The Walking Dead is marching toward its series finale after an expanded season 11, but it’s not really ending, given that its spin-offs will live on, and two of its main characters are starring in their own series after this one wraps, Carol and Daryl.

The pair are season 1 OGs, the most iconic remaining members of the cast, and two that seem determined to turn the lights out on the series even after cast members like Danai Gurira (Michonne) and Andrew Lincoln (Rick) have left. And they’ll survive the death of the series itself, it turns out.

This episode, Diverged, was…slow. Quite slow, and fundamentally could be broken down to “Daryl fixes his bike” and “Carol tries very hard to make soup.” But I think the ultimate point was to show how much the two need each other, even if they’re on the outs.

I am honestly not quite clear on why the two are actually fighting. They had a bit of a tiff over the course of these past few episodes, but Daryl lashing out at Carol for reasons I don’t quite get. Carol has been a little all over the place recently, culminating in tonight’s episode where she tears apart an entire wall in a fit of frustration to try to find a rat. The rat is a metaphor for…something? I’m not sure.

The point of the episode seems to be that Daryl and Carol are not great at functioning without each other. Daryl gives Carol the tool he needs to fix his bike and he’s forced to find a replacement after nearly being killed by a few different zombies in the woods. Meanwhile, Carol can’t really control Dog very well, and Daryl probably would have figured out a way to kill a rat without tearing apart the entire kitchen to try to find it.

I’m hoping that things “settle” after this and we don’t need either Carol or Daryl going further off the deep end to prove they need each other. I would assume the storyline of their upcoming spin-off will be them getting on Daryl’s bike and jetting off, but I’m wondering how that works with current other characters, specifically Daryl’s connection to Judith and the not-dead-but-seriously-bring-her-back-already Connie. Meanwhile, these days if feels like Carol only really has Daryl, though I suppose in this episode she also had Jerry.

I do think this episode suffers when you compare it to the other season 10C interim episodes because I don’t think it reveals any larger truths about each character past what we already know. No exploration of their pasts (which after 10 years, the show has more or less done for both of them), and they’re not characters like Gabriel, Aaron or Princess who needed a solo episode for more development. They already have the bulk of the screentime for the series, and Daryl just had a solo episode a few weeks ago! So it just seems like an odd choice, and perhaps one done mainly for pandemic reasons, the ability to film an entire episode where the characters are mostly by themselves or with…a dog that can’t catch coronavirus.

I ultimately didn’t like it, but I sort of understand what it was trying to do with the split perspectives of Daryl and Carol struggling without one another. Next week marks the highly anticipated adaptation of Here’s Negan, the comic origin story for everyone’s favorite villain, where his screen wife Lucille will be played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s actual wife, Hilarie Burton. I’m looking forward to it.

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