The Walking Dead creator and executive producer Robert Kirkman has talked about his decision to kill off a character.
AMC viewers saw Dale Horvath (Jeffrey DeMunn) injured by a walker and shot by Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) in a mercy killing during Sunday night's episode 'Judge, Jury, Executioner'. Kirkman explained that the decision to deviate from the plot of the comic books was not taken lightly.
"I have talked many times [about] how much I like the difference between the comics and the show," Kirkman told The Hollywood Reporter. "There are going to be big plot lines that we may not necessarily get to, like the romance between Dale and Andrea.
"If you think you really want to read that storyline, that's available in the comics, and I highly recommend you pick those up. The show is always going to be a different animal and the decision to kill Dale off was a big one and it wasn't one that was made lightly."
Kirkman added that Dale's death would have an impact on the rest of the characters, saying: "To lose this guy at this moment means so much for this group. It's going to be such a monumental death that it's going to affect things a great deal moving forward.
"It seemed like the right time and that to me, all the stories that are going to come out of this that people haven't seen yet, are worth losing the Dale/Andrea relationship."
Kirkman described Dale as "an important piece" of the group, adding that the characters would now struggle "to make the same decisions they would have made, and that's really going to affect the group as a whole".
"They are kind of in a bad place and we're going to have to deal with that," he added.
