It is difficult to be an old wise man’s character on “The Walking Dead”. If you are not beheaded with a sword by the governor (rest in peace, Hershel!), Then you probably open your stomach or open by a wandering walker. This is what happened to poor Dale (Jeffrey Demunn), the guy who was the voice of the reason for the main survivor group of almost two complete seasons before his premature disappearance on “The Walking Dead”. Has the Dale moral code sometimes brought him to Goody-Shoes territory? Eh, probably. But it is better to have too many scruples than nothing at all, and the group was worse in its absence.
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In the episode of season 2 of the television show “Walking Dead”, the judge of season 2 “, the jury, the executioner, Dale patrols on the farm alone at night when he sees a partially deflected cow. He will only investigate to be caught by a surprise walker. (Not a very competent man, we are sad to say.) Walker always manages to tear Dale’s guts with his hands alone.
This is different from the way things take place in the “Walking Dead” comics. There, Dale is captured by a group of cannibals who plan to keep him alive while cutting his parts of the body for food. But the joke is on the cannibals, because Dale reveals that he had been bitten by a walker shortly before capturing him, and eating his leg, they consumed tanhed meat. Fans of “Walking Dead” television programs will recognize this scenario like the one who arrived in Bob (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) in season 5; This means that if the series had been exact for the comics, Dale should have been there for three more seasons. Why is it written so early?
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Jeffrey Demunn wanted to leave because he was crazy to know how AMC treated Frank Darabont
The most important thing to know about Demunn is that he was (and is still) a longtime 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 hoped to work together for a long time on “The Walking Dead” before the AMC superiors complicated everything.
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At the start of the production of season 2 of “The Walking Dead”, AMC pushed Darabont out of the show because of its many disagreements with them on the budget and the creative direction of the show. Darabont is always responsible for many of what is happening in season 2, but for the most part, showrunner’s tasks have been transferred to Glen Mazzara (who would continue to manage things until the end of season 3). The complete story of how Darabont was started with “The Walking Dead” is long and disorderly, but the main thing is that Darabont was badly treated, and Demunn was not happy with it.
“I was furious to know how Frank [Darabont] was pushed out of the show, “Demunn Explained in Cleveland.com in 2018. “I spent a week not being able to breathe fully. And then I realized:” Oh, I can stop. “So I called them and I said:” It’s a zombie show. It was an immense relief for me. “”
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How did Dale’s death affected the show?
The circumstances of the departure of Demunn are depressed, but at least it was managed by the writers of the series as well as it could have been. The death of Dale herself is filled with a lot of interesting character moments: the big one is when Rick (Andrew Lincoln) cannot resolve to shoot Dale in the head, which the later seasons Rick would not have a problem. Instead, Rick must let Daryl take his weapon to him; It is a development that establishes both the growing confidence between these two characters and marks the level of innocence that Rick still has at this stage of the series.
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The other big moment of character here is with Carl (Chandler Riggs). The young Carl was going through a bit of a reckless sequence at this stage of the show. Earlier in the episode, Carl taunts a walker trapped outside the farm; However, when the walker frees himself and rushes for him, Carl runs away and does not tell anyone. While Dale goes to bed on the ground dying, Carl looks at and realizes that the walker who killed him was the same that he had mocked earlier. Carl is devastated to realize that he is indirectly responsible for the death of Dale, but the incident also leads him to collect his act. With a major exception (but friendly), Carl finally stops walking outside the house after this episode.
In the long term, you can see the effect of the absence of Dale in the series through the moral entertainment of Rick and the rest of his group. Very early in season 3, we see that Rick is a much more hardened man than season 2 left him. At one point, he even murdered a prisoner with a machete and does not seem to feel bad about it; The prisoner in question was quite bad, of course, but the rick of season 2 would not have deleted him so quickly. Other characters would finally challenge Rick to be a better person in the coming seasons, but none of them had the same influence as Dale. I don’t know if “The Walking Dead” was better after Dale’s death, but it was certainly much darker.
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