I pointed out last week that Carol had largely disappeared into the background recently. Well that came to a crashing halt with this week’s episode which picked up right where last week left off. Rick and his Alexandrea Marauders capturing a member of Negan’s gang who happened to also have Darryl’s motorcycle, and the unknown female voice who radioed in on the conveniently dropped walkie-talkie who claimed to have Carol and Maggie as a prisoner.

**********Spoilers ahead ***********

Carol is adamant that Maggie stay put in the woods. That’s when a guy come’s up behind them and Maggie puts a bullet in his arm, but before she can finish him off. (In Jurassic park raptor attack style) A group of women appear out of nowhere and have Carol at gunpoint and Maggie wishing she had listened to Carol about staying back at the compound in the first place.
A red head woman appears to be the leader of the group and she seems to think she has the upper hand in negotiations with Rick and the rest of the group. They only have one prisoner and he doesn’t seem to be all that important to them. When Maggie and Carols jackets are pulled over their heads and they are lead away from the compound it really becomes apparent that these are not amateurs the Alexandrea group is dealing with. They change radio channels per a pre-arranged code knowing Rick has at least one of the walkie-talkies. They have taken the girls to a “safe house” and are keeping them separated and on the ground, gagged and bound with duct-tape at their hands and feet.

Carol manages to snag a rosary and crucifix from a walker the group killed dragged out of the room. She hides it and then starts to have what appears to be a panic attack. The guy Carol shot is bleeding too much and it’s obvious unless he gets some medical help he’s not going to last long. While Carol appears to be hyperventilating, the captors find the crucifix in Carols pants pocket, and she pretends to need it to calm down. “Oh you are one of those,” says one of the women. They think Carol is afraid, she tells them it doesn’t matter what happens to her, just don’t hurt Maggie and the baby. They wonder why anyone would want to get “knocked up” at this point, and Maggie asks if it’s ever a good point to get knocked up. A woman smokes nearby and they point out it’s not good for the baby. The woman appears to have bigger problems with her lungs than Carol or Maggie do at the time, though the captors seem to believe they will be the ones doing all the killing today.

The “scout crew” is coming they tell the man who is bleeding out quickly. Maggie informs them that he is going to lose his arm, maybe his life. He seems more bent on revenge against Carol, but the women captors realize they need insurance until the situation is fully over. The man beats the redhead, and Maggie and Carol, still bound, try to take him down.
They separate Maggie and Carol and try to interrogate them to find out where their camp is. Carol tries to bring up her own history of husband abuse. She’s playing up the victim role like crazy, if we didn’t know otherwise it would be amusing. But she has lured the women into thinking she is weak. Carol claims that faith got her through the loss of her daughter.
Maggie sees that her interrogator has lost her small finger. She tells Maggie that she stole something, but it seems more related to the fact that she he went looking for her boyfriend when he had been blown up. The captor informs Maggie that she should know they aren’t the good guys, and still wants to know where their base is. But the one thing we have learned about the strangers…women are obviously not treated that well.
The redhead is trying to stall the negotiations with Rick. She isn’t believing they need to make a trade. Carol tries to convince them they were ambushed on the road. Carol brings up Negan, and claims that they though Negan was a maniac and had to be stopped. The smoking woman says something “borg” like that they are all Negan. Carol bums a cigarette from the woman, and the redhead tells her tail of being a secretary. She talks about being forced to stay in D.C. when they evacuated the “important” people first. She wasn’t allowed to join her family. Her boss was weak and she killed him. She stopped counting how many people she killed when she neared “double digits” and stopped feeling bad about it. “your people are killers Carol, that makes you a killer,” she says. Carol tells the redhead that she is going to die if she doesn’t work something out with Rick. She asks if Carol is going to be the one to kill her, and Carol says she hopes not.
The redhead still thinks the trade is a bad idea. She also thinks Rick and the group are right outside because there is less static on the radio. The scouting group is 10 minutes out. Carol tries to convince them that Rick is a man of his word. They leave her alone and she sharpens the end of the crucifix and uses it as a knife to free herself. Maggie is trying to do the same by rubbing her duct-taped hands on a metal shelf. Carol finds her and they decide they have to take out the whole group.

The man they first shot then helped knock out died and turning. They tie him near the door and use him as a trap. He bites lung cancer lady and they quickly beat her to death. When redhead returns and finds both of her people dead on the ground she grabs her gun and heads out after them.

In the hallway they run into bunch of walkers set as a trap to keep them in and others out. Carol and Maggie quickly find themselves trapped between the gun yielding redhead (who we learn is named Paula when one of the other captors calls out to her) and the maze of ready to attack walkers, so when one of the walkers does get loose, Carol reacts and somehow shoots Paula. The other woman who was interrogating Maggie (and who called out to Paula) shows up and Maggie has to take her on in hand to hand combat. When Maggie gets scratched Carol takes her out with a quick shot to the head. Paula is impressed Carols timid nature was all an act asks what she was so afraid of. Carol claims it was the fear of having to kill her (Paula). When wounded Paula attacks again Carol throws her onto one of the walker trap poles and lets the Walkers start eating her.
Then they hear the scouts radio in asking if they are still a go, and Carol imitates Paula saying “meet us on the kill floor.” Carol claims she could have killed the guy in the woods, she had a clear shot and didn’t want to. Maggie tells her not to beat herself up about it. The (Negan based) scouting party walks in and walk right into the holding cell, but Carol and Maggie slam the door and trap them inside, light the floor which is covered with gasoline and incinerate all of them. As they manage to fight past the maze of walkers and escape, Rick and the team arrive to free them. (Paula was right, they had been tracked and Rick and Co. were closer than they were letting on.) They kill the prisoner they had when he claims to be Negan, but I’m not sure anyone believes him anyway. Most importantly Carol has a conscience now. I hate when Carol has a conscience, it gets in the way of her killing.

I can’t really criticize this episode too much.  It was a solid character building episode, we didn’t learn much about Negan and his group, but then again we really aren’t supposed to know much about them yet.    I don’t like Carol becoming kinder, gentler Carol, but it’s precisely because she has been such a bedrock of “bad-ass” that she has faded into the background recently.
There are three episodes left this season. So many questions, and I’m not sure how many actual answers we will get, or more importantly who will survive to next season.