Apple cider vinegar Is Pilates for you? 'Ambient gaslighting' 'Main character energy'
ENTERTAIN THIS
The Walking Dead (tv series)

‘The Walking Dead’ recap: What are you afraid of?

Kelly Lawler
USA TODAY
Carol, what can we do to help.

Spoiler alert! The following contains spoilers for The Walking Dead season 6, episode 12 "The Same Boat." To read our recap of episode 12, click here .

18 people. Maybe 20.

By the end of Sunday’s episode of The Walking Dead, that’s how many people Carol Peletier, former abused housewife and baker of acorn and beet cookies, has killed since the world ended. And it’s starting to hurt.

With a show like Dead, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where ethics and morals are simply not the same as they are now, it’s inevitable that the heroes, the protagonists, the survivors we’ve been following from the very beginning have had to make some hard choices. They’ve had to kill. But as the world has devolved and violence has become the norm, those choices have become less and less hard. This season is forcing our heroes to confront those choices in a new light as they become the aggressors, killing to gain something rather than out of self-defense. This week Carol, whose journey has taken her from meekness to coldness to somewhere in between, and Maggie, who has found a new hardness of late, were both forced to confront the decisions about life and death they’d made in the past and the ones they will keep making to survive. It wasn’t very pretty.

Dead women walking

“The Same Boat” starts off exactly where last week’s episode left off, showing us how, exactly Carol and Maggie wound up in the hands of the Saviors. Carol, who has not been entirely the same cold, calculating machine since the herd attacked Alexandria, shoots a Savior who comes upon her and Maggie. Carol shot him in the arm and wanted to leave -- Maggie went over to “finish it.” The time taken to discuss it is enough time to get ambushed by another group of Saviors, who are pointedly all women.

The leader of this particular group is a woman named Paula, who we learn later in the episode has killed what sounds like dozens of people and lost her husband and four daughters along the way. She’s a lot like Carol, and Carol immediately sees something in her.

Making Carol and Maggie’s captors all women, save for the man Carol shoots who eventually bleeds out on the floor, allows the episode to dive into themes of motherhood and femininity even amidst all the zombie violence. The contrast between what a pregnant woman is supposed to be, often brought up by the captors, and the way Maggie acts in the episode is striking. She is not delicate or precious or particularly maternal. The episode also intimates that it is Carol and Paula’s status as women that has helped them survive this long in this world. When Paula says “guys can’t handle pain” after the man hits her, her words are invoking so many things: The pain of childbirth many women go through, the pain Carol experienced at the hands of her abusive husband and the pain she herself has experienced as the world ended. She can handle it, she says. The guy whining on the floor with a hole in his arm can’t.

Paula has Maggie and Carol taken to a safe house and keeps Rick hanging on the walkie, never agreeing to trade Maggie and Carol for the Savior he has hostage until she has the advantage. But despite her strategy and forethought, Carol is, as usual, one step ahead. She immediately puts on an act, playing the slightly helpless, meek woman she was before. She hyperventilates into her gag. She says “excuse me” and “thank you.” She clutches a rosary, for goodness’ sake.

Carol says and does all the right things to get the situation where she wants it to be. She and Maggie get their gags removed. When the man she shot gets punch-happy, Carol lays down and takes it, and lets Maggie fight back. She gets Paula and the rest to open up. And yet, meanwhile, she uses that rosary to saw her bonds away. Subtle symbolism, there.

You’re not the good guys

While the events of the past few weeks seem to have at least partially softened Carol’s exterior, Maggie has had the opposite reaction. This is the woman who got Gregory to give Alexandria half of everything a few episodes ago, after all. Yet, fundamentally, her goals are different than these women and even Carol. They want to simply survive, to “stay standing,” as Paula puts it. “That’s what Walkers do,” Maggie throws back at her. Maggie doesn’t want to just survive; she wants to live.

Unfortunately to get to a place where she can live, she’s going to have to stop others from doing so. After Carol gets free and helps Maggie do the same, Carol suggests they just slip out unnoticed and leave these people alive. Maggie is adamantly against it. She made a deal with Gegory: They would wipe out the Saviors in exchange for supplies. So these women don’t get a pass.

Maggie sets a trap for one woman, allowing her to be bitten. She beats another to death with the butt of a gun. But when it’s Paula’s turn, Carol is the one who ends up with a gun pointed at her. Carol tells her to run, but that’s not who Paula is. She’s a fighter. She the quiet secretary who killed her own boss to survive. And so she fights, but Carol wins.

After the pair takes out their captors, they set another, particularly gruesome trap for their back up. It is just before they burn two men alive that Carol tries to unload her conscience on Maggie. But the younger woman isn’t having it, and tells Carol to put it out of her mind. It’s not necessarily the best strategy, and when they’re reunited with Rick, Glenn and Daryl, neither woman is remotely “OK.”

Rick, on the other hand, seems to have no moral or psychological quandary of his own, shooting his Savior hostage point-blank when he claims to be Negan. Our survivors may be dealing with guilt and conscience individually, but as a group, they are still being led by Rick, and he sees one clear path: Kill or be killed. We wonder how Negan will see things.

Featured Weekly Ad