‘The Walking Dead’ season 7, episode 2 reaction: Melissa McBride on Carol’s new dilemma

While the first episode of “The Walking Dead” season 7 was a bloodbath, the second episode was a little more of a peaceful stroll. Okay, we’re not saying that it was all sunshine and bacon, but it may as well have been since we weren’t watching anyone get their head beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.

This was a story mostly about the Kingdom, and how Carol and Morgan fit into this society. They were trying to figure out how they could function within that world, and for Carol, she was struggling once again when it comes to preserving an element of her humanity. There was a time on this show when she was more of a killing machine, but she’s realized now that she isn’t quite in that head space anymore. As a result of that, she’s got some very specific reasons for not wanting to be at the Kingdom, and they’re similar in so many ways to why she doesn’t want to be at Alexandria.

In speaking about this further in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Melissa McBride passed along the following message:

“She just wants to get out of [The Kingdom] and not have to meet new people. She doesn’t want to get involved with another group, she’s not sure where she’s at as far as being able to kill — she’s doesn’t feel like she can. She can’t ask them to save her life if she’s not willing to save theirs. She’s in a hard place.”

We’re not sure Carol’s going to make a complete heel-turn to the point where she reverts back into killing machine again, but we could see her land somewhere in between in the near future where she takes some elements of her rather-violent past and mixes that with her more humanistic side. You have to have both in order to function truly in this world; otherwise, you may as well be one of the monsters.