Maggie finishes her off by beating her to death with the butt of a handgun, the best way to let out some aggression in the apocalypse. The aforementioned a-hole boyfriend eventually bleeds out after Carol shoots him in the episode's opening minutes his reanimated corpse is later used to trap Molly, the woman who can't stop coughing up blood (a cancer-induced parlor trick that was probably bound to attract hungry walkers at some point anyway). Her fellow henchmen don't fare much better.
That didn't happen, but thankfully, Paula eventually stopped talking long enough to get herself simultaneously impaled and eaten alive before episode's end, so I suppose that's a win. It was a giant mess, written and delivered so gratingly and unconvincingly that I wanted her to just go ahead and shoot me, too, to put me out of my misery. Paula spends most of her time monologuing about how she's the baddest of them all, how she doesn't care that her boyfriend beats her (congratulations?), how she decided to kill her boss way back when the apocalypse started because he probably would have gotten her killed first. Like the cartoonishly foul-mouthed guards at the Savior gate last week, Paula and her henchmen throw around junior high favorites like "prick," "bitch," and "balls," because they're totally tough and intimidating, you see. But I don't love how it's employed here, seemingly purely for shock value's sake – and seriously, it's not shocking at all. To be clear, this isn't me clutching my pearls I f-king love some good cussing. In addition to Paula's Acting-with-a-gigantic-A antics, the show has once again decided that in order to illustrate just how menacing the Saviors are, its members must use profanity at every opportunity. This random identity crisis certainly wasn't helped by the fact that Carol spent most of the episode interacting with Paula, the head of the Savior gang that takes the women hostage.
But it seems like such an odd 180 for the woman who single-handedly blew up an entire cannibal camp back in the season five premiere to just now be questioning how far she's come (and didn't this already happen way back when she shot Lizzie?). And her losing sleep over the number of people she's killed obviously points to some remorse about what she's had to do to survive. Perhaps she blames herself for Sam's descent into madness – and ultimate death – as her gift of a cookie on his gravesite last week suggests. It made sense to spend some quality time with Maggie and Carol, since both women have been underused and underserved this season what was confusing, though, was why Carol seems to suddenly be wrestling with her admittedly murky morality, as if her brief foray back into domesticity in Alexandria has made her long for her former boring, beaten-down life. The law of averages (Rick's new favorite phrase) inferred that the show's recent run of excellent installments had to end sometime, but man, this week's bottle episode was such a buzzkill (until its final minutes, anyway more on that in a minute). Viewers likely guessed that the formidable women would eventually evade their captors, but this slog of an episode made what's become a routine trope more painful than usual.
Tonight's installment of "The Walking Dead" picked up just moments before last week's left off, focusing on the capture of Maggie and Carol by a band of Savior stragglers outside the group's compound.
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