A thread about Carol, Caryl and season 10:
The two main points:
1. The character who took over from Rick as lead was Carol (despite Mel being 2nd billing)
2. A big portion of s10 is told through Carol’s eyes and she’s an unreliable narrator, so we can’t take it all as presented.

Important to note: I obviously don’t write for the show and this is merely the interpretation I think makes the most sense. If you’re a d*nnie shipper and you stumble upon this, I think it’s best if you move along because you won’t like it and I’m not here for dramatic outrage.

So, let’s get to it!
1. The character who took over from Rick as the lead of the show (at least this season) was definitely Carol. Rick said it himself: “If anyone gives me hope for how things can turn out, it’s you”.

Their personal struggles are the focal point and their rivalry with the villain is the driving force of their respective season(s). The plot shapes itself around their dynamic with the antagonist and the other characters adjust themselves to propel the story.

There are many parallels between Rick and Carol, and one worth noting is the overlap of their emotional breakdowns and the way they started losing grip of reality – Rick in the prison after Lori’s death & Carol this season following an overwhelming accumulation of loss and grief.

They both start hallucinating dead people as their subconscious plays with their sense of guilt and shame, creating situations designed to taunt them – they force themselves to repent for what they perceive as their failures/sins.

Carol hallucinates the kids in the cover of that book in s10ep3 to remind her of her hand in their deaths and/or of how she feels responsible for them one way or another. Alpha chases her through the woods and echoes hurtful things that other characters have said (like Ed's "you

stupid cooze”), bringing up traumatic memories to torture her, therefore playing with her guilt and low self-esteem. Rick sees a pregnant Lori several times, acting as a constant reminder of his failure to protect her and of his insecurity in the role of leader of the group.

There’s a scene in season 3 that overlaps Rick’s hallucination with Hershel reading Psalm 91:8 – “Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold, and see the reward of the wicked” –, and I think it applies very well to both Rick’s situation at the time and Carol’s journey at the moment,

especially considering her relationship with religion and faith. Rick also hears the phone ringing in the prison and talks to characters we knew (Amy, Jim, Jacqui and Lori), just like “Alpha’s” lines evoke characters who are long gone (Ed, Lizzie, Mika etc).

There are also the hallucinations that serve as their way of gathering their strength to live. When Rick is about to die in season 9, he sees several dead characters (Sasha, Hershel and Shane) and through those conversations he understands that he still has a role in the world

of the living. Part of Carol’s hallucination of Alpha is also about realizing that even though she’s in despair and hitting rock bottom, she doesn’t want to die, as she claims. She tells herself what there is to live for, which in this case is mostly Daryl and their relationship.

These scenes are extremely emotional and, in my opinion, a direct parallel between the two characters.
This correlates to my second point, which is that

A big portion of this season is told through Carol’s eyes and she’s an unreliable narrator, meaning we can’t take everything we see and hear at face value, but in the context of her deteriorating mental state and resulting interpretation biases.

From the moment she steps out of the boat, we start seeing things from her perspective, which explains some shots like the infamous shot of the ASL book in Daryl’s back pocket. This is the catalyst that leads her to jumping to some conclusions later on, but we’ll get to that.

From that point onward, the episode focuses on her and her dynamics with other characters, such as Daryl, Ezekiel and even Connie, to a lesser extent. The focal point is how she reacts to them and how they react to her, again solidifying her role as the lead.

The story is stagnated until she arrives and retakes her position in the game.

Episode 3 is a textbook example of an unreliable narrator: we go inside her mind more than once and sometimes we see things that only happened inside her head without knowing the difference, like her conversation with Daryl about his father.

She has some hallucinations that we can recognize as such – mostly the kids in the cover of that book, as previously discussed. Then we have the dream, which is a goldmine of subtext I could spend an entire day talking about without unpacking everything.

She dreams of a domestic scenario with Daryl, and by her expression before the sequence begins, we can infer she’s happy and at peace. The deleted scene with Michonne confirms it, when she admits she doesn’t want to sleep because she’s having good dreams.

If she’s dreaming of a life pre, during or post-apocalypse isn’t clear but it doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that she dreams of being married to Daryl – not Ezekiel, not Ed, not Tobin, none of the men she was at one point or another romantically/sexually attached to.

