There are only a few episodes left of this season of The Walking Dead, and a brief preview for this week’s outing sees Carol take her final vengeance on Alpha by planting the reanimated head of the dead Whisperer leader on a wooden pike in mockery of the fate of her adopted son Henry. This won’t be the end of things, though, and after Beta discovers what happened, it will likely spark a final assault from the skin-masked tribe that will result in a high body count.
The preview also sees Negan speak to Carol, proclaiming “I held up my end, now hold up yours,” referring to whatever it was she offered him in exchange for his help in pursuing her revenge, meaning we’ll likely see what happened when Carol freed him from prison. It’s possible that Carol agreed to speak on Negan’s behalf to put an end to his indefinite sentence of imprisonment and become a proper member of the Alexandria community, but even after so much time it’s questionable if everyone will accept him after all the murder and destruction he previously caused in the settlements’ war with the Saviors, not to mention the isolating tactics he brought to the Whisperers that resulted in the destruction of Hilltop.
The episode title, “Look at the Flowers,” is a callback to controversial season 4 installment “The Grove,” where Carol killed the unstable teenager Lizzie after her growing psychopathic tenancies lead to her murdering her younger sister and Carol deciding that there was no hope for the increasingly disturbed girl, telling Lizzie to look at the flowers as a distraction as she shot her in the back of the head.
How this will play in to the episode is not apparent, but it may be intended as a reference to the questionable things Carol has done in the past in the name of what she believes to be necessary, with freeing Negan to embark on a mission of infiltration and assassination only the latest in a long line of them. Perhaps it’ll even cement her feeling that life with other people is something she is no longer worthy of and lead to another of The Walking Dead’s most popular characters leaving on their own solitary pilgrimage.