The Walking Dead Villains: Who’s The Worst, Part 6

Paula

The second member of The Saviors that I’ve singled out for the purposes of this list, Paula was one Negan’s lieutenants, leading a scouting party which watched over his outpost/prison in the abandoned satellite facility.

We are first formally introduced to her in episode 613, “The Same Boat”, after she and her team captured Maggie and Carol as the two stood watch while Rick and the others laid siege to the outpost.

During the episode, we slowly watch as Carol, in a clever bit of espionage, essentially interrogates Paula while she and her team attempt to interrogate Carol, revealing a great deal about Paula, who she is, and who she used to be.

While it seems like some of The Saviors (Including Dwight) do the sort of cruel, violent things they have become notorious for out of fear of Negan, Paula does not seem to be amongst them.

Paula appears to be someone who takes a certain amount of pride in her work for The Saviors, and sees whatever violence they inflict as just part of the job.

She seems like someone who has adjusted very well to the brutal world the zombie apocalypse has created, and doesn’t appear to have much qualms about killing people to serve the interests of The Saviors.

On some level, I might be able to accept this…but, what I can’t accept, is when she explains to Carol her first kill in the apocalypse.

According to Paula, after DC was put into lockdown (To get presumably The President, his cabinet, Congress, The Supreme Court, The Joint Chiefs, and other high-ranking government officials out of dodge), she was left stuck in the city with her boss, whom she clearly had little more than disdain for.

As she continues recounting her story, she explains that she was not allowed to rejoin her husband and their four young daughters, as they were out in the suburbs when the capitol was put on lockdown.

She doesn’t describe what their fate was, implying it was either very bad, or, they disappeared (Fled?) and she was never able to find them again.

At the end of her story, she tells Carol that, angry that she’d never see her family, and, supposedly, believing that her boss would ultimately get her killed…just decided to off him.

I mean, I can understand thinking your boss is an idiot, and I can believe that she thought he’d ultimately get her killed, but…was killing him really necessary?

You see, upon hearing here story, I found myself wondering: “Why not just abandon him? It wouldn’t take much to just wait for him to go to sleep, then leave and find a new base to hide out in. Why make a point of killing him?”

That’s when I started thinking back to her story: Paula didn’t care about him, he meant nothing to her (Frankly, we see this in her “relationship” with Donnie, too).

What did mean something to her: Her family.

She lost (Or, at least, believed she had) her family. She never got the chance to be with them as the world crumbled around them, never got to see her husband, or her children, never found out what happened to them, and never (If necessary) got to die with them.

This clearly left a whole in her that was never filled, and, I believe, in frustration at what the world had become and at the government that deprived her of her family, chose to take out those frustrations out on someone she hated, and justified it by convincing herself he was going to get her killed, and that is what puts her here.

Even in a zombie apocalypse, nothing gives you the right to kill someone who doesn’t really pose you a threat, just because you happen to be angry about something else. What makes us good or evil is our choices. When you choose to kill someone essentially because you can, you’ve crossed a line you can’t uncross…

Next: Can Anyone BE Worse Than Him?