Dreams have a way of revealing your deepest fears and desires, and she’s definitely not afraid of Daryl, so I’ll just leave it there and let you make of that what you will.

She doesn’t allow herself to enjoy it though, because she doesn’t think she deserves happiness after everything she’s done, so her subconscious quickly brings up Henry to remind her of what she lost, and she wakes up with tears running down her face.

You can see she looks over her shoulder, and I’ll be damned if she wasn’t checking to see if Daryl was there. She comes down and during her conversation with Michonne we’re once again confronted with the uncertainty of what is real and what she’s imagining.

Michonne doesn’t believe she saw the whisperers, Carol swears she did, and we’re unsure. She saw them, but were they really there? It’s later shown that there was, in fact, at least one whisperer, but that reveal only occurs at the very end of the episode. That’s not incidental.

Sleep deprivation and a convoluted emotional state make her the perfect unreliable narrator and we’re shown that time and time again.
In episode 6 (Bonds), her conversation with Daryl – not covering the adorable playfulness because I would never finish this – is very interesting.

Carol is all over the place this season and this scene illustrates that clearly. She brings up Connie and, on a surface level, it seems like she’s trying to set her up with Daryl. She alludes to some sort of “evidence” in which she bases the assumption that Daryl likes her

like that by simply saying “I see things.” Considering she’s in a state resulting from extreme sleep deprivation and disinhibition of her self-loathing tendencies, it’s safe to assume that we can take that literally, because why should we trust her clouded judgement when

it’s being clearly questioned in canon at every given chance? If the viewer can’t recognize her deteriorating mental state, then that’s on them and not on the show. Carol is projecting her own insecurities and connecting dots that she planted herself.

She’s unsure of where she stands with Daryl, she doesn’t know the nature of his feelings towards her and she resorts to the oldest and simplest play in the book, used by every awkward teenager in love. She dances around the subject and tries to understand if he likes her

/like that/ by asking if he likes another girl. It also stems from the fact that, like Angela said, she’s trying to take care of him because she thinks she’ll die soon. She loves him so much and so selflessly that she’s doing what she thinks will assure his future happiness.

Talk about selfless unconditional love. But deep down she doesn’t want him to pursue a romantic connection with Connie, otherwise she would have taken to action instead of just words. It’s a manifestation of fear and selflessness at the same time, nothing more.

And Daryl assures her “It’s not like that. Not at all.” She doesn’t get it, though. She’s in a downward spiral because she feels that her relationship with Daryl is crumbling at her feet, yet she can’t do anything about it because she’ll only make it worse.

She feels no support from anyone but him (and later on Kelly and Lydia, but that’s not where we’re at right now), and she’s losing him too. It’s chaos in her mind and that’s what we see, a desperate frenzy, not OOC behaviour like some claim.

The viewer must keep in mind that Carol suffered years of abuse in many forms, and it doesn’t go away like that. Its toll can be felt still, and her sense of self-worth is extremely fragile, always a moment away from shattering.

Her manifesting her fears and insecurities through bursts of incoherent dialogue and/or actions is expected and understandable. She’s hurting, and I don’t know how you can look at someone who makes you feel their pain (because Melissa is THAT good) and hate them for it.

There is a lack of empathy there that scares me beyond measure.

But back to the show, I also wanted to cover a detail I noticed while going through some scenes to write this. We’re all aware of the watch that doesn’t have the minute or second hands in Carol’s dream.

But what I noticed is that when they’re walking around the school in episode 3, we can see the same clock on the wall. In episode 4, when she’s talking to Daryl on the staircase, she says “It’s like time never moves.” She was talking about Negan, yes, but not only imo.

All these mentions of time being stuck, plus physically being stuck in that cave (especially considering she’s claustrophobic) point to the way Carol feels overwhelmed in every aspect. She’s frozen, stuck, and doesn’t know how to move forward.

Maybe I’m overanalyzing this, I have a tendency to do that, but I think it makes sense.

To sum it up, Carol is a lead, caryl is coming, we stay winning!!

I’ll end this here because it’s already way too long and I don’t want to take up more of your time! I hope you enjoyed reading this (if not, I’m very sorry ), here’s a cookie for your time