. You can go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify his murder of Otis and covering up what happened, but, like most other murders, Shane is simply grasping at whatever straws he can to justify his actions. Most murderers do that.
He betrayed a person he’d offered to give up his own life to save. He tried to save Otis. Otis refused his offer. He obviously did not believe that they could both get away and was willing to die himself so Otis could live. He tried it Otis’s way anyway and it became even more clear to him that they both could not escape. Saving Carl was the only thing that mattered. He chose saving Carl which was the moral thing to do.
I can’t see Shane offering to sacrifice himself to save Carl if Shane was immoral. There was also no point in him making a false offer to Otis at the school either so the offer was legit.
Otis made a series of bad decisions that threatened a child’s life more than once. He shoots the kid and then refuses to go back and save the kid when offered the chance. He chose ro stay with Shane. Honorable man or a coward? I could see him being afraid of going it alone. Shane, he knew was more competent than he was. He very well could have thought that he’d never be able to get back by himself ( the farm was a no zombie killing zone and Shane had fought them before ) and by splitting up and letting Shane sacrifice himself meant that three people would die and was too cowardly to choose to be the sacrifice himself.
As for the zombies not closing remember that they were shooting the zombies that were catching up. Shane was going along with that. He didn’t sacrifice Otis until the bullets were gone but the xombies weren’t. All hopes for a joint escape were exhausted before he made the tough decision. Again, the decision he’d offered to take the short end of a few minutes earlier.
You are not a hero for letting a child die because a coward refuses to save the child. The child was an innocent victim. Otis, not so much.
I think I liked this series a lot more when the zombies were more of a visceral threat. When people were trapped in a tank surrounded by zombies, when they had to hide away without making a sound because they were - surrounded by zombies.
This season’s opener was great but ever since then its been Melrose place with zombies as an afterthought. I don’t care for any of the so called “leaders”, but Shane is a more interesting character for this kind of show. As Dale said - he was born to be in this world. Viewers who loathe him will squirm when he succeeds, viewers who love him will cheer.
Hershel, Andrea, Dale, Glenn and of course Daryl are all interesting characters for this kind of show. Rick and Lori will continue to be the couple that survive only because of their decency and sense of what’s ‘right’, or obvious pregnancy. Those two are necessary because they are the moral compass that will keep creating dramatic tension.
Everyone else is up for grabs as zombie snacks.
I hope
*Weirdest fetish ever… *
First world problem: Sometimes a person quotes many posts I have already read, so I have to turn my finger on the scroll wheel two times.
I’m not well-versed in zombie lore, so I’m confused about the whole eating thing. Feeding them catch-able chickens in the barn implies they need sustenance of some sort. So what do the hordes out in the wild eat (when they aren’t catching humans.) They don’t seem smart or quick enough to catch common prey like rabbits or squirrels, or most healthy animals. Is there a timeline for how often they need to eat?
Also, I know it was simply to drive the plot, but what was the walker doing in the pharmacy? The town is deserted so there’s no one to eat. They had been to the pharmacy many times without incident so it wasn’t like the walker was the pharmacist who had re-animated recently.
Seeing the walkers stuck in the muck in the creek made me think a viable defensive strategy would be to find a swampy area to make a base. Or even dig a moat. Do they have large equipment on the farm? It wouldn’t keep them away, but it would be fairly easy to pick them off as they got stuck.
I think its quite clear that they don’t need to eat, at least not within the timeframe that the show has been running so far.
It might be that the people on the farm think that they might need to eat (or at least err on the side of caution) without that actually being the case.
They were feeding the walkers chickens because Hershel thought they were just ‘sick’ and so they needed to eat. We don’t know if they actually need to eat or if it’s just a leftover response to the virus. There’s plenty of movies where the zombies are bloated from things they’ve eaten (zombieland, resident evil), but their digestive systems are no longer working.
They must have left the pharmacy door open or unlocked and the zombie walked in.
A sandy moat with water running through it would be a good zombie defense. They’d get stuck, and all you’d have to do is stick em in the face with a long spear so you don’t waste a bullet.
I had completely forgotten that Shane first offered himself as the zombie sacrifice before shooting Otis. That underscores that Shane did what had to be done and isn’t just a coldhearted murderer.
And come on, arguing that the zombies weren’t going to catch them and so nobody had to die? Shane had a twisted or broken ankle, I think Otis did too, and Otis was too winded to run fast anyway. The whole scene was making the point that they couldn’t just outrun the shuffling horde because they were injured and weak.
This whole thread really emphasizes to me how modern cultural norms encourage a sense of dandified morality in which people don’t just dread the difficult, ugly decisions but simply refuse to admit that they can ever exist.
