There is No Moral Choice of Who to Save in TellTale Games' The Walking Dead Season 1 Episode 1

This is the written version of the video I made for YouTube on February 20, 2025 with only some slight changes made for readability.

Welcome to Philosophy and Ethics in games, the series where I break down the choices in some of my favorite games and figure out which decision is the right one. I’m Josh “Bearheart” Hawk and in this episode we’re diving into TellTale Games’ The Walking Dead. We’re starting with season 1 episode 1 and we’ll be breaking down the series over the next several weeks.

The Walking Dead franchise is one of the biggest to land in the past decade and a half. What started as a series of graphic novels became several TV shows, toys, games and a truckload of merchandise.

The first Walking Dead show aired on October 31, 2010 to critical acclaim. A year and a half later, the concept was brought to the video game space by TellTale Games with episode 1 of The Walking Dead game releasing in April of 2012.

The game follows a man named Lee, who is on his way to prison after being convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. Right away you can tell something is up as emergency vehicles and chatter on the radio in the police cruiser drown out the cop in the front seat.

Before long, Lee finds himself walking free and trying to navigate a world that’s been turned upside down by a zombie virus that causes people to eat each other.

The game offers you a ton of decisions throughout, with some having a major impact and others being rather minor. I won’t be looking at every choice you have to make in this blog, but I will be covering a couple of big choices and trying to figure out what the right thing to do is in each scenario.

The patrol car that Lee is being transported in winds up crashing, and after freeing himself from the back seat and recovering the keys to the handcuffs from the dead body of the police officer, he experiences the first sign of something being horribly wrong when the officer comes back to life and tries to eat him. Using a rifle he finds on the ground next to the overturned patrol car, Lee dispatches the officer only to draw the attention of several other zombies who’d been hiding in the woods.

Managing to escape the horde, Lee winds up jumping over a fence into the backyard of a house, eventually finding cover and meeting a little girl named Clementine. Together, they head out in search of help, finding a pair of men, Shawn and Chet, who help them escape the area.

Making their way out of town, the group ends up at a farm owned by Shawn’s father, Hershel, and we’re introduced to several characters on the farm that will wind up playing a huge role later on in the story.

The farm is also where we’ll find the first major decision that we have to make.

To this point in the story, we’ve had to make small dialog decisions. Most of these revolve around either lying or telling the truth, but there’s also some smaller choices you can make by choosing who to talk to on the farm and what to actually discuss with them.

Eventually you make your way to Hershel, but your conversation with him is interrupted by a loud noise and screaming coming from the back yard. Hershel runs to get a gun, and Lee makes his way to the back only to find Shawn on the ground near the fence he had been repairing. He’s trapped under a tractor and zombies are trying to get to him through the fence.

Duck, the young son of one of the other characters you met, Kenny, is sitting on the seat of the tractor and trying to escape the clutches of another zombie.

You’ve only got seconds to make a decision on who you want to go for. You can try to save Shawn, who helped you the day before, or you can save Duck. Who should you save?

Let’s start by putting ourselves in the shoes of Lee directly.

You’re standing there, in shock, watching as a young child is being attacked on the one side and a grown man is trapped on the other. The boy already has a zombie pulling on his arm and the man, while trapped, seems to be in a better situation as the zombies are struggling to get to him through the fence. Morally speaking, the age of the characters does make a difference because one is more developed and, in theory, should be able to fight off attackers a little easier.

Duck is more helpless in the situation and the reasonable thing to do would be to save him first. But is there a more moral thing to do?

This situation is very similar to a triage situation during a major tragedy. Often, you have to assess in a few short moments who needs the most help and apply whatever assistance you can to them before moving on. Sometimes doing that means that the person you didn’t treat first doesn’t make it. And that plays out here, as after saving Duck you watch the fence break, and the zombies start munching on Shawn.

In a real-life scenario you would be left wondering, what if? What if you had chosen to save Shawn instead? Kenny shows up to help with Duck as soon as you get there, so maybe if you’d let Kenny save Duck while you saved Shawn they could have both lived.

In a video game, though, it’s easy to go back and see what the other outcome was. It turns out there is no way to actually save Shawn. Try as you might, you aren’t able to free him from the tractor and he gets eaten as you watch helplessly.

And that brings out a really powerful message that holds true in life.

Sometimes you do everything right, you do what makes the most sense and what seems like the best decision in the moment, and things don’t go the way you expected. You can choose to beat yourself up about the choice you made, wondering if another decision would have been the better one, but in reality you did the best you could with the information you had. It doesn’t make the other choice better, or the choice you made wrong, it just means you’re human.

