The Walking Dead: The Same Boat (6x13)

The body count keeps getting bigger and bigger. A lot of people die in this episode, but fortunately, Carol and Maggie are not among them. Let's jump in.

Cons:

I've really admired this back half of the season for its pacing, and this was the first time that I felt a bit of a drag. Character episodes that focus on just a few key players can be tricky. Sometimes, this show does an excellent job. Other times, like tonight, there are some moments that drag. It wasn't a big issue overall, but I did get a little distracted during some of the speechifying.

Paula, our main guest character for the week, was for the most part very interesting. But she also exemplifies what I was just talking about with the speechifying. This is hard to describe, because I don't think she did a bad job by any means... it's just that something about her performance felt very performance-like. I almost felt like I was being asked to be impressed by her. In another key example of a minimal, character-driven episode, we had Morgan and Eastman, a guy who we only ever saw for one episode back in "Here's Not Here." But he blended in, and felt like part of the world from the very beginning. With Paula, I sort of felt like she was there to put on a show, and then take a bow and peace out. Am I making sense? Gosh, I feel a little mean, because the acting really was very nicely done...

Pros:

Just to give some context, pretty much this whole episode took place in one of Negan's group's hideouts, as Paula and her crew hold Maggie and Carol hostage. They are buying time for reinforcements, and wondering whether they should trade the two women for the guy that Rick, Daryl, and the others have hostage. Maggie and Carol manage to break out and kill everybody before their rescuers arrive, and they fall gratefully into the arms of their people when they arrive, shaken by the violence they've just perpetrated.

The parallels between Carol and Maggie and their captors is what really provided focus to this episode. Neither side can claim to be the "good guys," and both groups can totally justify their actions as being self-defense, or at the very least retaliatory. These people weren't nearly as bad as some of the others we've run up against... and in fact they look downright benevolent when you compare their kidnapping of two women to the brutal nighttime slaughter that Rick and the others just participated in last episode.

First, you've got Carol and Paula. Both used to be timid and weak underlings, and both have lost their children. Since then, they've had to toughen up to survive, and it has changed them both into people they don't recognize. What's so interesting about Carol, though, is that after this change to the more ferocious version of herself, she's tried to change back again, somewhat, since coming to Alexandria. She doesn't want to lean in to the violence. She doesn't want to let that become her full self. Paula, on the other hand, seems to have totally succumbed to the violence and the "do whatever it takes" philosophy that Carol is trying to avoid. Throughout the whole episode, Carol plays at being a meek and timid coward, trying to lower everybody else's expectations of her. It works so well because Carol was basically playing herself, back before the conditions of this world hardened her. And when she turns on the bad-ass mode to get her and Maggie to safety, Paula sees her own violence reflected back at her, and it's her own undoing.

Maggie's character was paralleled in another one of the captors, a woman named Michelle who had gotten pregnant but had lost her child. The two of them even had a few moments of quiet camaraderie, if you can call it that. Michelle stops Molly, another captor, from smoking a cigarette, out of concern for Maggie's child, and confides in her about her own past. Later, when it comes to blows, Michelle takes a swipe at Maggie's stomach, and all bets are off.

I found it interesting that of the two captives, Maggie was the much more violent and almost blood-thirsty of the two. Her impending motherhood has brought her to a place of "survival at all costs," rather than a place of kindness and compassion towards other living things. Carol, in making her escape, suggested that they just run, but Maggie insisted that they finish this, killing all the remaining people inside.

The final scenes were very intense, with a mounting sense of violence and tension. I never really felt afraid that Maggie and Carol were going to die in this episode, and maybe you could count that as a flaw... but really that's not what the episode was about. As we watch Michelle, Molly, and Paula all come to violent ends, as we watch Maggie and Carol burn the two reinforcements to death by luring them into a trap, we're left not with fear for their lives, but for their souls, as cheesy as that sounds.

I loved that this episode was dominated almost entirely by ladies - only one of Negan's people was a man, and he spent the whole episode out of action because Carol had shot him in the arm before they got captured. In the end, though, we get our three guys coming to Maggie and Carol's rescue: Rick, Daryl, and Glenn. As Glenn takes Maggie into his arms, Daryl goes straight for Carol, which of course made my shipper heart soar. Daryl puts his hand under Carol's chin and asks her all gently if she's alright. When she says no, Daryl pulls her into a big hug. Awww! Whether you want these two to fall in love or not, it's clear that their bond is a deep one.

Another interesting part of this episode is the continued absence of Negan. Twice in this episode, somebody lets slip that they are Negan, but it seems to be more a term for their collective. When Rick hears his captive say that he is Negan, Rick executes him without further question. But extra-diegetic-wise, we know that Jeffrey Dean Morgan has been cast as the character of Negan, so... something more is going on here. I'm intrigued by the idea that Negan is a name used by the collective. All of this mounting tension is making the eventual appearance of Jeffrey Dean Morgan all the more eagerly anticipated.

This episode and the last one both serve the important function of bringing the focus back to the horror of killing living people. Over the years, Rick and the rest of the crew have sort of become desensitized to the reality of murder. Rick himself seems particularly hardened to it, as he kills the guy who calls himself "Negan" pretty much without blinking. But after a few months settled in to Alexandria, after the hope that a happy future might actually be possible, the necessity of these killings comes across all the more brutal. And "necessity" is an interesting word here too. It's not really self-defense, and it's not really retaliation: not a single Alexandrian has died at the hands of the Saviors. And the body count in the other direction keeps growing and growing.

All I can say is, with all this ruthless killing from our heroes, the retribution is probably going to be a hard pill to swallow. As long as Carol and Daryl survive, I'll be okay... but I'm starting to get more and more scared that one of them might be getting the axe.

8/10