The following contains spoilers forThe Walking Dead season 6, episode 12 “The Same Boat”.
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Under the direction of a hard-hearted redhead named Paula (Alicia Witt), the remaining Saviors – including a man nursing a painful, Carol-inflicted gunshot wound – took Carol and Maggie back to a second, secret rendezvous point in an abandoned slaughterhouse. I liked the character Carol had become, and I don’t want her to get annoying before she’s written off. “It’s a mother’s instinct to fight, to save the family, and I think there was just a little moment of understanding and making her feel better and comfort, and that’s where that led to”. Their paths diverged in a very important way though, where Paula stopped feeling anything, Carol is feeling everything.
And as the radio communiqué at the end of last week’s episode suggested, Carol and Maggie have been taken by Saviors who were out during the night’s bloodbath. Surely, the writers can’t be cheating us out of meeting Negan because that would just be cruel. “We’re gonna work this out, and it’s gonna go our way”. Paula, while quite ruthless, seemed to have been that way from the start, after she told Carol (Melissa McBride) that she had to kill her boss in order to survive. Maggie is interrogated by The Saviors to give up their location while Carol is berated by them and told she is pathetic. Carol and Paula, Maggie and Michelle (the woman with the missing finger), Molly (the chain-smoking woman) and Donnie, they’re all reflections of each other.
Savior: “You’re some kind of stupid getting knocked up at a time like this”.
Maggie and Carol are extremely shaken up when Glenn, Daryl, Rick and Co. show up to rescue them. Carol and Maggie are still arguing over what to do next. It feels as though Maggie’s pregnancy has been more pressure on Carol than it has been on Maggie, and it’s clear that Carol is struggling to deal with the level of violence that she’s been forced to inflict on people, which is an interesting idea for such a strong character.
Molls replied “Sweetie, sweetie… we’re all Negan!”.
It’s not enough that Polly gets a huge bite taken out of her face on camera; we later see her zombified corpse. Carol will reveal to the Captors about her cancer.
Carol says and does all the right things to get the situation where she wants it to be. What this line really brought home was the fact that if it’s true for them, it must be true for everyone else-even the people who appear to have no good in them whatsoever. But the younger woman isn’t having it, and tells Carol to put it out of her mind. She headbutts him, and Carol tries to help her. The man kicks Carol on the ground and Paula finally clocks him over the head so he’s knocked out. Poor Carol. Whether she was faking anything at the beginning of the episode is still up for debate, but she was not faking anything at the end.
I really enjoyed watching these women confer with each other, about the state of the world and who they should be, even if they were on opposite sides. There’s plenty of tension with this group that’s apparently lead by Paula as she’s looking for a good way to come out ahead.
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Checking things out through binoculars back at Negan’s headquarters, fellow Savior Primo was shot off “his” bike and apprehended by Rick and company, prompting Paula to intervene via walkie talkie.
