When Sofia came out of the barn dead, I was like, "Go on, Shane. Go on. You're a big man. You pretty much driven the final nail into the whole trying to get on Hershel's good side, just like you wanted. Go on, big man. See if you're man enough for that." Of course, he wasn't. He thought he was so macho doing what he did, breaking open the door to the barn and having a live target shooting contest, but was nothing more than a gutless turd when Sofia came out. And it took Rick having to do it. I had no doubt Rick could do it (as he had to shoot the little girl zombie at the start of Episode 1 of Season 1). I just knew it was going to be harder on him, but Rick just proved that he was even more of a true leader than Shane only wished he could be (Shane couldn't admit his own mistakes and thought that Rick wasn't making hard choices. And Shane still fails to see that if Rick hadn't gone back into the city to save Merl and get the guns in the process, that there would have been more deaths during the camp attack). My mom pretty much said it, "He has to do it. Because he feels like he let her down." Afterwards, I pretty much said, "I can't blame Rick for what happened to Sofia. I mean, what other option was there at the time? I mean, they were being chased by two Walkers. There wasn't any other option."
I know many may disagree with that, but I do agree that the final scene was emotional. Unlike many people, including my dad, who found the season so far boring, they fail to forget that this is not a two-hour movie where there is a lot of running and gunning and barely any character. This is a show about characters trying to survive in a zombified world. And I think this episode serves as a reminder that this is a story about trying to be human in the face of uncontrollable terror. To me, this show deals with some of the same themes that RIS Battlestar Galactica did, the biggest one being "What it means to be human when death can come at you at any time, with hope on short supply and in the face of surviving the apocalypse." It's easy not to care about characters in a zombie film these days (just look at the Dawn of the Dead remake, or any of the Resident Evil films), to think of them as nothing more than zombie fodder. But it's stories like The Walking Dead that serves as a grim reminder that the characters are human, that they have emotions, and that they are often forced to make the hardest choices (even with some characters that are so arrogant to not see it, such as Shane).
