It splits up Carol and Daryl, but a flailing episode of The Walking Dead goes nowhere
TV Reviews Daryl
When people talk about The Walking Dead like it’s running on fumes, this is the kind of episode to which they’re referring. At the beginning of this installment, Carol and Daryl’s friendship is fractured, and profoundly so. (We know that’s not really the case, what with the upcoming spinoff and all, but still.) Their blowup in the cabin from a few episodes back made it seem like Daryl’s anger over Carol’s behavior had finally tipped over into genuine antipathy, driving a wedge between the two and leaving both feeling exhausted and despairing. Here, they separate, go on notably different journeys, and then come together once more at the very end. And after the whole thing is done, what’s changed is… absolutely nothing. We end at the exact same place we began. What a pointless exercise.
It’s genuinely confounding to try and imagine what the plan behind this episode was, given where it starts and where it ends up. Presumably, the idea was to show how both of them are struggling in different ways to deal with the emotional fallout of their fight, in order to deepen our understanding of their respective pathos and show how the two process their feelings of guilt. Instead, Carol builds a mousetrap and Daryl works to fix his bike. Carol is trying to pretend everything’s okay, but she’s hurting. We already knew this. Daryl avoids thinking about things he doesn’t want to, and instead throws himself into unnecessarily dangerous situations to keep his mind off of it. We already know he does this. We already understand all of this. There’s nothing here to add anything to our knowledge of the situation or the characters, save for maybe learning Jerry has somehow never heard the old parable about stone soup. It’s such a nothing of an installment, it makes one wonder if the show was simply asleep at the wheel for a week.
But let’s temporarily grant the creative team the benefit of the doubt, and assume they achieved whatever it was they set out to do with “Diverged.” (I assume they meant it to be akin to the Breaking Bad episode, “Fly,” given Carol’s obsessive hunt for her rodent nemesis.) We pick up shortly after the end of “Find Me,” the episode that concluded with the Carol/Daryl dust-up mentioned above. They’re not really talking, and after Daryl says he intends to stay out on the road a little longer, even the small niceties get set aside, with Carol turning down a ride back to Alexandria and Daryl quick to let her know that he didn’t intend to apologize. So when they set off on their individual journeys, we’re already primed to expect some pent-up emotions to come to the fore.
Those emotions are more apparent in Carol, which, again, we’ve already come to expect. She gets back, and quickly realizes there’s no clear role waiting for her, any more than there’s an easy answer to the wedge that’s been driven between her and her old friend. So she looks for ways to feel like she’s solving a problem, since she can’t solve the only one that matters to her. This gets awfully explicit when she finds the bloodied shirt on the ground, and tells Jerry why she wants to get it cleaned up: “Somebody loved it, and I just want to fix something.” So she tries to make soup; she tries to fix up a solar panel; she kills a bunch of walkers just to get some dandelion to add to the pot; and then her dark night of the soul comes after she tries and fails to catch a rat with her homemade mousetrap, eventually dismantling the entire wall of the garage in frustration. “I miss him,” she tells Dog.
The feeling isn’t quite so overtly mutual on Daryl’s end. His own sense of loss at their blow-up gets channeled into a single-minded mission to fix his bike, after a seal on it gets busted. He scavenges old cars for parts, and then—when he remembers he gave his pocket knife to Carol, and his big hunting knife proves too big for the job—sets off on a mission to hunt walkers until he finds one that has what he needs on its undead person. And sure enough, before you can say, “That’s quite the happy coincidence,” he manages to hunt down and take out some walkers bearing military supplies, including pliers and the bonus reward of MREs. It was risky, given the number of walkers he had to plow through (and clumsily slipping into that pit in a very non-Daryl way), but it kept him distracted.
And that’s all this was: a distraction. It’s hard to grant the creative team the benefit of the doubt when the episode doesn’t seem to offer any benefit to those watching. “Can’t you just let people like me suffer in peace?” Carol says to Jerry when he comes by to offer emotional support, and honestly, not showing us any of this would’ve been the right move. There’s a reason most of our characters’ lives happen off-screen, and we only check in when meaningful encounters and/or moments that change their perspective arise. It doesn’t move the plot forward, or enrich our understanding the way a good character-study episode does (see: last week’s plunge into the mind of Princess), or even just offer the bare minimum of some good old-fashioned zombie-killing spectacle. Daryl comes back, and they have a stilted, awkward conversation, and Carol realizes nothing has really changed since the start of the episode—which is the moment the audience realizes it, too. It’s an hourlong shrug, a time-filler in the worst way. Get your shit together, Walking Dead. This was embarrassing.
