The Walking Dead, Season 6, Episode 13: The Same Boat
An actually decent episode that focuses almost entirely on Carol and Maggie as they break out of confinement after being captured by a group of Saviours. Building up on the Carol scenes we saw last episode, we get to see a relatively large amount of Carol. Sure, Maggie is around, but she doesn't get much to do character wise other than the brief interrogation scene and being the resident Miss Badass while Carol's struggling with her previous role as the most cynical and heartless among our main cast. How utterly chilling was that scene when Maggie sics that one zombified Saviour onto the leader, Molly, before proceeding to murder her by stabbing her face like five dozen times? Or the cool, clinical way that she tells Carol to finish this and burn the nameless reinforcements alive after tricking them into entering a closed room?
It should, in theory, be repetitive. Last episode showed us Glenn and Heath's own struggles with the ruthless bastards that they have to be in this new world where they are glorified headhunters, but because we see Carol's own moral struggles the episode ends up being far, far more interesting. Add that to the chillingness of 'omg Maggie is pregnant' which Carol quickly reminds us of, and, yeah, it's a bit of a cheap trick to ramp up the tension in the episode but it turns out that pregnant Maggie is still, y'know, Maggie.
Now if only the Saviours other than Paula had much depth to them beyond being one-note caricatures, then we might actually sympathize with Carol's wobbling convictions. On the other hand, make the Saviours too sympathetic and suddenly Maggie and Carol would end up looking like far too villainous. The dude (Donnie?) who Carol shot is an asshole through and through, the reinforcements don't even get more than a couple of lines, Molly is a cold-hearted jackass, and Paula killed her boss early in the apocalypse and openly mocks Carol. Add the fact that they're actually a small cell that's high-strung and don't even have any idea if they can take the eight-man strong Strike Team Rick, and it's honestly small wonder that Paula's cell lasted the entire episode.
Carol's story is pretty amazing. She reverts back to acting like a scared housewife that causes everyone to underestimate her, and her actress delivers this so, so well that you immediately buy into how the Saviours quickly dismiss her as a threat. She's hyperventilating, she's begging for them to spare Maggie, she stammers, the prays with the prayer beads (which she uses to cut her binds when no one's looking)... and it's implied that the montage of her with a hood looking downwards at the ground is her leaving a trail for Daryl to follow.
But at the same time, this isn't the same Carol who's a one-man army that murdered the cannibals in season five. She's starting to have doubts, having her own guilt-addled moments, enough that she freezes up when confronting Paula in the climax. It's not the smoothest transition, I have to admit, and in particular the talk from Paula about not keeping track of her kills seemed to be one of those shove-in-your-face comparisons that doesn't land at all. But as much as the character development isn't 100% well done, it's still doing decent at showing two characters we care about absolutely demolish a Saviour base.
Which leads to the various Saviours talking about how "we're all Negan", which might imply that 'Negan' is an abstract concept and that the Saviours is an organization without a head to cut off. Of course, I know that Negan is a character in no small part due to knowing who his actor is, but season six's biggest failing is that it's growing increasingly obvious that Negan's going to cameo at the end of this season just like how the Saviours did at the end of last season, except that the Saviours are such a non-threat and so generally abstract that it's going to take a hellluva finale to keep season six from being one of the bigger disappointments of this series.
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