The Walking Dead Season 11 Episode 19 Scene That Mirrors The Dark Knight
(Warning: Spoilers ahead for the latest episodes of "The Walking Dead.")
As fans hurtle toward the highly-anticipated finale of AMC's "The Walking Dead," it's become clear that one of the biggest storylines of this final season is the warpath of vengeance that Pamela Milton (Laila Robins) is laying down in the wake of her son's death.
Following the death of Sebastian Milton (Teo Rapp-Olsson) in Season 11, Episode 18, Pamela gets to work tracking down her son's killers. She orders Mercer to hunt down Eugene (Josh McDermitt) and eventually discovers that Lance Hornsby (Josh Hamilton) is the true culprit behind her son's shocking demise.
When Pamela confronts Lance in Episode 19, he makes it clear that he had no intention whatsoever of hurting Sebastian and that he only planned the attack to force her into speaking with him. Although she seems somewhat understanding, Pamela refuses to give him his life back that easily and decides to make Lance play a game for it instead — one which parallels several famous scenes from the iconic superhero film "The Dark Knight" involving a popular Batman villain.
Pamela uses a coin game to enact justice on her son's murderer
During this chilling confrontation within Lance Hornsby's jail cell, Pamela Milton grabs a coin from Lance's pocket and shuffles it between her hand behind her back. She then forces Lance to choose which hand has the coin in it. Using a coin to decide whether or not someone lives or dies instantly recalls the insanity of Two-Face/Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) from "The Dark Knight." Dent is seen several times throughout the movie flipping a coin to decide whether or not he will kill somebody or let them live.
Although Dent's use of the coin is more based on the idea of using pure randomness to decide someone's fate (either heads or tails), it's still easy to draw a connection between his coin flips and Pamela's coin game in Episode 19. In fact, you can draw an even stronger parallel between Lance's earlier use of that very same coin in Season 11, Episode 16 — wherein Lance flips the coin to decide whether or not to execute the residents of Oceanside.
As of now, the fate of the Oceanside residents is still up in the air, though Lance himself actually ends up winning his personal coin game with Pamela. As a reward for earning back his life, Pamela brings in the corpse of Roman Calhoun (Michael Tourek) for Lance to chop up and feed to Sebastian. This act seems right up Two-Face's alley, given his tendency to enact his twisted kind of "justice" on people even if they win his coin game.