It’s tough being a wise old man character on “The Walking Dead.” If you’re not getting beheaded with a sword by the Governor (rest in peace, Hershel!), then you’re probably getting your stomach ripped open by a stray walker. That’s what happened to poor Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn), the guy who served as the primary survivor group’s voice of reason for nearly two full seasons before his untimely demise on “The Walking Dead.” Did Dale’s moral code occasionally bring him into goody-two-shoes territory? Eh, probably. But it’s better to have too many scruples than none at all, and the group was worse off in his absence.
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In the “Walking Dead” TV show’s season 2 episode “Judge, Jury, Executioner,” Dale is patrolling around the farm alone at night when he sees a partially-devoured cow. He goes to investigate only to be ambushed by a surprise walker. (Not a very competent man, we’re sad to say.) Dale is strong enough to restrain the walker from biting him, but the walker still manages to rip open Dale’s guts with his hands alone. Daryl (Norman Reedus) ultimately runs in and kills the walker, but by then, Dale has already been mortally wounded, leaving Daryl little choice other than to shoot him in the head.
This is different from how things play out in the “Walking Dead” comics. There, Dale is captured by a group of cannibals that plan to keep him alive while chopping off his body parts for food. But the joke’s on the cannibals, because Dale reveals that he’d been bitten by a walker shortly before they captured him, and by eating his leg they’ve consumed tainted meat. “Walking Dead” TV show fans will recognize this storyline as the one that happened to Bob (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) in season 5; this means that if the series had been accurate to the comics, Dale should’ve been around for three more seasons. Why’d he get written out so soon?
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Jeffrey DeMunn wanted to leave because he was mad about how AMC treated Frank Darabont
The most important thing to know about DeMunn is that he was (and still is) a long-time friend of filmmaker Frank Darabont, the showrunner for the first season of “The Walking Dead.” Darabont and DeMunn had previously collaborated on “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile,” and “The Mist,” and were hoping to work together for a long time on “The Walking Dead” before the higher-ups at AMC complicated everything.
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During the early part of production on “The Walking Dead” season 2, AMC pushed Darabont out of the show due to his many disagreements with them over the budget and the show’s creative direction. Darabont is still responsible for a lot of what happens in season 2, but for the most part the showrunner duties were switched over to Glen Mazzara (who would continue running things until the end of season 3). The full story of how Darabont was booted from “The Walking Dead” is long and messy, but the gist of it is that Darabont was treated poorly, and DeMunn wasn’t happy about it.
“I was furious about how Frank [Darabont] was pushed out of the show,” DeMunn explained to Cleveland.com in 2018. “I spent a week not being able to take a full breath. And then I realized, ‘Oh, I can quit.’ So I called them and said, ‘It’s a zombie show. Kill me. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ It was an immense relief to me.”
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How did Dale’s death affect the show?
The circumstances behind DeMunn’s departure are depressing, but at least it was handled by the show’s writers as well as it could’ve been. Dale’s death itself is filled with a bunch of interesting character moments: The big one is when Rick (Andrew Lincoln) can’t bring himself to shoot Dale in the head, which is something that later-seasons Rick wouldn’t have an issue with. Instead, Rick has to let Daryl take his gun from him; it’s a development that both establishes the growing trust between these two characters and marks the level of innocence Rick still has at this point in the series.
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The other big character moment here is with Carl (Chandler Riggs). Young Carl was going through a bit of a reckless streak at this point in the show. Earlier in the episode, Carl taunts a trapped walker outside the farm; however, when the walker frees itself and lunges for him, Carl runs away and doesn’t tell anyone. As Dale lays on the ground dying, Carl looks over and realizes the walker that killed him was the same one he’d taunted earlier. Carl’s devastated to realize he’s indirectly responsible for Dale’s death, but the incident also leads to him getting his act together. With one major (but sympathetic) exception, Carl finally stops wandering outside the house after this episode.
Long-term, you can see the effect of Dale’s absence in the series through the moral downslide of Rick and the rest of his group. Very early into season 3, we see that Rick is a far more hardened man than season 2 left him. At one point, he even murders a prisoner with a machete and doesn’t seem to feel bad about it; the prisoner in question was pretty evil, sure, but the Rick of season 2 would not have done away with him so quickly. Other characters would eventually challenge Rick to be a better person over the next few seasons, but none of them held the same sway that Dale once had. I don’t know if “The Walking Dead” was better after Dale died, but it was definitely a lot darker.
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