2.11 Judge, Jury, Executioner

Rick sides with Shane causing Dale to worry that the group is losing its humanity; Carl's actions have unintended consequences.

Plot Summary
The group spent much of the episode debating the fate of young Randall, a prisoner from the other group of survivors. Rick, somewhat surprisingly, agrees with Shane that he should be executed, lest he escape and lead said other group to the farm, with potentially disastrous results. Randall had described their various scouts, invariably men, as being rapists and murderers, who prey on the weaker and smaller groups of survivors that they found, but he protests his own innocence after being tortured. Dale attempts to be the voice of reason, but finds himself without many allies in the group, which fear Randall’s presence as a threat to their already-shaky stability.

In the end, Randall is spared, for the moment, when Rick finds himself unable to put a bullet in his head after Carl urges him to do so. Unfortunately, Dale, patrolling the outer edges of the farm, is mortally wounded by a walker whom Carl may unknowingly have led back to the camp after encountering him on a secret trip into the woods. Rick makes a move to put Dale out of his misery, but ultimately cedes the duty to Daryl, with whom Dale had a conversation about group mechanics earlier in the episode.