The thing is, abuse fucks with your head. Abusers train their victims to believe that they're helpless and powerless and wouldn't survive without them. And in small-town Georgia, Carol might not have had access to the sort of support resources that many women turn to when they try to escape abusive relationships. If her family wasn't around anymore or accepted Ed's behavior as normal (as far too many people do), who could have helped her? Abusers also systematically isolate their victims from friends and family who might support them against the abuser, or from whom the victim might get some validation and self-worth. And without friends, family, or a shelter to help her, she might have been legitimately worried about how she would feed her child, especially if she'd been a stay-at-home mother with no work experience in more than a decade, if ever. Not to mention the fear that if she did manage to leave him somehow, he might track her down and harm her and her daughter.

Remember a few episodes back, when Carol told Andrea about how she should kill the Governor? It seemed pretty obvious to me, based on the passion with which she expressed the plan and the detail of it, that she'd been holding onto that same plan to deal with Ed for a long time, and only didn't because she would lose Sophia if she murdered her husband. That tells me that Carol saw no other option for escaping him than murder.

And that's how it is for a lot of real-life abuse victims -- their abusers go to a lot of trouble to keep them trapped and put up obstacles, emotional, financial, and physical, to prevent their escape. The fact that some women do eventually manage to get away means that they should be praised, not that the ones that don't should be condemned.