Or rather the fault of the disillusioned farmer they must retrieve from the bar.
That was the reason that put them in the bar it didn’t make the two guys act the way they did. They were clearly threatening and in no way trust worthy. Rick gave them the chance to go on their way and leave them alone but that wasn’t going to happen.
Once the decision was made to kill them before they could act any member of that crew was an enemy and not a unthinking slow enemy. Randall has to be killed unfortunatly IMO and Dale was wrong in his appraisal of the situation. The world has changed and he needs/needed to change with it. You don’t have to give up your humanity and rape, kill and rob other humans for no reason other than your needs but you will have to kill other humans in self defence. Randall easily falls into that category IMO. If he and his crew had got the upper hand on Rick and co. it wouldn’t have ended well for them or the people back in the house.
He knew he was going to be killed so was probably saying anything he could think of to escape. I can’t fault him for that. But that’s why he has to be killed now. Last week, he might still have became part of the group. Now they’ve beat him (why? I didn’t really understand that) and tried to kill him so if he ever gets loose, he is likely to have an axe to grind.
Having said that, my prediction is that Dale’s death will cause second thoughts about Randall. This will piss Shane off and he will attempt a takeover. Carl or Randall will save Rick by shooting Shane and instead of killing Randall, Rick and the family will leave the farm and let him go hundreds of miles away. Or maybe Randall will take a bullet for Rick and prove he was a ok guy all along. That would be more dramatic.
This is the part that cements it for me. The group they tangled with was hostile and violent. This means you cannot let Randall go and must execute him. They should have left him to die…but they didn’t.
However, if this was some guy walking along and he says he is with a large group and Rick and Co. grab him and execute him because he might be a threat then that is crossing some bad line there, IMHO and if you do that your humanity is gone.
Agreed. That kind of pre-emptive strike would put them into a different category of people. One that Dale should have been concerned about but the context of the incident IMO make Dale’s concerns wrongheaded IMO.
There’s no way to know, of course, but Herschel might have done them a favour - they know there is a bad group in the area now, instead of having them sneak up on them in the middle of the night. Which is something they probably should have been thinking of on their own, but planning is not the strong suit of this group.
I think Dale’s concerns were valid, but in this situation, I don’t see a way around needing to protect the group from the larger, more dangerous group. Well, maybe packing up and moving somewhere else might do the trick, but they haven’t even considered that, apparently.
Lori being pregnant is apparently the reason Rick doesn’t want to move.
Good points in your post.
This is probably the most important point in my mind. To wit: what is Randall going to do if released? He’ll be alone in the middle of that wasteland, and he’ll know of the existence of (at least) two groups: one that doesn’t want him around, and the other that will no doubt welcome him back, especially with news of the whereabouts of easy plunder (given the size and weapons advantage). There’s absolutely no reason to believe he will not go back to his old gang, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding; he’s got no choice if he wants to survive. Rick’s group knows this; Randall knows this.
There’s no way Rick’s group can trust him; if they keep him around, he’s a constant threat to run off and bring back his raping pillaging buddies, and Rick’s group must constantly guard him. At that point, and in the middle of the apocalypse, the decision is not quite as cut-and-dried as humanity vs. inhumanity; tribal rules have returned and the survival of the group becomes more important than survival of the Other.
This.
If they’d just fixed him up and let him stay (keeping an eye on him, of course), he probably would have been quite happy to hang with the people who saved him and fixed him up, rather than run back to the people who left him to be zombie snacks.
But once you’ve beaten and tortured a person (how is blindfolding him, pointing a gun at his head while he begs for his life, and then dragging him away to wait to be killed at some undetermined later time *better *than just killing him anyway?), you **do **have to kill him, since you certainly can’t turn your back on him.
Dumbasses.
Randall shot at them. He always had to die.
I don’t buy that. They went back for Merle after he threatened to kill TDog, and Darryl threatened the bunch of them that whole trip. The guys in Atlanta kidnapped Glenn and pointed guns at them and that wound up being a friggin’ mutual admiration society.
I’ve said before, if they’d put a mercy shot in his head while he was stuck on the fence, I’d have been good with that (I would NOT have been good with letting him be zombie snacks unless there was absolutely no way to avoid that without endangering themselves). But why bring him back and patch him up only to either dump him in the middle of nowhere or torture and kill him?
Dumbasses.
Plus, from his perspective shooting at them probably appeared as righteous as Shane now considers killing Randall.
We don’t know what the entire group dynamics are like in his group (and didn’t until they decided to torture him, weeks later, and that is still information that the rest of our group doesn’t have). So quite possibly all he knows is “two of our guys walked into that building and got shot and now it appears that they’re going to be shooting their way out and can we let them get out and possibly come after our women and children.”
To border on the offensive, I view him as kind of like a stray dog when he was stuck on that fence. They had no obligation to take him in, just like you don’t with a stray dog. But once you take the stray dog in, you have responsibilities that supersede killing him just because you’ve decided he’s inconvenient.
Threatening is different than shooting, and Merle was part of their group. Even then they still handcuffed him to the roof of a building and left him there. The Atlanta gang had no idea where their little tent village was.
I suppose he didn’t always have to die; they could have left him on his own with a fighting chance as they tried to do. Once it became clear that he knew where they lived, then he had to die.
The zombie apocalypse is no excuse to nurture sadism. Carl was gleeful about what was happening which meant he shouldn’t have been there to see it carried out. I think it would be out of character if Shane drops the issue, but in the past he’s also shown an interest in shielding Carl, so I do think he would have held off on the execution for awhile.
Randall said their group contained women, when one of the men at the bar asked Rick if his group contained women, since he hadn’t been with anyone in awhile. Although I suppose Bar Dude might have been on his best behavior with the women in his camp.
If Randall does escape and bring his group back to the farm, Rick and co. have it coming for the way they mismanaged the entire ordeal.
To be fair, Bar Dude didn’t say the women were with them voluntarily. Dude pissing in the corner and talking about “cooze” – in front of guys he doesn’t know – warning signs.
Maybe there’s a rescue mission coming up.
What about the Stockholm Syndrome? Randall could come to identify with them. No one starts off as a group intentionally. Why couldn’t he become part of it over time?
Bar dude made it sound like there weren’t any women around at all. Unless he meant “willing women,” what he said doesn’t jibe with Randall’s story.
Just before the shootout at the bar that involved Randall, we heard a couple unnamed guys talking right outside the bar. I thought one of them referenced a woman back at camp, something like I’m not going to tell her so and so died and we left him there.
I could be misremembering, though. Anyone have a better memory?
I don’t agree with this. This is basically the anti-Dale position–that it’s “morally right” to kill Randall based on Randall having previously shot at the good guys.
Now, if there were a way to communicate to Randall’s group that Randall was killed for shooting at the good guys, then that would be different–then the deterrent effect would be an additional policy consideration supporting killing Randall.
I favor befriending Randall, finding out where the bad guys are, sneaking up on them and killing them, taking their stuff.