The choice to save Duck will have a profound impact on the story later on. For now, Hershel kicks Lee and the rest out of the farm and Kenny offers to give Lee and Clementine a ride to Macon.

Arriving in Macon, the group finds the town seemingly deserted. It’s only after trying to get the attention of what looks like a person down the street that they learn just how packed it is with zombies. Thankfully, a couple of new characters come out of nowhere to assist, and it’s only a few moments before everyone is safe inside a small drugstore.

This is where we meet most of the core group that will be with us for the next couple of episodes. There’s Carly, the reporter; Doug, her friend; Glen, a former pizza delivery boy and cameo from the TV show; Lily, the Air Force Admin and Larry, Lily’s father.

The initial situation is somewhat tense, with Larry accusing Duck of being bit and Kenny potentially coming to blows with him depending on how you choose to handle the situation. After some back and forth, a close call with Clementine finding a zombie in the bathroom and Larry having an issue with his heart, things settle down and you get the chance to look around and talk to everyone.

This is a chance to get to know the others in the group and gain some goodwill by bringing people candy bars you find littered around the store. After gathering backstory on Lee and the others, you wind up going out to save Glen, who had been scavenging for gas. He’s stuck at a local motel, and explains he wound up there after hearing the screams of a girl coming from one of the rooms.

Clearing some zombies and convincing her to come out of the room she’s boarded herself in, you discover she was hiding because she’d been bitten. She asks for a gun, hoping to end her life before she turns into a zombie, and you have another moral dilemma. Do you help her out, or do you walk away?

It might seem straightforward. Just give her the gun and be done with it. But we struggle with this concept in society as we know it.

Let’s replace the zombie bite with terminal cancer. Say she’s someone who has been given months to live, who wants to end things on her own terms. Would you hand her the gun then?

You could argue that people have beaten the odds when it comes to cancer. There are cases of people who’ve been given a few months to live and lasted years.

But you could also argue that the zombie outbreak in this situation is still very new. At this point in the story, the group is still convinced the military will show up to save the day at some point and that a cure will be discovered.

So, is it immoral to give her the means to end her life?

If you don’t give it to her, and she dies and comes back as a zombie and eats someone, would it then be your fault?

I would argue that the right thing to do in this situation is to let her have the gun and let her make her own choice. By keeping it from her you are taking away her free will and causing undue suffering. She wants to go out on her own terms, and she doesn’t want to become a monster that might harm someone else.

But that isn’t even the last big decision of the episode.

Returning to the pharmacy, you make your way into the back area to get some medicine for Larry and wind up setting off an alarm that draws zombies to the building like flies making their way to a pile of manure.

In the struggle to keep them out, you find yourself standing between Carly on one side and Doug on the other. Carly is struggling to reach ammo for her gun as Doug is being pulled out a window by zombies. You have to choose who you want to help, and this time the one you don’t help actually dies.

Just like before, there is no right answer here. Going in, you don’t know that one or the other is doomed.

The best choice, given what you’ve seen so far, would seem to be saving Doug. Carly has proven she’s capable and a great shot, so it’s natural to think she’d be able to break free on her own and save herself. But that isn’t the case, and if you do go for Doug she gets bitten.

You could argue though that going for Carly makes more sense BECAUSE she’s a great shot and a bigger asset to the group than Doug in a lot of ways.

And that brings up an interesting concept.

Morality and ethics are based on society and what we value. In a situation like a zombie apocalypse, the values and what is important to an individual group might differ greatly from what we presently value. Doug has shown he’s intelligent, helping Lee to get the keys to the pharmacy at one point, but in a situation where you need someone who can shoot more than someone who can program a computer it makes sense to save Carly over Doug.

Carly reveals at one point that she knows who Lee is. She knows he’s a convicted murderer, but she also says something that stands out.

“Maybe you’re a murderer, I don’t really care. Frankly that’s a skill that might come in handy.”

And that shows the shift in what is acceptable and considered moral or ethical. Had Lee escaped from the police cruiser and been on the run from the law in a normal circumstance, Carly would have assumed the worst on seeing him and called for help. But in a situation where all the norms of society have broken down, where the dead are rising and eating the living, what is acceptable has changed.

By the end of episode one, the group finds themselves in the motel from earlier. They’re trying to figure out the next steps, making plans to fortify the motel and hold out until the military comes to save them, when the power goes out and everything goes black.

While the choices in episode one might’ve seemed difficult at times, the choices in the coming episodes just keep getting tougher. The next episode in particular is a doozy, and we might even be inviting the Donner party for dinner. So, make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube, or following me here on the blog, so you don't miss future analysis videos and blogs.