The Walking Dead: Is Rick Still A Good Guy?

Warning, spoilers for Sunday's new episode of The Walking Dead follow (season six episode 12).

In Not Tomorrow Yet, Rick rallied all of Alexandria to go on a hunt for Negan and the Saviors. In exchange for finding and killing these allegedly ruthless men, the Safe-Zone community would receive half of the Hilltop's flourishing supplies and "one of them cows," as Daryl put it.

Sure, it's survival. Sure, it's the ruthless Rick we love to see. But is Rick still a good guy?

Think about the stuff and things that happened in Not Tomorrow Yet - the biggest being Glenn and Heath being forced to kill for the first time. These are two guys who, for however long the apocalypse has been going on, have managed to keep their hands mostly clean. They hadn't killed a living human being and have still survived. Rick's plan changed that. Glenn was forced to kill two men, not out of self-defense, but as a means to an end. Shortly there after, the two gunned down a group of people who were merely defending their home.

Now, look at what the rest of Rick's group did, even Father Gabriel. They killed a defenseless group of human beings. Gabriel had an injured man on the ground and still chose to shoot him. They were driving knives into sleeping men's heads. Where is the "good guy" in that?

Unless we read The Walking Dead comics and assume the Saviors are the same group of people we saw on the pages, how do we know they're bad guys? Just because they have guns and call people "needledick" isn't convincing enough for me. Jesus' story about 16-year-old Rory is a fair counter argument but by showing up and killing a group based on a new friend's story in exchange for food doesn't separate Rick from Negan very much, if at all. The only real evidence of Negan's group being a menacing group of killers is the photos Glenn saw on the wall, which no one knew about prior to killing this group at the compound.

"If I was in a group and I came upon Rick's group, I don't know how I would process them," says The Walking Dead executive producer Greg Nicotero. "I don't know how I would determine whether they're a good group or not a good group, especially if I was witnessing them raid this compound and kill everybody in it. I would be very curious to see what people would perceive Rick as."

"He's got a pretty significant group behind him but if you were watching from a far, I don't know that you'd be able to say that Rick is genuinely a good guy or not," Nicotero points out. "These people are doing what they need to do to survive, just like any other group out there needs to do."

All of these things considered, I get it. I know it's all probably necessary to survive and at this point and Rick doesn't want to take chances anymore. That's respectable.

However, Rick is the guy who once humanely put down bicycle girl and tried not to kill his ruthless best friend who was sleeping with his wife until he absolutely had to. Has he lost all of that humanity and is now literally willing to kill, to be a hired gun, to survive?

Really, it all comes down to, "What would Hershel do?"