This one’s all about Carol, we finally get to see what happened to her after Rick ejected her from the prison. This episode bounces back and forth between different times when she was on her own and when she is with Daryl looking for Beth. This proves that she is a strong woman and perfectly capable of taking care of herself.
She and Daryl follow the car with the white cross into the city. They hold up for a night at a place that is familiar to Carol, a temporary housing unit that she had once stayed at when she was with her husband, the one that beat her. While there they discover some walkers that can’t get at them. Carol wants to take care of them, but Daryl convinces her to leave them be. When she wakes up in the morning she finds that he has taken care of them and is burning the bodies. With everything that has happened and the way he has reacted around Carol, being brought to tears when he seen her again after escaping Terminus, following her out of the church during the feast to watch over her, and now with allowing her to get some much needed rest by taking care of these walkers himself it is obvious that he is very much in love with her. It’s a wonder that she doesn’t know.
They set out on the quest to find clues to where the car with the white cross went, they search for a place high up so that they can get a good look around the city. As they scurry through the ruins from building to building trying to stay in the shadows Daryl uses fire to distract the walkers. They make their way into an office building through a parking garage and once in one of the offices they stand in front of the window looking for signs that might point them in the right direction and they take a moment to have a brief philosophical conversation about how the world got like this, and Daryl uses the F word to describe his feelings on the matter. Of course AMC cuts it and if you’re not attentive you’ll miss it. His exact words are, “The reason I said we get to start over is cause we gotta, f*** the way it was”. Then he sees it, a wrecked van teetering over the railing of a bridge that has those same white crosses on its windows, a clue, the only clue that they have.
On their way out of the building they meet Noah, the one that Beth helped escape from the hospital. He doesn’t want to hurt them, he only wants their weapons. As he is running away Carol aims her pistol at him and shoots, Daryl knocks it away to prevent her killing him. They take pursuit but get blocked by a door that Noah locks behind him. They make their way out of the building with Carol bitching the whole way about being in the middle of the city with only three bullets and that she was just going to shoot him in the leg. Daryl assures her that they can find more weapons and counters with the fact that he was just a damn kid. In the middle of the argument, as Daryl jimmies a door open, a book falls out of one of the backpacks, a book that Carol put there, as he picks it up he reads the title. It says, “Treating Survivors of Childhood abuse”.
When they finally make it to the van Daryl carefully climbs inside, Carol follows. He finds information that leads them to believe that the van comes from Grady Memorial hospital, but getting off the bridge the way that they came is a bust because they are over run by walkers. They have no choice but to crawl back into the van and use their weight to push it over the side. When the van hits the bottom, like a cat, it lands on all fours and neither one is killed or even seriously injured, go figure. On the bright side, at least we don’t lose two good characters from the show. Also, the really cool thing about this scene is that right after it hits the bottom several walkers hit the top of the van, presumably from walking off the side of the bridge after the van, which confirms that, yes, walkers are really dumb.
They continue on their quest to find Beth, only now they believe that they need to find Grady Memorial hospital. They stop in an ally for a rest and aside from a few bumps and bruises they seem to be Okay. Although, Carol is not looking well and seems to be in a great deal of pain. Daryl offers her a drink and she can only lift her left arm so he wants to see her injury. She lifts the right edge of her shirt and exposes a serious collar bruise that reaches all the way down her chest that suspiciously follows the same track as a passenger seat belt. She claims that she’s had worse and besides they’re only three blocks away from the hospital.
They find another building that is very near the hospital and once inside again stand at a window and have a philosophical conversation. This time it’s about how different they are compared to when they first met and this time Daryl refrains from the cursing. Before they can finish their conversation they hear a noise and go to investigate. They find a walker nailed to a wall by a crossbow arrow and it turns out to be one from the crossbow that was stolen from Daryl, by Noah. He uses a machete that he found to take care of the walker and then retrieves the arrow. Then follow the sound of gunfire from down the hall, it is Noah, and he’s fighting off a walker and pushes it toward Carol. She has a knife in her right hand but can’t lift it high enough to stab it in the head because of her injury. Daryl saves her and then proceeds down the hall in the direction that Noah went. He finds Noah pushing an empty book shelf up against a door to block yet another walker, Daryl attacks him. During the scuffle the book shelf falls on top of Noah and Daryl wants to leave him there for walker fodder, Carol insists that they help, and Daryl shoots an arrow through the head of the walker.
After Noah is saved he thanks them, but insists that they leave because the people from the hospital would have heard the shots and will be coming and he is not going back there. And this is where they find out that Beth ‘is’ there and he tells them that she helped him escape. As they are leaving, but before they can get out the door, Noah falls and Daryl goes to help him leaving Carol in the lead. Once out the door and in the street she gets run down by one of the hospital cars that break out a stretcher to take her away and Noah holds Daryl back telling him that the hospital people can help her and if he goes out there he will have to kill them and then they won’t be able to help her. Noah tells him that they can get her back and save Beth but it’s going to take a lot because they have guns and people, and then Daryl looks at him and says, “So do we’, Because he knows just the people that are armed and would be willing to help rescue them.
As was stated in the first paragraph this is the episode that shows us what happened to Carol after Rick ejected her from the prison. We get to see flashbacks of the time immediately after her ejection, how she survived and what she did. How she almost had a break down but refused to quite. How she found a place to stay that was close to the prison, seen the smoke coming from that area and investigated to find it destroyed and all of her friends gone. We also see a scene of her and Tyreese burying the girls after she was forced to kill Lizzy to insure that she wouldn’t harm Judith. And then further back we see a scene of her actually burning the bodies of the two people that she killed at the prison in an attempt to prevent the spread of illness. The last scene that is shown of Carol by herself is the time right after she left Terminus when she caused all the chaos to allow all of her friends to get away, when Tyreese and Judith were waiting for her at the shed. All these flashbacks just prove one thing, that she is tough as nails, able to survive, and will stop at nothing to help the ones that she loves and considers family.
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