Mercy Me: Three Lessons From the Season Premiere of The Walking Dead

Chandler Riggs as Carl in The Walking Dead, photo courtesy AMC

The Need for Mercy

Early on in the episode, Rick’s son, Carl (Chandler Riggs), run across a starving man near a gas station. The man, terrified, talks with the gun-toting Carl, quoting a verse from the Quran: “May my mercy prevail over my wrath.”

Rick comes across Carl and the man in conversation and fires a couple of shots in the air, scaring the guy off. Carl’s not pleased, but Rick explains that the man could’ve been one of Negan’s spies.

“If he isn’t one of them, I hope he makes it,” Rick tells Carl.

“It’s not going to be enough, Dad,” Carl says.

“Enough what?” Rick asks.

“Hope.”

Later, Carl returns to give a little hope—and a little mercy—to the starving man, leaving behind two cans of food along with a one-word note: “Sorry.”

While the man may have quoted the Quran, mercy is pretty central to Christianity, too. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy,” Jesus says in His Beatitudes (Matt. 5:7). “Mercy triumphs over judgment,” James writes in James 2:13. Even in a landscape as seemingly God-forsaken as that we see in The Walking Dead, Carl finds a place for mercy, and the hope that results from it.

It’s a particularly interesting moment, because the episode hints that a changing of the guard may be coming. “This is your show,” Michonne tells Carl as they both watch Rick leave for his war. “You’ll see.” Could it be that the literal show—that is, The Walking Dead—may ultimately be about Carl more than Rick? That his sense of mercy is the hope for the world going forward?