The Walking Dead celebrates Carol this Sunday
By Sonya Iryna
This Sunday The Walking Dead will be celebrating Carol’s amazing journey with a marathon of the best Carol episodes.
There’s probably no one on The Walking Dead that has made more of a transformation than Carol Peletier. When fans first meet Carol she is an abused housewife trying to keep her daughter safe from her husband, Ed Peletier. Carol is much more worried about Ed than the dead, with good reason.
But after Ed is killed by a walker Carol continues doing what she knows. She takes care of Sophia. And she does the work that needs to be done quietly and in the background. Even though Ed is no longer a problem she can’t seem to shake her meekness or dependence on the others.
Then Sophia goes missing after the herd attack on the highway and Carol is once again thrown into a major crisis. After losing everything she could have just decided to accept her fate and she could have committed suicide or just waited to die. But she didn’t. She transformed herself into a leader and a warrior. And she did it over and over again as the series went on.
That’s why it will be such a joy to watch The Walking Dead marathon on AMC this week featuring some of Carol’s best episodes. Walking back through Carol’s journey from victim to leader will be a great reminder of how much this beloved character has changed over the course of 8 seasons.
Featured Episodes
The episodes that were chosen for the marathon are a little surprising. There are the classic Carol episodes like “The Grove” and “Cherokee Rose”. But some of the other episodes that represented some of the biggest changes and developments in Carol’s character were left off the list. The episodes that will appear in the marathon are:
“Cherokee Rose”
“ 30 Days Without An Accident”
“Indifference”
“The Grove”
“No Sanctuary”
“Forget”
“East”
“Last Day On Earth”
“The Well”
“New Best Friends”
It’s surprising that “The Same Boat” didn’t make the cut because it was one of Carol’s finest episodes. In that episode Maggie and Carol are captured by Saviors and held at the slaughterhouse outpost. Carol uses her cunning to outsmart the Saviors but she ends up seeing one of them, Paula, as a mirror image of herself. But with so many amazing Carol episodes to choose from I guess some of them just had ot be left out.
“The Grove”
Rewatching “The Grove” is always a little bittersweet. Even after all the shocking and brutal deaths that have happened on the show in the last few seasons like Glenn and Abe, Sasha, and Carl the deaths of Lizzie and Mike are still horrifying. But there is no denying that Melissa McBride’s nuanced performance as Carol having to face the reality that Lizzie was not fit to live in that world and having to kill her is one of the finest in the history of the show.
In fact, when site creator Adam Carlson and I sat down to discuss the best episodes of the show with Wall St. Journal author Paul Vigna “The Grove” was one of the few episodes that we all agreed was one of the finest episodes in the history of the show. You can read more about what we all thought of “The Grove” in Vigna’s book “Guts: The Anatomy Of The Walking Dead”.
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AMC is airing several marathons of The Walking Dead dedicated to different characters throughout the next few weeks until Fear The Walking Dead returns in August. The marathon of Carol’s best episodes airs Sunday July 1st from 11 AM until 10 PM. Will you be watching? Let us know in the comments or tweet us @undeadwalkingfs and @sonyairyna.