“The Walking Dead,” Season 2, Episode 3, “Save the Last One” starts with most of our intrepid heroes in deadly peril, of being eaten, of succumbing to wounds, or just giving into madness and despair.
Spoilers surely follow.
Shane and Otis, having acquired the medical equipment that Carl needs to live, are trapped in the high school by hordes of walkers, all of them intent on making them both happy meals on legs. Wherever they run, walkers are waiting for them. Their lives are not the only ones that are on the line. If they do not get back to the farmhouse with the supplies, Carl is likely a dead little boy.
And at the farmhouse, with T Dog and Glenn having arrived so that T Dog’s wound can be treated, Rick and Lori are asking themselves an awful question. In a world gone mad, overrun with walkers who exist for nothing but eating the flesh of the living, will it not be better for Carl if he just slipped away? His likely fate otherwise might be far worse.
On the highway, no one is sleeping, so most of the group there set forth in a futile search again for Sophia. The purpose is not so much to find the girl but rather to fill the empty, dark hours. Two of them find an unfortunate who, sensing that a walker bite was about to change him, had hung himself. That just turned him into a hanging walker, snarling and thrashing on the end of a rope, his legs chewed up by scavengers.
Rick believes that he has an answer for Lori. He recounts how the deer had come upon them and looked right at Carl and he at it. That suggests to him that there is a life beyond the horror that the living now find themselves in.
Nevertheless, with Shane and Otis running late, it is time to operate on Carl in a forlorn hope of saving him. But just like a TV show, Shane arrives just in time with the needed medical equipment. Sadly, Otis did not make it. But Carl is saved and stabilized, and will perhaps live after all.
What Shane is not telling anyone is that the reason Otis didn’t make it was that Shane shot him in the leg and left him for the walkers. It was not just his life on the line, but the boy’s. Even so, Shane likely killed some of his humanity along with Otis.