From mercy-killing Lizzie to traumatizing Sam, Carol did some truly dark things in The Walking Dead. Carol had one of the most shocking and transformative character arcs in The Walking Dead. When she was introduced in The Walking Dead season 1, Carol was shy and timid. She was trying to raise her daughter while suffering horrific abuse at the hands of her husband. In these early episodes, Carol needed other characters like Lori and Shane to stand up for her. But throughout the series, Carol became a ruthless badass who could stand up for herself and everyone else without hesitation.

For the most part, that transformation was empowering and inspirational. It was great to see Carol grow into a strong and resilient hero who could protect herself and the people she cares about. But that growth also came with some disturbing side effects. As Carol became desensitized to the act of killing and crossed more and more boundaries in her quest to defend the group, she did some truly horrifying things. Ever since her daughter Sophia died in The Walking Dead season 2, Carol has been on a very dark path.

10Carol Let Negan Go

When Rick blew up the bridge and was presumed dead, he left his fellow survivors with just one wish. After defeating Negan and bringing the Saviors to their knees, Rick decided to spare Negan’s life. Instead, he wanted Negan to be left to rot in a jail cell at Alexandria, forced to watch the Alexandrians thrive and prosper long after his tyranny ended. But Carol was so selfish that she couldn’t even let Rick have that.

As the conflict with the Whisperers intensified, Carol’s desperation to end Alpha’s life clouded her judgment. She made a deal with Negan to release him from his cell in exchange for him earning the trust of the Whisperers, biding his time, and ultimately killing Alpha. The deal worked out in the end, but after what Negan did, it was pretty questionable to let him go.

9Carol Manipulated Ash By Lying About Sophia

Carol finally returned to screens in the second season of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, dubbed The Book of Carol, in which she flew out to France to find Daryl. But when she was trying to convince pilot Ash Patel to take her to France, she couldn’t tell him she was just looking for an old friend, because that wouldn’t sound urgent enough for Ash to risk his life. Instead, Carol lied to him — about her late daughter Sophia, no less.

Carol told Ash that Sophia was taken by her father to visit her aunt in France right before the zombie apocalypse kicked off, so she wanted to fly to France to find her. This convinced Ash to take the risk, because he was moved by the prospect of reuniting a mother and daughter after the end of the world. But it was all lies; Carol callously manipulated this man.

8Carol Let Mary Get Eaten

After the destruction of the prison in The Walking Dead season 4, Rick and his group all separately followed signs to a supposed safe haven called Terminus. But when they got there, they found that the haven wasn’t so safe after all. Terminus was populated by cannibals, who would lure in vulnerable people, trap them in train cars, and eventually eat them. Luckily for Rick and the gang, Carol figured out the ruse before she got there, so she could help them escape.

Saving her friends from captivity in Terminus is one of the most heroic things Carol ever did. But one of the darkest things she ever did was baked into that heroic act. During the commotion, Terminus got overrun by a horde of walkers and Carol allowed Mary, one of the cannibals, to get eaten alive.

7Carol Crossed Alpha’s Border & Instigated The Whisperer War

After defeating the Saviors, the survivors found themselves under the tyrannical rule of yet another sadistic group when the Whisperers showed up. The Saviors always announced their arrival with a lot of blood-soaked bombast, so it was easy to see them coming, but the Whisperers would disguise themselves among the walkers, so they were trickier to detect. Daryl and Carol were both on the same page that the conflict with the Whisperers needed to be nipped in the bud.

Alpha had given them one simple instruction: don’t cross the border into Whisperer territory. Blinded by her quest for revenge, Carol ignored that rule and crossed the border anyway. As soon as Alpha spotted Carol on her side of the border, the Whisperer War had begun. That war got a lot of people killed, all because Carol couldn’t follow one rule.

6Carol Burned Some Saviors Alive

After the defeat of the Saviors, not all of Negan’s ex-henchmen wanted to fall in line. They were given the choice to either join the community and pitch in or leave the community and go off on their own. Some of the ones who went off on their own left the area and started a new life, but some of them stuck around and continued to cause trouble for the peacemakers. One such ex-Savior was Jed, who terrorized Carol and Henry and stole their valuables.

