**Spoiler warning if you haven't seen episode 2.12** Last night's episode of The Walking Dead left many unanswered questions, especially if you don't read the comic book series. Thankfully, Robert Kirkman provided a number of answers regarding the story development process and what we can expect to see in next week's finale:

Did Carl See Everything?: "Carl knows that he shot zombie Shane. All he knows is that he came into a clearing, saw Rick upset and saw zombie Shane come after his dad and killed him... All Carl really knows right now is that he was a zombie."

Comic vs Show: "In the writers' room, we felt Rick was passive at times and wasn't handling things himself. So to end this season with Carl killing Shane for Rick would have been a misstep. It was very important to us in the development of Carl as a character to have him have a hand in it. That's how we came upon the idea of, in a sense, both of them killing Shane. What excites me about that scene is when Rick stabs Shane, even if you read the comic and you know that Shane is more than likely going to go in this scene, I always like that there's probably been about two or three other scenes in this series thus far where you're thinking, "Wait a minute, Shane could die right now, couldn't he?" That knife is still as much as a shock to comic readers as anyone who's watching the show for the first time having never read the comic."

Regarding Shane: "We knew that he was going to die before we cast Jon Bernthal. If the first season had been 13 episodes instead of six, Shane's story would have been told all in that first season; it would have been much like the comic book where Shane dies at the end of the first volume. But because we had that short of a season, we ended up expanding it to really be able to tell that story to its fullest. We knew from Day 1 when we sat down in the writers' room to pull out the second season that this was going to be the season that Shane died. It was always about working toward that and building up that character and setting up this confrontation between Rick and Shane."

Learning More About "The Herd": "Our finale is going to have a very cool opening scene that will reveal what this herd is and where this herd came from and also kind of inform the audience a little bit on zombie behavior and how herds form and what they do. You'll get answers to all that kind of stuff in the very first minutes next week."

The Jenner Whisper?: "Leading up to the shooting with Carl, let's just say that Shane coming back as a zombie in this scene without having been bitten by a zombie after having just been stabbed by Rick is something that we connected through the Jenner whisper secret and is something that is going to be revealed in the next episode."

Keep an eye out for more content from The Walking Dead later today, as we'll have a number of videos and photos from the upcoming finale.

Catch up on our recent coverage of The Walking Dead with the following articles: