6x13 The Same Boat

One of the best parts of Carol's storylines on The Walking Dead is that they've largely been underplayed. Melissa McBride is such a talented actress that the show can dispense with its often lumpy dialogue and simply let her convey the meaning in the moment, whether it's a sullen look after the events of "JSS" or the harsh tone in her voice when she tells Rick that Maggie shouldn't be out on the raid. This season in particular, The Walking Dead had done a good job at letting the idea of Carol feeling the weight of her actions and gradually pivoting away from the ruthless persona of strength she'd taken on bubble under the surface, thereby making the scenes where those themes are a little more prominent stand out as earned and effective.

But "The Same Boat" basically turns that subtlety on its ear. It's a bleak bottle episode, that spends most of its time keeping Carol in a single room and trotting out an odd version of "This Is Your Life!" There's Maggie as a symbol of uncorrupted innocence and incipient motherhood there to let Carol fight to protect something in another person that she herself has lost. There's the colorful Molly, who offers Carol a view of her possible future, a dead woman walking who's not afraid to do what need doing. There's Donnie, a nearly textbook abusive boyfriend who's mostly a prop to draw out another parallel for Carol. That parallel is Paula, who is both a dark reflection of what Carol has become--a woman who lost her children, dealt with abuse, and resolved to kill when necessary without compunction or hesitation--and a living caution of what Carol is afraid that Maggie could become.

These are all interesting character comparisons in particular, but given that all of these people have to be introduced and die in the same episode, the audience necessarily gets thumbnail sketches of everyone rather than meaningful shades of character development to make them feel like real people rather than narrative devices to elucidate Carol's internal conflict. The episode does a good job in giving Carol's captors texture--Molly in particular is someone I'm sad to see go given how distinct and magnetic she was with little weight to carry here--but their characterization is thin, and that inevitably leads to the feeling that "The Same Boat" is more of a contrived allegory than a story with emotional truth.

That's especially true for Paula, a well-acted, poorly-written character who seems to have little use besides acting as the obvious living wakeup call for Carol she's meant to reflect and turning subtext into brutally on-the-nose text. When she blasts Carol for being weak, when she spits Carol's philosophy back at her in a clumsy fashion, when vocalizes that Carol sees Maggie as the way she used to be, it's all unnecessary emotional exposition about themes the show had already communicated in much subtler ways. I actually liked the idea of Paula as an antagonist because the performance is good, and there's a harsh pragmatism to her that makes her an interesting comparison point to Rick as much as she is to Carol. But when she launches into that monologue it becomes clear that she's only here to be a ponderous, poorly-sketched out doppleganger for Carol, with nothing under her skin but cheesy dialogue and didactic speeches.

Melissa McBride does what she can to save all of this. Her performance does a very nice job of showing Carol's simultaneous cunning and her pain. She's obfuscating timidness to disarm her captors, the same way she used that persona to keep the Alexandrians off guard. But McBride does a great job of selling the moments where Carol's real concerns, her genuine conflicted feelings about the choices she's made, bleed through. More than that, the episode shows her using those real feelings to further the lie, a tactic composed of equal parts canniness and pathos.

There's a bit of Morgan's philosophy that's wormed its way into Carol's thinking, whether she likes or it hates the way it makes her shoot an intruder in the arm rather than in the chest, or hesitate when a single bullet could practically end the whole struggle. Carol become this hardened warrior so that she could protect the innocent, so that what happened with Sofia wouldn't happen again. It's why what rouses her from her mild pacifist streak is Paula's swipe at Maggie's stomach. But as bluntly as the concept is hammered home in "The Same Boat", Carol has been wounded in that process, and when she looks at the deaths she's been responsible for, at the harshness she's perpetrated in the same of doing what's necessary, she doesn't necessarily like the person she sees, and begins to not only question that path, but to slowly feel more and more of the hurt of it all.

I'm hardly a Carol-Daryl shipper, but there's has always been a special friendship on the show, and one of the most pleasant moments in a dark episode was his immediately comforting her after she and Maggie kill the last couple of Saviors. Maybe he can help her find a bit of peace.

But that brutality doesn't stop at Carol. "The Same Boat" also suggests that it's infected the whole group, or at least the ones who embark on the raid of the saviors. Again, it's not subtle. Michelle, who seems intended as an alternate version of Maggie much as Paula is a dark mirror of Carol, outright says, "you're not the good guys." But at the same time, I like the idea of the show broadening its perspective a bit. We literally see the events at the Saviors' compound from Paula's eyes, and it's not necessarily a pretty picture.

The Walking Dead has been toying with this idea since beginning the Hilltop/Negan storyline, and it's fruitful territory. It's cold and nearly heartless when Rick takes out Primo without his enemy barely getting a sentence out before there's a bullet in his brain. To this end, the best scene in the episode is the first, that shows a group no less capable than Rick's looking on with horror but determination at what our heroes have accomplished. But it peters out quickly when the episode tries to draw a moral equivalency while making the Saviors we see too thinly-drawn to feel truly sympathetic.

But as I often say about The Walking Dead, there's the germ of a good idea there. I appreciate the concept of Carol as an agent of change, of someone who's lived by the philosophy of doing whatever must be done, no matter the cost, it protect yourself and your own, who's disillusioned by where that's led her and having serious qualms about the group as whole adopting that view. This episode was a weak attempt to draw out that internal conflict in Carol, but hopefully the way it tied that idea to the larger theme of whether our heroes are really worth rooting for or if, instead, they've become something different, something cruel out there in jungle, will lead to better and brighter things.