The Walking Dead Season 2 E12: Better Angels (Part 2)

If you have not read my review of episode 12 (Part 1) from this season, you may do so here: The Walking Dead Season 2 E12: Better Angels (Part 1)

Picking up where we left off, everyone is trying to figure out what happened.  Shane comes out of the woods and lies to everyone about what happened.  Shane, Rick, Daryl and Glenn form a search party to hunt down Randall.  Daryl questions Shane’s story, things just aren’t adding up.  To make things quicker they divide up into groups of two: Shane with Rick and Daryl with Glenn.

Daryl finds some tracks and continues to discover just how off Shane’s story was.  There was obviously a struggle between Shane and Randall.  They hear and see a walker out in the woods and it attacks them.  Glenn manages to kill him only to discover this walker used to be Randall.  The odd things is, there aren’t any bites on his body, his broken neck is the only injury he has.  They don’t understand how he turned.

Meanwhile, Shane leads Rick through the woods.  Rick seems suspicious of Shane and after a while lets him know that he knows what he is planning.  They talk about this murder, about Lori and Carl.  Shane says that Rick’s family is broke, and he has no idea how to fix it.  Rick moves closer and closer to Shane, slowly pulling out his gun, handle first, to give it to Shane.  Rick attempts to talk Shane out of this but the look on Shane’s face says it all.  While Shane is distracted grabbing Ricks gun, Rick stabs him with a knife he had been pulling out with his free hand.  Yelling at Shane about making him do this, his friend’s life pours out and Shane dies in front of him.

Rick killing Shane is one of the best scenes in the entire series.  If you remember back to the first scene ever on the show, of Rick and Shane talking, you remember just how close these guys used to be.  Shane even risked his own life to save Rick once and now it has come to this.  With two seasons worth of build up, it’s a tense moment that probably took most people by surprise (as it did Shane).

We see a flash of zombies (Shane’s perspective).  Rick thinks about what just happened as Shane’s body starts to reanimate without him knowing it.  Carl shows up and draws his gun on Rick.  Rick thinks Carl wants to kill him for murdering Shane.  Actually zombie Shane was walking towards Rick and Carl kills him.  This scene was a reference to the comics where Carl kills Shane.  Rick checks Shane’s body while the camera pans out to show a herd of walkers heading their way.   The walkers had been out in the woods and heard the gun shots.