The Real Reason Jon Bernthal's Shane Walsh Died In The Walking Dead Season 2

Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) may be the main character of "The Walking Dead" overall, but you can certainly make the case that Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal) was the most important character of season 2. He was Rick's conflicted frenemy, a guy who cared for Rick but did sort of sleep with his wife on multiple occasions. He also served as the devil on Rick's shoulder, constantly arguing against Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn), the angel on Rick's shoulder. He wasn't evil exactly, but he sure didn't see the value in playing by society's old rules in this new violent world they'd all found themselves in. 

But although Shane was the standout character of season 2, the show still killed him off in the season's penultimate episode, "Better Angels." After growing tension between them, Shane tries to kill Rick, only for Rick to turn the tables and stab him to death instead. Shane does return for a bit as a walker, but is thankfully shot in the head by trusty Carl (Chandler Riggs). That's the end of Shane for the next nine seasons, although he is name-checked every once in a while, and even shows up in a hallucination or two. 

In season 7, Rick gives an emotional monologue about how he knows Shane is the real father of Judith Grimes, but that he loves Judith anyway. Luckily for everyone, Judith grows up to be more like Rick than she does Shane. 

In a 2012 interview discussing Shane's death, co-creator Robert Kirkman explained: 

"We knew that [Shane] was going to die before we cast Jon Bernthal. If the first season had been 13 episodes instead of six, Shane's story would have been told all in that first season; it would have been much like the comic book where Shane dies at the end of the first volume. But because we had that short of a season, we ended up expanding it to really be able to tell that story to its fullest. We knew from Day 1 when we sat down in the writers' room to pull out the second season that this was going to be the season that Shane died. It was always about working toward that and building up that character and setting up this confrontation between Rick and Shane."

When asked about the show's specific method of killing Shane off — by having Rick stab him up close and personal — Kirkman explained that the goal was to make his death "definitive." There could be no ambiguity, no opening for fans to theorize about a surprise Shane return down the line. There also couldn't be any room for Rick to play off the murder as an accident. It needed to be clear choice made by the main character, something that would push him forward into the darker Rick we meet in season 3. 

The other plan with Shane's death was to use him to reveal a major element about how the zombie virus works in this universe: Everyone's infected here. By having Shane die without being bitten, only to return from the dead shortly after, this helped confirm the secret the C.D.C. doctor told Rick in the season 1 finale, that all dead people in this world come back as a walker. Getting bitten certainly speeds up the process, but Shane's death made clear that all of them will need to be shot in the head when they die, bitten or not. 

For fans familiar with the comics, the most surprising part of Shane's death was that it took as long as it did. In the comics, Shane gets shot by Carl at the end of the very first volume. His purpose there is to foreshadow the moral downslide Rick would go through, but the comic version of Shane wasn't a particularly fleshed-out character in his own right. He was quickly forgotten. 

On the TV show, keeping Shane around served a few clear purposes. The first is that the awkward position Rick finds himself in — by waking up from a coma and finding out that his best friend and wife hooked up under the assumption he'd died — makes for some very messy, compelling entertainment. The writers were going to milk that dynamic for all it was worth. 

The other (better) purpose was that Shane helped externalize Rick's struggles. Instead of one guy dealing with the constant string of moral quandaries on his own, the show had Shane representing Rick's desire for a colder, pragmatic approach to surviving the apocalypse. Meanwhile, the show brought in Dale a little earlier than the comics to represent Rick's desire to be a good person, to stick to his ideals no matter how impractical it may be. When Dale dies in "Judge, Jury, Executioner," the big thematic concern this poses is that now Shane's got an opening to take fully bend Rick to his point of view. 

Rick kills Shane in the next episode, but of course the ideological battle between Dale and Shane would rage on in Rick's head long afterward. It became a character conflict that was more subtle and internalized than it was in the first two seasons, but arguably even more compelling. As Robert Kirkman explained in another interview after Shane's death:

"At the end of the day, what we kept coming back to is that 'The Walking Dead' is much more about Rick and his journey than it is about Shane and his journey. And keeping Shane around was, in a sense, stealing from Rick. It was time to let Rick emerge and see how Shane's death affected him and how it informed his decisions. ...  It really sucked to lose Jon Bernthal, but it's going to make the show that much better and that much more deadly."