Carol Peletier is a character portrayed by actress Melissa McBride in The Walking Dead series. Introduced in season 1, Carol experiences a drastic transformation throughout her storyline. In season 4, the prison was overrun, the survivors scattered, and viewers were given one of the best episodes of the series, "The Grove," written by Scott M. Gimple and directed by Michael Satrazemis.
This episode saw Carol with Tyreese (Chad L. Coleman), Lizzie (Brighton Sharbino), Mika (Kyla Kenedy), and baby Judith (Tinsley & Anniston Price) as they discover an idyllic house located in a pecan grove. The episode begins as a sort of apocolyptic fairy tale but ends as something from a nightmare.
Sisters Mika and Lizzie couldn't have been more different, Mika, a gentle soul was much more mature than her older sister Lizzie, who believed that walkers were still people. She fed them and played with them, soemthing she didn't realize could be very dangerous.
One day, Carol sees Lizzie out playing with a walker she has dubbed Griselda. She is running around "playing" with her new "friend" when Carol appears and kills the walker with a knife. Lizzie is furious, screaming to Carol that she killed her friend. She refuses to listen when Carol tells her the walker wanted to kill her.
Another time, Mika finds Lizzie feeding mice to a walker trapped on the railroad track. Mika tries to reason with her, but Lizzie won't listen. Lizzie tells her, "They just want me to change, to make me be like them." This results in the pair being chased by a pack of walkers, of which Tyreese and Carol kill. Lizzie believes that the walkers just want her to be like them and that humans just come back different.
Carol and Tyreese come upon Lizzie holding a bloody knife, standing over the dead body of her sister. She smiles and tells them "Don't worry, she'll come back! I didn't hurt her brain," and explains she was about to do the same to Judith. She aims a pistol at them, telling them they have to wait until Mika wakes.
Carol and Tyreese then agree that Lizzie can't be around others, so Carol takes her into the woods. She tells her to "Look at the Flowers," a phrase she heard Mika use to calm Lizzie, and proceeds to shoot her. They bury the girls and, the next day, leave the grove and continue their travels down the railroad tracks.
"The Grove" featured an outstanding performance by Melissa McBride is one of the series most gut wrenching episodes. It was a gutsy move by creators to go this dark and it was unsettling to many, which is exactly what they intended.
