 "Beside the Dying Fire" features the deaths of Patricia and Jimmy, who were both consumed by walkers. Alongside the deaths of the aforementioned characters, the episode's script initially called for the deaths of Hershel, as well as Shane Walsh and Randall, both of whom had died in the previous installment. Since Kirkman felt that there was a lot of potential development in Hershel, his death was scrapped from the script. Although plans to write off the character commenced earlier in the season, Mazzara opined that his hypothetical death would have carried no emotional resonance. "The plan was always to whack Hershel, and I actually told Scott Wilson,' Thanks for everything you 've done, but in the next script we're going to kill off your character. 'We started writing that and it felt like Hershel's death was playing as a plot device and we were getting no emotional resonance. It was just playing as a gratuitous death. This was one of those examples where we won 't play a shocking death for the sense of death; we have to get something out of it. We got nothing out of it. If you look at the shot of Hershel looking back and seeing that barn burning and his farm completely lost to the zombies, that shot was well worth it because we see the farm was really a character and you can only see that through Hershel's eyes. So it was the right call to keep him alive."
