The Walking Dead
Episode 6.13 “The Same Boat”
Directed by Billy Gierhart
Written by Angela Kang
Starring Andrew Lincoln, Danai Gurira, Melissa McBride, Lauren Cohen, Steven Yeun, Norman Reedus, Chandler Riggs, Michael Cudlitz, Lennie James
AMC
Air date: Sunday, March 13, 2016, 9pm

Warning – SPOILERS for The Walking Dead Season 6…

This week’s episode of The Walking Dead, Episode 6.13 “The Same Boat,” focused only Carol and Maggie, who had been taken captive by a small sect of The Saviors, Negan’s people. Last week, Rick and his team had invaded what they believed to be Negan’s compound for a deadly sneak attack, which was their end of the deal they made with the Hilltop people. Carol and Maggie had been guarding the perimeter while the rest of the group invaded the compound and massacred its sleeping occupants, blurring the lines between right and wrong.

It was obvious leading up to this ambush that Carol, who went from being a meek and battered housewife to a total badass warrior, was having a crisis of conscience of sorts. She had realized that the number of people (that’s live humans, not Walkers) she’s killed is well into double digits, and that the attack on The Saviors was going to lead to total bloodshed. For a long time, Carol, who has been masquerading around the Alexandria Safe Zone as a happy cookie-making homemaker, has had her own code she lived by “” she did what she had to do to survive, even if it meant ending another life, but she didn’t relish in it, which differentiated her from people like the Wolves. But, perhaps now she realizes that the mass slaughter of Negan’s people is far beyond even what she is willing to do.

And what Carol is willing to do and what she has done are not things that she wants someone like Maggie to have to do. At the start of the episode, we see Carol telling the pregnant Maggie something to this affect when some the surviving Saviors come upon them, catching them off guard. Carol shoots the man (Donnie) who comes up behind Maggie, but then the women are quickly overpowered by the others “” Paula, Molls, and Chelle “” who take them hostage.

Paula (Alicia Witt), via walkie talkie, begins negotiations with Rick, who has one of Negan’s men, Primo, but she’s really just stalling for time, as a few of her fellow Neganites are about 30 minutes away. We don’t get to see Rick’s end of things through the episode; instead, we get to see what happens with Carol and Maggie, who are being held by Paula’s group inside a “safe house.” This is where Carol’s plays up her “weak” persona, first acting like she’s hyperventilating, then seeming like a religious person who relies on her faith to get her through. Paula sees Carol as a weak person, just as the Safe Zone residents once believes. She appear innocuous, which is likely why Paula and Moll saw no problem with leaving Carol unguarded “” big mistake!

But, we’ll get back to that.

This was a tense episode because at every turn it seemed like Paula’s patience for the situation would run out, and she would just kill off Maggie and/or Carol. Carol starts off by letting them all know that Maggie is pregnant, and when Molls starts smoking near them, she reminds her about “the baby.” That last time Carol chastised someone for smoke, that person was soon after killed by the wolves while standing outside puffing on a cigarette, so you know something is going to go down if Carol has to reiterate that smoking is a disgusting habit.

Chelle takes Maggie into another room to interrogate her, and as far as we know, Maggie said nothing. But Chelle sure had a lot to reveal: Her father’s name was Frank, and that was what she was going to name her baby. Her boyfriend was found blown up on the road “” so we know now that he was one of Negan’s men that Daryl killed with that rocket launcher a while back. And one of her fingers had been cut off as punishment for taking gasoline from the safe house to take a car to go look for said boyfriend. Eventually, both each women proclaim that they aren’t going to die today, but Chelle says that one of them is wrong.

Meanwhile, Paula has some of her own stuff to get off her chest: She worked as a secretary, and had a husband and four daughters before the world ended, and she was stuck with her boss when the evacuations started. And, the first person she killed post-apocalypse was her needy, coffee-drinking boss, someone who she felt was going to drag her down and jeopardize her survival. She reveals that she stop feeling after her kills entered the double-digits, an issue we’ve seen Carol struggling with herself. Paul looks at Carol as if she’s just another weakling. When Carol asks Moll for a cigarette, Paula scoffs at her, saying, “You are weak, you’re so scared you can’t even stick to your own principles.” Carol replies, “You don’t want me to stick to my own principles,” and while we know what that means, oblivious Paula sure doesn’t. Carol has survived this long on her ability to fool people into underestimating her, and now it’s working on someone who’s seemingly as cutthroat as she is, but is braggart about it. She warns her captor that if she doesn’t negotiate the hostage trade with Rick, she will end of dead. “Are you going to kill me?,” Paul asks, to which Carol replies, “I hope not,” still keeping her weakling persona intact.