Long-time Walking Dead viewers knew that Jed was making a big mistake by messing with Carol, and he eventually learned that for himself. Carol snuck up on Jed and his group in the middle of the night and burned them alive. Jed begged for his life in his final moments, but Carol — as usual — ignored his pleas and lit the fire.

5Carol Watched A Walker Eat Paula’s Face

In one of The Walking Dead’s bottle episodes — season 6, episode 13, “The Same Boat” — Carol and Maggie were held hostage by a merciless killer named Paula, played by Alicia Witt. After a minor victory against the Saviors, Carol and Maggie were captured and held for ransom by Paula and her group. Spending a few hours with Paula forced Carol to reckon with her dark choices as she recognized elements of herself in this horrible murderer.

When Carol overpowered her captors, she’d reconsidered her approach to dangerous situations and didn’t want to just kill Paula like she normally would. But Paula left her with no choice, so Carol reluctantly impaled her on a stake. But that’s not the most disturbing part; the most disturbing part is that Carol stuck around to watch a rogue walker chew off Paula’s face.

4Carol Threatened Sam

When Rick and the gang first got to Alexandria, Deanna made them all hand over their guns to be locked away in the armory. But after months on the road, surrounded by humanity’s worst monsters, Rick was too paranoid to let that happen. So, he, Michonne, and Carol snuck into the armory and stole back a couple of pistols, just in case the Alexandrians turned on them.

There was just one problem: Sam, the kid who took a liking to Carol’s cookies, spotted them. Carol decided to keep Sam quiet by threatening him with a gruesome death. She said that if he told on them, the monsters outside the walls would get him and eat him. This traumatized Sam and led to the deaths of his entire family when he froze in the middle of the horde.

3Carol Led Daryl, Jerry & Others Into A Cave Full Of Walkers

This was yet another disastrous consequence of Carol’s relentless quest to exact revenge against Alpha. Carol was so desperate to kill Alpha that she led Daryl, Jerry, and a bunch of her other friends right into one of the Whisperers’ traps. They ended up trapped in a dark cave filled with ravenous walkers. A few inches of rock were all that separated the survivors from a horde of the undead.

They managed to figure out a way out of the cave, but Jerry almost got eaten on the way out and Connie and Magna both got stuck in there. If Carol hadn’t been so reckless, none of this would’ve happened. If she could just keep a level head and bide her time in her selfish pursuit of revenge, then they would’ve avoided this fateful cave altogether.

2Carol Killed Sick Survivors During The Walking Dead’s Prison Arc

The early episodes of The Walking Dead season 4 ominously suggested that the zombie virus wasn’t the only biological threat in this world. Rick and his group had fortified the prison, invited in a bunch of new survivors to help out, and they seemed to have brought back some semblance of old-world normalcy in their lives. And then a mysterious new disease started spreading around the prison and killing everyone it touched.

Since Hershel was the only doctor on site, Rick’s group had a tough time trying to contain this disease and fight against it. That’s when Carol decided to take matters into her own hands and murdered two of the sick people — Karen and David — much to Tyreese’s chagrin. This act was considered so dark that Rick banished Carol from the prison for it.

1Carol Killed Lizzie

Easily the darkest thing that Carol ever did in The Walking Dead was killing Lizzie. When everyone got separated after the fall of the prison, Carol and Tyreese drew the short straw. Daryl and Beth only had to look out for each other, and Rick and Michonne could count on Carl to help them out, but Carol and Tyreese had to take care of 12-year-old Lizzie, 10-year-old Mika, and baby Judith.

And if taking care of three kids in a zombie apocalypse wasn’t stressful enough, Lizzie started losing her mind and befriending walkers. When Lizzie killed Mika and tried to do the same to Judith, Carol knew something had to be done, so she took her out into the wilderness and shot her. This isn’t just the darkest thing Carol ever did; it might be the darkest thing that ever happened in The Walking Dead.