The Walking Dead draws a clear parallel between Maggie's son and Carl Grimes in season 11's "The Rotten Core." When Negan hit a home run with Glenn's head in The Walking Dead season 6's finale, audiences mourned the loss of a firm fan favorite. As if forcing a pregnant Maggie to watch the ordeal wasn't dark enough, Negan also deprived Glenn of the chance to meet his son, and Hershel has grown up knowing his father only through stories he hears from Maggie and the other survivors. Since Lauren Cohan (Maggie actress) returned in The Walking Dead season 10, Hershel has enjoyed a more prominent role in events, and is now played by young Kien Michael Spiller.
When The Walking Dead's "The Rotten Core" begins, Maggie believes she left her son behind before heading out to help Aaron and Gabriel defeat a rogue unit of Lance Hornsby's Commonwealth soldiers. Hershel is apparently accustomed to his mother going AWOL for long periods, but this time he's not standing for it, and secretly joins the fight at Riverbend apartment complex. Easily Hershel's biggest episode thus far, his actions feel eerily reminiscent of The Walking Dead's original "zombie apocalypse kid" - the one and only Carl Grimes.
After Hershel's presence is discovered, the youngster finds himself face-to-face with Negan. The precocious child doesn't take long to deduce this man is his father's killer, and Hershel promptly pulls a gun on Negan, who becomes helpless at this gun-toting kid's mercy. The entire sequence is a close riff on a memorable Carl Grimes scene from The Walking Dead season 7. Just like Hershel, Carl stowed away in a truck (belonging to the Saviors on this occasion) and, also like Hershel, he surprised everyone by pulling a gun on Negan. Still in his villainous phase back then, Jeffrey Dean Morgan's character reacted with far less humility, calling Carl "adorable" and allowing Dwight to disarm Rick's son. Nevertheless, giving Hershel the hide-in-a-truck-then-point-a-gun-at-Negan storyline Carl Grimes had feels like an intentional homage.
The comparison between kid characters traces even further back to The Walking Dead's comic series, and the death of Shane. In "The Rotten Core," Hershel boldly brandishes a gun that's far too big for him, determined to avenge his late father by killing the man responsible. Back in The Walking Dead issue #6, an equally tiny Carl Grimes pointed an equally over-sized pistol at Shane and, once again, it was all for his father, since Shane was on the verge of murdering Rick at this point. When The Walking Dead adapted this pivotal scene in season 2, Rick was the one who shot Shane while Carl gunned down his reanimated corpse. Hershel's Negan holdup feels like a direct parallel of Carl's very first comic book kill, both in terms of his motivations, and the imagery of a small child pointing a gun toward a grown man.
Perhaps The Walking Dead intends to morph Hershel into something of a Carl Grimes replacement for the remainder of season 11 and into Isle of the Dead - Maggie and Negan's upcoming spinoff. Both are children of main protagonists, and both are bright, brave youngsters who have adapted to the zombie apocalypse surprisingly well, and aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. Judith had that role locked down for a while, but she's busy listening to Motörhead in the Commonwealth these days. With those similar characteristics already in place and a bunch of storyline parallels cropping up in "The Rotten Core," Hershel Rhee is seemingly being positioned as The Walking Dead's latest Carl Grimes replacement.