Calling them "character development episodes" is about as complete a misrepresentation as one could make. TWD was rebuilt on a soap melodrama model in season 2: it, in effect, hasn't had "characters" from that point forward. Soap melodrama takes all of the potentially problematic elements of the melodrama and cranks them up to 11. It eschews reason, subtlety, nuance, understatement, and intelligent, adult behavior and aims, instead, at provoking emotional reactions through simplistic and sensationalistic narratives centered around highly emotional themes, played out via exaggerated, non-naturalistic, emotion-laden behavior. This is the level on which it tries to engage its viewers.

Characterizations in soap melodrama are dictated entirely by temporary plot needs. A character may be one thing one week and something entirely different the next. There's no consistency. There isn't even any effort at consistency. Such considerations play no part in the production.

When Shane tells Lori he thinks the search for Sophia should be called off and admits he doesn't really care about any of the others, just she and Carl, Lori berates him for using them as an excuse to advance such a cruel notion. Then, an episode later, Beth falls ill, possibly zombie-infected, and when Rick volunteers to go retrieve their only medical professional (who happens to be Beth's father), Lori guilt-trips him about how he's abandoning their son! Carl apparently can't even spare Rick for the amount of time it takes to drive a mile into town and back. Then, minutes after Rick departs, Lori herself turns around and abandons Carl.

If you're looking for a "character" in any of that, you're simply out of luck. The only point of any of it is to milk that melodrama, and Lori--just like all the rest--becomes whatever she needs to be in that script to generate those melodramatic scenes, even if it entirely contradicts who she was in the previous ep or who she'll be in the next one.

There have been, to date, seven major versions of Rick, none of them flowing from one another, none of them consistent with one another.

There's no "character development" on TWD and no character development episodes. When Gimple became showrunner, he tried to straddle the divide between character drama and soap melodrama and try to throw in some actual characterization. He apparently decided his experiment was a failure (as could be expected) and abandoned it. Eps in which nothing happens except a lot of bad dialogue doesn't = "character development episodes."