No one character on The Walking Dead has evolved more than Carol Peletier has over the course of six seasons. Carol has transformed from a meek, domestic abuse survivor who lost a daughter into a woman so protective of her people that she’s killed others proactively because of the potential threat they posed. She killed Tyrese’s girlfriend because she was sick, showing no remorse and crossing a line that Rick was so unsettled by that he briefly kicked her out of the group. She killed Lizzie — a little girl — because she was psychotic and couldn’t be saved from her mental illness. She practically wiped out Terminus single-handedly, and in this year’s midseason finale, she shot and killed the Wolf, Owen. At last count, she’d killed 18 people.
Nobody has been more bad ass than Carol in recent seasons. Until now.
In this week’s episode of The Walking Dead, “The Same Boat,” showrunner Scott Gimple continued to build on a reversion of her character. The bold and pragmatic Carol is losing her edge. She is losing her ability to kill. The weight of her murder count is weighing on her conscience. She froze when confronted by an attacker, intentionally shooting him in the arm instead of killing him. She hyperventilated while being tied up by Paula. She showed a reluctance bordering on refusal to kill Paula when given the opportunity, and she clutched at her rosary beads after Rick killed Primo.
Carol is broken.
It’s not an implausible reversion, but the speed with which she has changed over the last few episodes feels slightly rushed. However, it’s not unearned.
There is a confluence of events that has led to Carol’s current state, but it was Morgan that initially got into her head. In the midseason finale, Morgan planted the seed when Carol tried to get through him to the Wolf. “We can be better than them,” Morgan told her. “We are better than them,” Carol responded, reluctantly. “Not if we kill,” Morgan tells her,” and that’s where Carol seems to turn. “They made us kill,” she said with hesitation, holding back tears. “We had to stop it,” she said, almost not believing her own words. She didn’t want to kill Owen. She even tried to bargain her way out of it. “You tell me you’re sure,” she said to Morgan. “You tell me you know how it will go.”
It was that hesitation, her inability to kill Morgan — because she knew that what he was saying was true — that allowed Morgan to disarm her, both mentally and physically.
“We are better than them.”
Carol desperately wants to believe that, but her role in Sam’s death (which was as a result of her own cruel words) and the Wolf’s death (even after he redeemed himself by saving Denise) have convinced Carol that maybe they are not “better than them.” As Paula suggested to Carol in this episode, Carol and Co. are not the good guys. They aren’t any better than them. They’re all battling for survival, and somewhere along the way, they’ve lost their sense of humanity.
Thanks to Morgan, Carol’s protective instincts are battling with her guilt and remorse, and after the death of Paula and Primo, it’s clear that Carol’s guilt is winning out. After allying with Rick for so long, Carol is finally set to become an obstacle to his agenda.
