With a show like The Walking Dead, which ran for 11 seasons, some characters are bound to change immensely. We could talk about Daryl, or even Negan, or even Rick, whose character had really bounced all over the place before his eventual “end” in season 9 (before his spinoff).
There’s one character that forever changed and never quite came back from it, and that, my friends, is Carol (Melissa McBride). And it all started in season 4.
The Walking Dead season 4 altered Carol in a way that we hadn't seen before
Had we seen a lot of good character progress with Carol before this? Of course. I think one of the most satisfying deaths that we saw in The Walking Dead was when Carol beat the heck out of her abusive ex-husband’s zombie corpse as a symbol of her breaking free. From season 1 to season 3, she was truly beginning to grow out of her shell.
Yes, the shocking death of Sophia, her daughter, also altered her forever back in season 2. Still, in my mind, it really made her a stronger survivor and also helped her grow a closer relationship with Daryl, her later best friend in the apocalypse.
Toward the beginning of season 4, you could clearly see that they were closer and that Carol was just happier.
Carol was already sort of on one with her teaching the kids at the prison how to use knives. She also killed and burned the bodies of flu victims before getting banished from the prison. All of those choices were understandable at the time, but then, Carol changed for good.
The infamous Lizzie and Mika came along.
For those who don't remember, Lizzie and Mika were children who arrived at the prison as survivors with their father. When their father died, Carol became a surrogate mother to them, especially after the prison fell. The issue is, though, that Lizzie was a pretty troubled child, often playing with the walkers and seeing them as “friends,” even though that clearly was not the case.
The whole ordeal lasted until “Look At The Flowers,” the iconic episode where Carol is forced to kill Lizzie after the older sister killed her younger sister. She was stuck in this delusion that walkers were just sick people and that Mika would come back as the same person. With Carol in charge of keeping baby Judith alive at the time, she had no choice but to kill Lizzie to keep the baby safe.
It was a masterclass in acting from Melissa McBride, but from this moment, Carol was never the same.
Carol became colder
Carol, from then on out, was pretty much the opposite of who she once was. She became a lot more strategic in using her “kindness” to trick people and get what she wanted, like in Alexandria, where she played along with everything going on. She became a lot more closed off to children, knowing that this world was cruel and she couldn’t really take on that much of an emotional role again. Honestly, she became a badass.
Taking down Terminus from the outside is something Carol never would have done beforehand. But she saw that no one could be trusted — even children. If she had to do what was supposedly wrong to save the ones she loved, she would do it.
If we’re being honest, she did try to become a mother again with Henry, but he was tragically killed too. Daryl had even stopped her from seeing Henry’s decapitated head, thanks to a famous villain, Alpha), but her reaction was almost muted in a way. Yes, she was heartbroken, but deep down, she knew something like this would happen again.
Arguably, this is what kept her alive all the way until the final season and why her character is so different from the ones in the comics. She’s still here to this day in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, and I don’t really see her dying even when the final season rolls around in 2027. Her kind nature morphing into that of a survivor is truly what made her such a complex and interesting character.
A part of me does miss who Carol was before Lizzie and Mika, mainly her more caring exterior. I do think that we’ve gotten glimpses of it in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. She still has the good side that she shows to the ones she loves. But the Carol of the past is long gone. And for now, all we can do is wait and see how her story will end at the finale of Daryl Dixon.
All 11 seasons of The Walking Dead (featuring Carol’s story) are available to watch on Netflix.
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