![]() "I lost everything, but it made me stronger," Paula confesses, a declaration of sentiments Carol herself might recognize. By the time Paula remembers her life "before" - as a secretary tasked with making her boss "feel good about himself" - "The Same Boat" emerges as an acrid comment on our own state of affairs. ![]() It's only later that she discovers that one of her captors suffered her own miscarriage. Maggie refers to joining the generations of women for whom childbirth was a perilous endeavor. Though the episode cannily refuses to treat women's experiences as universal - when Carol, herself a survivor of domestic abuse, attempts to forge a connection with Paula after Donny's violent outburst, the redheaded Savior cuts her off with a snarl - what the characters share, across the factional divide, is their gender. Still, this juicy morsel of information sets up the running conversation at the center of "The Same Boat," in which the central issue is womanhood itself. Why would Carol, as calculating as she is, accept the additional risk to Maggie and her unborn child by bringing attention to it? The swing the youngest of the Saviors takes at Maggie's abdomen later on confirms that the danger of revealing any actual vulnerability is frighteningly real. When the covers come off, Carol and Maggie are bound and gagged in a grim room near "the kill floor." It eventually becomes clear that the former's "hyperventilation" is just the beginning of a brilliant long con designed to get the drop on the Saviors, but even for an episode this blunt in its thematic thrust - "You should be glad she didn't have a sack of gonads to trip over," one of the Saviors chides Donny when he questions Paula's decision-making - it's hard to buy Carol openly spilling the news of Maggie's pregnancy. So does the ingenious montage of Carol and Maggie being transported to the Saviors' slaughterhouse/safe house, each image largely obscured by the coats pulled over their heads. In the context of a series that can read, visually speaking, as The Young and the Zombiefied, this revisiting and re-engineering of last week's final sequence - seen here from the other side of the short-wave radio - emphasizes the change of perspective. The episode signals its interest in women's points of view from the opening minutes, as Paula, the leader of the group holding Carol and Maggie hostage, peers through her binoculars at Rick Grimes and the gang from the woods beyond the Saviors' compound. ![]()
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