How Carol has become the show’s best character 

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Carol in the Walking Dead has changed dramatically from the start of the series (Picture: AMC)

It’s no secret that Carol absolutely dominated the first episode of The Walking Dead season five. We’ve got Michonne and her samurai sword and now Carol and that bottle rocket.

Back at the start, Carol was the downtrodden, beaten wife, doing the washing at the river or screaming in terror. She was just too fragile for this zombie-filled world. Or even the regular world.

She was a mystifying waste of actress Melissa McBride’s considerable talent.

Then, in season two, Carol lost her daughter Sophia. It wasn’t the most popular storyline, dragging on for weeks, but it finally gave McBride something to do, even if that something was mostly crying.

Luckily, McBride cries with the best of them. Her performance was almost too raw and real for such an outlandish show.

This storyline also gave us the start of the Carol/Daryl friendship. Or is it a romance? Mother/son relationship? Who knows. It’s darn precious, is what it is.

At some point between seasons two and three, Carol learnt how to be gloriously blasé about handling serious weaponry, even if her aim left something to be desired.

She started making filthy jokes, advising seduction and murder and using dead friends as human shields. Carol the Ruthless Pragmatist was born.

Season four saw the birth of the Carol we now know. She taught knife skills to children under the cover of ‘storytime’. She took on a couple of surrogate daughters. She killed people and set them on fire to stop illness from spreading.

It’s safe to say that there is nothing Carol wouldn’t do to protect her group. Or, at least, the majority of them.

Banished or not, Carol just can’t help but return to her group in times of danger, like some sort of mythical protector. She showed up out of the blue to save Tyreese and those semi-adopted kids.

Then, when one of those same kids went mad, she dealt with it in the most brutally pragmatic way possible, wrenching her own soul out in the process.

MORE: The Walking Dead, season four, episode 14: Did The Walking Dead just have its Red Wedding episode?

Carol makes the hard decisions that Rick would have cocked up, resulting in the deaths of loads of people. You better believe Carol would never have let the Governor get away.

And where to start with the season five opener? Carol single-handedly destroyed Terminus, rescued the gang, reclaimed Daryl’s crossbow, and reunited Rick with his daughter.

Best of all, in Melissa McBride’s hands, Carol’s dramatic character development has been completely believable every step of the way.

She’s not only the best character on The Walking Dead, she might actually be one of the best characters on TV.#

MORE: The Walking Dead, season 5, No Sanctuary: Who dies in episode one?

MORE: The Walking Dead season 5, episode 1: 12 unanswered questions from No Sanctuary

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