Carol Peletier is an icon in The Walking Dead world. She is among the list of characters who experienced drastic transformation during her storyline. She is also a character who outlived her comic story, and the main series to continue in a spinoff series.
Played by The Mist actress Melissa McBride, Carol began her journey as an abused wife and mother who was scared of her shadow. When her husband Ed (Adam Minarovich) was attacked and killed by walkers, she took years of frustration out on his corpse with a pick ax. This was the beginning of a new life for her.
In season 2, Carol suffered a tragic blow with the death of her daughter Sophia (Madison Lintz). She bottled up her emotions and hardened herself, becoming a woman that tackled difficult situations head on and made the tough choices no one else had the courage to.
These decisions included many deaths. The Walking Dead’s social media accounts recently featured a series of images with Carol’s comment from The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, “I’ve killed a lot of people. I remember all of them,” along with images of those she killed. This post included four, but Carol’s body count is MUCH higher.
The first image was that of Karen (Melissa Ponzio) and David (Brandon Carroll), members of the group at the prison in season 4. During the second episode of the season “Infected,” the pair’s burned bodies are discovered by Tyreese (Chad L. Coleman), who was in a relationship with Karen. It was later revealed that Carol killed them to contain the spread of a flu that broke out in the prison. This led Rick (Andrew Lincoln) to force her to leave the prison. There have been interesting fan theories that Carol didn’t do the killing, but Lizzie (Brighton Sharbino) did, and Carol burned the bodies as a cover-up.
Carol later killed Lizzie in “The Grove,” the episode that gave us the line “Look at the flowers.” Lizzie had many mental health issues, which led to her killing her younger sister but not damaging her brain so she would reanimate. Carol and Tyreese stopped her before she could do the same to Rick’s baby daughter, Judith.
Carol then killed a large number of people when she rescued Rick and the others from Terminus. Carol could have held a grudge but instead used her skills for the greater good and saved the group.
Another death featured in the social media post was that of power hungry Deputy Governor of the Commonwealth, Lance Hornsby (Josh Hamilton). He was snake from the get and Carol knew it. In the end she shot an arrow through his neck. He did reanimate and return to the gates of the CW where Governor Pamela Milton (Laila Robins) tried to commit suicide by allowing his walker to bite her, but he was shot in the head by Maggie (Lauren Cohan).
The final image of the post was that of Marion Genet (Anne Charrier) in the Daryl Dixon series. This was a gruesome death, as Carol shot an Amper Serum dart into Genet’s back. Unable to reach it, Genet’s eyes and veins turned black, and her head swelled, filling with blood before it exploded. This was the effect of the serum on a live person, as it was engineered to be used on the undead.
In the season 2 finale of Daryl Dixon, Carol suffered PTSD from the death of Sophia, a death she never took the time to mourn. This series did a fantastic job of taking viewers through her trauma and resolution during hallucinations brought on by guano exposure.
Carol will return in season 3 of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon on AMC and AMC+ in 2025.
