This is a meta I wrote in response to THIS gifset way back in season 4. I was going back through my old posts and I realize that I shouldn’t have hijacked it like I did. And I do want to keep the meta, so here it is again, in all its old and outdated glory.
No, Rick. Tyreese punched you one time. You damn near killed Tyreese by beating him to death over nothing. Let’s get this straight.
And how come Hershel needs to keep reassuring you, Rick, that you can come back, you can come back, even if you lost Carl and Judith and the Prison “even then” you could come back from the things you’ve done…but you now think that Carol…of all the people that you have known in this world…can’t come back? And you, Rick, have made it not metaphorically but literally true?
Here’s the thing you may not be able to come back from, Rick: Deciding that another person cannot come back from what they have done.
The alternative is something you may not have considered, Rick. What if when she does come back, your choices - not her choices - made her into the monster you believed her to be? Because you made her lose her children and the prison. You separated her from the counselor who could reassure her that she could come back - even from this. You condemned her to almost certain rape, starvation, despair and death.
After she forced you through a stare-down to offer sanctuary to two needy souls. After you watched her relieve the suffering of a man in need. After you picked tomatoes with her as if she was still your sister. After you informed her of her punishment by locking her out of the car and then were cruel in ways that satisfied your emotional needs to punish as you believed you should have been punished.
Carol may have been hard, but she was not cruel. She may have been calculated, but she was not cold. Rick, you’ve forgotten what it actually took to be a officer of the law. Sometimes it takes a moment of dispassion in order to enact the greatest compassion. Carol understood that for the first time in her role as leader. You don’t even realize that this is what you have lost. That is an essential part of having a moral compass. It’s part of why yours is wildly dysfunctional.
These two commentaries originated in a post I reblogged, but I couldn't trace its history to be able to find the whole conversation, so I'm recording it so I don't lose it!
brusselsprite
I love Michonne, but I do not get the free pass for killing that dude who she easily could have knocked unconscious, nor do I get the forgiveness for the backpack guy. According to my moral compass, I choose Carol’s basically-mercy-killings of two people who were drowning in their own blood over that shit any day.
ikkleosu
Let me also add this: I love Hershel, and I love that his instincts were to try and save people BUT his instincts (as were shown back in the barn on the farm days) are also to be in denial about the true horror of things. In the prison his actions - or lack thereof - caused the unnecessary deaths of at least 2 people.
Due to his reluctance to lock people in, and put them down before they turned led to the shooting and walker feeding deaths.
Those scenes were a direct parallel to Carol’s actions. She killed 2 people before they turned to prevent the spread of the infection, and their potential actions once they became walkers. Hershel wouldn’t put down people to prevent them becoming walkers, and 2 people were killed.
In the end, it shows the futility of the whole thing - act or don’t act, the results will be the same. This also meant that neither option was more right or wrong than the other.
Hershel didn’t manage to save anyone by his own methods. Only because the team returned with medication did Sasha, Glenn and the others live. Everyone else who got sick before them died, including Henry and Caleb who Hershel tried so hard to save.
There was no happy ending in this story, and both Carol and Hershel would have to live with double guessing themselves over if they had done something differently those people would have lived. Chance are, they wouldn’t have.
[My response to THIS THREAD. I decided to keep it as an independent piece because I was the last one to comment.]
[Just as a note: Rick did save Carol twice. Once in the prison yard when she was clearing the water intake and once in the house when her reflexes seemed to fail.]
Carol: "I lost my daughter. I didn't lose my mind."
Rick: "I don't want you here." (To Tyreese's group, while waving a gun at an hallucination!Lori)
The problem partly lies in fully placing trust for either decision-making in the investigation or the banishment in a person who is unstable. Yes, he made a judgment, but is he in a place to be trusted completely in his reasoning? I think there is some support for saying probably not - primary for me is his inability to recognize the contradictions in what he's doing while he's doing it or before. (We haven't yet seen what Rick will take from his own speech to th'guv'na. For me, how he reconciles that with his interaction with Carol will say a lot about his stability.) He might second guess himself after, but it seems to me that a fully stable Rick would have done this thinking before he took the action.
In terms of the investigation, are we sure that his skills of perception and deduction were at full potential? Now, I personally don't subscribe to an alternate killer theory and never have, but I do think it was strange that Rick only asked two questions and no more to reach his conclusion. I also think that Carol's responses in "Indifference" were ambiguous at best. Nothing is "clear" about how she means anything. We see Rick's responses to her, so we get a sense of what Rick thought and how he interpreted them - his look at her in the "have you lost children" moment, for example. But honestly? As a viewer I didn't think it was weird at all. I thought, "Carol is answering a question about the flu. None of her children (Lizzie and Mika) or Rick's children (Carl and Judith) had died from the flu." I thought Rick was the weird one for staring at her in such an odd way. I seriously had to think about it for a while, because I thought she answered factually. Sophia didn't die from the flu, so she hadn't been lost to the disease that had been their top priority in the previous statements.
As to the watch, I laughed at the line because it struck me as the crowning jewel in her statement to him about needing to step back up. Like, "You've lost perspective, Rick. Back when it wasn't a democracy you would be the one who realized that we've waited too long already and we'll be leaving the prison unprotected." Recall that they had basically left Maggie alone to man the post as the only one who could freely move between the quarantine groups. (Carl had been out with Hershel, but wasn't supposed to be, recall.) They were needed. And that was certainly proven true in the next episode "Internment" when the prison is nearly overrun from within the sick ward and from without. When she made the statement about the watch I thought it was a big "I'm done with you, Rick. You aren't thinking clearly at all. Might as well be waiting for your shiny watch." I was actually a little worried for her safety in being that much "fuck you" to a guy whose hand had been hovering over his gun the whole episode.
In both these examples, I know the producers have talked about them in a particular way after the fact - when the audience was already responding negatively to what had happened in the episodes. When I heard Gale Anne Hurd say on Talking Dead that the watch line proved Carol's inability to feel empathy I laughed out loud again. Because if that was what it was supposed to prove...well, it failed on me. Obviously, it didn't work that way for many others. It has felt quite a lot like a PR attempt to convince me to believe something that I didn't actually see onscreen when I read their interviews. Why? Not because I want Carol to be innocent. (Remember, I think she is the killer.) But because I just don't think that they succeeded in doing on screen what they said they did. There's been a lot of talk about how "this isn't the Carol we know" or "Carol is so changed I don't want to know her."
I think there's equally as much support for saying, "Unfortunately, this is still the Rick we knew before he supposedly took time away to collect himself. Refusing to engage in violence of decision-making has not done for him what we hoped it would do. He's not as recovered as they hoped and we hoped he would be."
Rick Banishes His Projected Mr. Hyde to Try to Allow His Dr. Jekyll to Come Back
Rick is likely trying to banish his Mr. Hyde with Carol. He may mistakenly think that to make the decision she would have to be without compassion - because he was acting without compassion when he made decisions like that. He can't quite comprehend a human being who can do both - make hard decisions AND live with the consequences. Because he can only believe one OR the other, he can't tolerate the presences of BOTH in one being. He has to excise her because it doesn't fit with his system. He mistakenly thinks that if he gets rid of her, he gets rid of the part of himself that he's still trying to banish when he tried to leave off his gun belt and go farming. She tried to tell him this wasn't possible. He should have realized it himself when he sacrificed the piglets. But he just cannot give it up. And so he sacrifices a human being to it this time. Wanna bet he sacrifices his own child to it before he finally understands? Watch out, Carl. You might be next.
