From taking down Terminus to taking out the Wolves, a newly released compilation collects the best badass moments of Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride) across ten seasons of The Walking Dead. After suffering the loss of her daughter Sophia (Madison Lintz), Carol evolved from an unassuming homemaker into a bow-slinging survivor and queen of the Kingdom. In season 10, which continues in 2021 with six new episodes pairing Carol with Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), she finds her way forward after getting revenge on Whisperer leader Alpha (Samantha Morton) and eliminating the threat of her walker horde to end the Whisperer War.
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“It’s been absolutely amazing. This might be one of my favorite seasons,” McBride told the AMC Blog about her character surviving all ten seasons of The Walking Dead. “It’s also different… it’s really wonderful to have new blood on the show and to be inspired by all of the new people and personalities. It’s really special and very surreal when I think about how I wasn’t even sure if there would be a season 2 and now Carol is here in season 10… It really blows my mind. I sit in gratitude all the time.”
Like her comic book counterpart, who died during the group’s occupation of a Georgia prison, Carol nearly met her end by a walker’s bite in season 3 of The Walking Dead.
“There was some investigation going on about killing Carol. It got pretty far down the line and I was pretty hardcore against that,” Scott Gimple, a writer and supervising producer on Walking Dead before becoming its showrunner in season 4, recently told Looper. “Because I saw her journey of going from somebody under her ex-husband’s thumb to being a warrior. It just looked like the most amazing journey for our character to have and having worked with Melissa McBride up to that point, it was like, ‘Oh, well, she could do that. She can do anything.’”
At the urging of McBride’s co-star Sarah Wayne Callies — who played Lori Grimes, Carol’s friend and the estranged wife of Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) — then-showrunner Glen Mazzara decided against fulfilling plans to kill Carol. In the season 3 episode “Killer Within,” Carol survives a walker invasion of the prison when a zombie-bitten T-Dog (IronE Singleton) leads her to safety.
McBride returns in the extended season 10 of The Walking Dead and the upcoming eleventh and final season spanning 24 episodes between 2021 and 2022. Carol and Daryl will then hit the road in an untitled spinoff created by Gimple and showrunner Angela Kang due out in 2023.
The Walking Dead returns with new episodes on February 28, 2021, on AMC. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD.