With Quinlan being the newest and least-experienced captain in the Western Deep, it makes sense for Kenosh to force him to make his first tough choice. One of the fun things about any form of sequential long-form storytelling is that you can smash forward like this and leave a lot of what just transpired to the reader’s imagination. Another is that decisions like these can come back later in all sorts of ways.

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click to enlarge

This doesn’t have to literally mean that the bandits return, though! The result of a binary choice like Quinlan’s can manifest itself in a number of different ways, all very potentially interesting to me and Rachel as storytellers. It’s not just the result of the decision, but the reasoning behind the decision. Obviously, Quinlan weighs the decision of life and death carefully — we also know he was never keen on the idea of being saddled with such heavy choices in the first place.

Do you think he made the right decision?