Carol deals with her grief by popping some Adderall in “Ghosts.”
BY: JACOB POLITTE
Online Editor
The Walking Dead: “Ghosts”
Season 10, Episode 3
Airdate: 10/20/2019
***SPOILERS BELOW***
Carol is arguably The Walking Dead’s best character. It’s not just because of Melissa McBride’s fantastic performances. Throughout the show’s ten seasons on the air, we’ve seen her grow from abused housewife to a genuine badass, the likes of The Terminator. We’ve seen her go from being slapped around to taking out an entire cannibal compound completely on her own. She’s also saved Alexandria from an attack from a group of rouge savages, killed an entire outpost of Negan’s Saviors using her wits and good acting skills and finished off the remaining Saviors years later by burning them alive. Carol’s done it all on this show, and none of it was planned from the start; behind-the-scenes, her character was slated to die at least twice before her rise to prominence.
One thing the show has not done though, is have Carol deal with her trauma. And there is so much of it to deal with. Numerous kids have died under her care or because of her actions: Sophia, Lizzie, Mika, Sam and now Henry. And while she can more than handle her own, it’s clear that the trauma that she’s been through has affected her greatly.
We’ve seen this arc before. For all of her bravery and badassery, Carol only knows how to do one thing when people she cares about die: run away. She tried to run after she saved everyone at Terminus. She tried to run again after The Saviors made their presence known at Alexandria, only to have King Ezekiel, Henry and the citizens of The Kingdom come into her life. But now, there is nowhere else to run. The Kingdom has fallen. And Carol is blinded with rage.
Objectively speaking, Carol is not in the wrong. Alpha does need to die for the communities to live in peace. But Carol has lost her cool, and isn’t going along with the communities’ attempt to avoid conflict; if anything, she’s attempting to incite it. Part of that rage is drug-fueled.
Carol has turned to Adderall in order to avoid dreaming about Henry. Even now, she is attempting to avoid dealing with her loss. But the drug has caused her to hallucinate things around her, including an entire conversation with Daryl. She is not well, and she even attempts to assassinate Alpha when their two groups meet at the place Henry and the others severed heads were displayed.
While Carol is hallucinating a lot of things, including Whisperers following them, it turns out that she may not be hallucinating all of it. It’s shown that they’re are indeed Whisperers following the group, and it’s implied that they have been crossing the borders that they have set for quite some time. It seems that neither side have been sticking to the parameters of their deal, and we’re inching closer and closer to conflict.
SCATTERED THOUGHTS:
– Will Carol be the one to kill Alpha? It sure seems like the show is heading in that direction. In the comics, it’s Negan himself who does the deed, but I think it needs to be Carol who is the one to end it here.
– Michonne spent most of last season isolating Alexandria from the rest of the communities, and I love that Carol just shut down her initial lecture about thinking of the rest of the group in two seconds flat. “B***h has to die” is an epic line.
– All of the dead kids in Carol’s life being on that textbook was really unsettling.
– I’m not even going to talk about the hallucination of Daryl cooking. That’s not because Henry makes an appearance, it’s just because it’s so weird and it might indicate that Carol has a romantic interest in Daryl and that’s just something I cannot accept.
– Siddiq getting upset and traumatized when Carol is brought into the infirmary reads to me that there is something that happened in “The Calm Before” that he’s not telling us.
– The other big event is the massive waves of walkers that are converging on Alexandria. At first everyone assumes that the Whisperers are behind it, but Lydia assures them that they’re not; she says that her mother would just send them all at once if she really wanted to wipe Alexandria out.
– To help combat the herd, Negan and Aaron are dispatched outside Alexandria’s walls, get into multiple arguments, and eventually get separated. Aaron ends up temporarily blind, but Negan saves him, further solidifying his redemption.
– Aaron’s mace hand is cool. Aaron’s butthole vision when he was blinded is not. This show loves blinding people.
– This show also loves poorly-lit nighttime scenes.
– It turns out that there were Whisperers watching the group during the winter in “The Storm.”
– Eugene and Rosita closing the book on a romantic relationship definitely means that Rosita and Eugene are definitely going to be a romantic item at some point.
– Dante is a good guy but my god is there just something really off about him.
A review of episode 4, “Silence The Whisperers,” will be published later this week.