An interesting tidbit is revealed during Paula and Carol’s exchanges: After Carol explains that her people killed the Saviors on the road because they were attacked, and that they ambushed the compound to get rid of Negan because he “sounded like a maniac,” Paula scoffs at her again, proclaim “We are all Negan.” This is confusing to Carol, who asks what that means several times, but gets no answer. What the hell does that men?!??!

So, back to leaving Carol unguarded: Of course she loosens her bonds and makes her way out of her makeshift cell, then goes to rescue Maggie. Carol wants them to just make their escape, and it’s Maggie who insists they stay and kill their captors. They go back to where Donnie lay bleeding only to discover that he’d already passed, so they tie him up as bait so that when he turns, he’ll attack the next person who walks in, which happens to be Moll, who’s ranting about wanting to “bloody up Magnolia.” Moll nearly wins her battle against walker Donnie, but Maggie comes up behind her and finishes her off. During a physical fight, Chelle slashes the pregnant Maggie’s stomach, but Carol shows up and shoots Chelle in the head. Navigating a hallway with Walkers strategically spiked down to keep people in, Maggie and Carol then come upon Paula. In an unlikely turn of events, Carol tells Paula to run, to just “get away.” She’s giving Paula a chance to live, which goes against her normal “take no prisoners” stance. Maggie is screaming to Carol to shoot, but she just keeps telling her to run, but Paula won’t.

At this point, Paula realizes that perhaps Carol had been a weakling at one time in her life, but it’s obvious after what she managed to do that day that she isn’t any longer, and that they are really very alike. Paula asks Carol, “If you were capable of doing all this, what we were you so afraid of?” It’s clear that Carol wasn’t fearful for her own safety; she was afraid that she’d yet again have to take a human life. “This,” Carol responds, readying to shoot the gun, but Paula disarms her and the two get into a physical fight, which ends with Paula not only impaled on a spike, but getting her face eaten off by a Walker.

Now that all their captors are dead, Carol and Maggie still have to make it out of the safe house just as the back-up team are about to arrive. Grabbing the walkie, Carol disguises her voice as Paula’s and tells the men to meet her on the kill floor. As the woman lie in wait to ambush the new arrivals, Carol confesses to having killed 18-20 people, and that she had a clear shot at Donnie in the woods, but she didn’t take it. Maggie says, “What’s done is done”; you can tell she doesn’t judge her friend and understands that not only what’s done is what, but what had to be done was done.

The new Savior members then make their way onto the kill floor, Carol closes the door on them, flicking a lit cigarette onto gasoline on the floor in the room, cooking the trapped men alive. It’s a horrible thing she’s had to do, and it’s obviously getting to her, but as usual, Carol does what she has to do to survive when threatened.

On the way out, Maggie sees the now zombified Paula and gives her a stab in the head for good measure. Just as Carol and Maggie reach the outside doors, they open and there stands Rick, Glenn, Daryl, Rosita, and Gabriel with guns at the ready. This is part of why Paul was too afraid to do the actual hostage swap, because she figure Rick would overpower her group, and was desperate for back-up because she knew Rick would eventually find her safe house, and of course he did.

When Daryl sees Carol and asks if she’s good, and she reveals that no, no she’s not, so he gives her a consoling hug, while Glenn hugs his wife, who says, “I can’t anymore,” after telling him how all the people who captured them are now dead (and it’s obvious who killed them!).

Although Rick has his people back, he also now still has Primo. Daryl says to let Primo burn, but Rick still wants to know where Negan is. “I’m Negan, sheathed,” Primo tells him, adding that there’s a “whole lot of fun” they can talk about, so why don’t they”¦ and oh wait, Rick ain’t got time for that. “Sorry it has to come to this,” Rick says as his shoots his captive in the head, as Carol looks on in shock as another life is taken. The episode ends with a close-up of her hand tightly clutching the rosary, drawing blood that then dripping down from it.

How could it not be obvious that this guy was not frightening head honcho, someone everyone was so terrified of? Also, why not keep him alive for information? Why not debrief Carol and Maggie to find out what they learned while in captivity, which would have been that the Saviors all consider themselves Negan!! (Molls said they were all Negan at one point, too.) How can Rick be so short-sighted that he thinks he’s captured Osama Bin Laden so easily and that he’s put down the threat in its entirety? Rick’s poor judgment during this whole Negan fiasco is definitely going to come back to bite them all in the ass in the worst possible way.

Photo Gallery

Follow me on Twitter and Instagram