I’m not just arguing it. I proved it. Look at the picture I posted. If Shane hadn’t stopped to shoot Otis they would have had an even bigger lead on the zombies.
Ummm, you realize this is fiction, right? A tv show? Posting a picture doesn’t change what the show very clearly portrayed, even if you found a screenshot that supports your grassy knoll theory. An inconsistent screen shot doesn’t mean the show didn’t portray the zombie horde as closing in on them.
And that’s not the Zapruder film you posted. I can’t even see anything in that picture besides blackness and a leg or two.
Pauls speech in Dune about drowning fishermen
. Dune (40th Anniversary Edition) - Frank Herbert - Google Books
I agree that shooting Otis in that situation wasnt evil. I think Shanes problem isnt that he is evil it is that he is an alpha male asshole. In many situations his plan is probably the more correct one but he responds to any disagreements with rage. If Shane was much better at putting his ideas across in a calm rational manner we would not even be having this debate.
I think it’s a bit rough on Otis to blame him for shooting dumbass Carl. (“Trust me, we’ve all wanted to shoot whiny Carl at some point.”) The bullet went through the deer and into Carl. That’s an act of God.
It was nice of Otis to volunteer to get the medical equipment, but I don’t think it was necessary. Lori should have been thrown into the barn immediately when she showed up on the farm with the chutzpah to blame Otis.
That being said, someone had to be zombie food, and if it wasn’t Otis, it was going to be a double entree. I don’t blame Shane for that, and I doubt most viewers do either.
But frankly, with no more antibiotics ever going to be manufactured, they probably just should have let Carl die in the first place. They expended way too many resources both medical and human to save someone that never would have survived if this was the real world and not movie-land where you can walk around two days after getting shot and operated on by a vet.
What should Shane have done? Your options, as I see them are: a) continued to aid Otis and most likley end up being eaten along with him, fighting valiantly to the end; b) abandoned Otis and the meds; c) injured Otis to create a diversion for the Zombies and taken the meds (this is what he did); d) other.
As I see it: the outcome of option a is three dead; the outcome of option b is two dead; the outcome of option c is one dead. I do not see any other options but have left you the opportunity to provide one (or more). At this point, you’ve either got to present an alternative or explain how letting two or three people die is more moral than killing one in these circumstances.
I don’t blame Otis for shooting Carl. It was the logical choice to make and would almost never be a big deal.
I said it was a bad decision which it turned out to be. I believe that intent doesn’t play into whether a decision is good or bad. It’s about the outcome. Otis made the right choice but it turned out to be a bad decision.
This makes some sense. Especially when you consider that brain damage is the only way to kill the zombies and cooking alive in an overheated car is really bad for the brain. At this point, we do not know how much brain damage is needed to kill a walker. Every attempt we have seen has been the result of overkill, either from a bullet through the head or a severe beating with a melee weapon of some sort. It maybe that it only takes a small amount of damage to actually kill a walker, but our protagonists are not exactly in a postion to test this.
The irony of your whole line of defense is that you’ve made the case againt yourself.
You haven’t offered what benefit would be served by Shane not doing what he did, and Shane, Otis, and Carl dying. You haven’t offered what benefit would be served by Shane telling everyone, making the farm family feel like shit instead of proud of their hero, and causing strife between the groups. I am going to assume that you are conceding that there would be no benefit.
And yet you say that the act of not doing these things - these things which have no benefit and terrible downsides - prove that Shane is a bad guy. It logically makes no sense whatsoever.
And… so you say that if his decision was the logical one, he should feel like he can tell everyone. Except… what if someone he tells is like you, where they cannot offer a logical argument against his actions, yet they still intuitively feel that he’s done something somehow wrong? He doesn’t have to hide his actions because he knows they were wrong, he has to hide his actions because other people may be unable to rationally analyze whether they were wrong, and may react to the correct, moral, utilitarian decision badly.
Shane had a light sprain. The next morning he does play it up during his O Brother scene but as they are lowering Glenn into the well a little later that same day, there is no hint that his ankle hurts, and it’s getting a pretty good workout in that scene. He does have a minor limp during target practice later, but the next day, all traces of an injury are gone. I would have walked on a bloody stump to get away from those zombies, but I guess it doesn’t matter. The writers wanted us to think he was too injured and the rest is just bad writing/acting/filming.
If he had split with Otis and been the lone survivor, it would have been easier to swallow. But shooting him, kicking his ass and leaving him to be torn apart and eaten alive was not his call to make. If Shane did it for Carl, let’s not forget that Otis was a trained EMT who could help Carl a lot more than Shane.