Stray observations
- Jerry does get in a good line when Carol tells him she’s off to get ingredients. “Maybe you won’t have to make a soup out of rocks.”
- Of all the failed reaches for meaning, none might be worse than the oh-so-symbolic decision to have both Carol and Daryl say, “See you later, asshole” to their respective antagonists, rodent and undead.
- Still, Melissa McBride is so good that her moments of fake-friendly Carol are still funny to watch, pointless though they might be.
- Next week’s final bonus episode is called “Here’s Negan,” meaning we’re finally going to get that long-promised backstory. I’m curious to see whether or not it follows the beats of Robert Kirkman’s miniseries.
28 Comments
Pope’s murderous militia guy was hunting them a couple weeks ago, and now a couple more (dead) militia guys turn up on their doorstep. Pope apparently goes around slaughtering whole groups of people, and he’s marked Maggie.
Shouldn’t Daryl be a little more worried about that?
When he walked away from that first car, I thought I saw a silhouette behind him and thought for sure it was the bad guy gunning for Maggie’s people.But, alas, it was not. It would have made things much more interesting.
So, a couple of things here in general: One, does the show go much into why the undead are still generally bodily intact after this much time? Rotting isn’t happening?Two, I thought that animals were also affected by the virus that reanimates the dead?
How many times do they have to show rotten walkers falling apart before people stop asking why they don’t show rotten walkers falling apart? From this season in the Robert Patrick episode where they did a gag where they pulled the arms of a walker and the skin came off as sleeves, all the way back to Hershel’s farm and the walker in the well.
Wow! Did someone accidentally say Zombie while walking around the Walking Dead set?
If they’ve been falling apart since the beginning seasons of “we can’t afford new locations!” then how are they not so much farther along en masse?
Everyone dies, and everyone turns when they die.Most people are in the rough vicinity of other people, so the newly turned will be in the rough vicinity of other people.They’ve been showing a lower density of walkers on their own. The Whisperers were actively herding them.I swear I wrote this exact same thing somewhere else recently.
And you would get mini waves of new walkers, at least regionally, if something went sideways and some community fell due to disease, starvation, our heroes effing things up, etc. etc.
Dog is the best actor on this show and they should have had him pinning trashing Daryl’s “reading room” on Carol.
I have no idea how this even got a C-. This should have been an F.
Literally nothing happens. The plot goes nowhere. The emotional tension
between Daryl and Carol advanced absolutely nowhere because at the end
they are back to square one. It was an episode about Carol making soup
and Daryl fixing his bike. It seemed like a parody. I was kind of
impressed that they even shot the script. Watching the after credits behind the scenes where they tried to contextualize it was hysterical. I think this might have been the worst episode of the show.
Honest question, since a lot of shows aren’t being reviewed anymore due to lack of resources , and Rob Bricken’s IO9 review listed for this every week as well ….why do you guys still waste a review on the show , when you could cover something else instead?
Every week, we get novel-length summaries of Shameless, SNL, and TWD that inevitably conclude that the shows aren’t worth watching and haven’t been for years. It’s really too bad that there’s been nothing else on TV over the past decade that would have better merited that level of attention!
There’s absolutely no calculus other than the number of clicks. That’s the beginning and the end of it.
And you have to think they throw out a decent grade sometimes to make you think there’s a corner to be turned. They gave a B to the crappy Princess episode last week, which is better than this crappier one only because there was minimal movement in the plot with the knockoff stormtroopers.
I can’t entirely blame the writer for trying to find any kernel of optimism they can, much like a bedraggled survivor squinting for beauty in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The Princess episode was not crappy. There just wasn’t enough zombie action for the likes of you.
I wish it were that simple. But after nearly 11 years, I’ve found my biggest pet peeve is when TWD tries to chew up minutes just for the sake of filling run time (a classic: opening with lingering flora/landscape/walker shots then a close up of a character contemplating something) – which I get they need to do during COVID filming. If the content of the Princess episode was condensed into half of an episode it would have be perfect.
There isn’t a single person who watches TWD for the zombies.
We get *two* articles on SNL. By the same writer!
I got the Breaking Bad analogue to “Fly.” I thought another one was the Better Call Saul episode where we watch Mike create various devices.
TWD answers the question, what would it be like if we spend an entire hour on the mundane day to day crap our characters have to deal with, such as rodent problems and motorcycle maintenance with limited tools. And they answer came back, yep…not very interesting. The one thing I did really enjoy, was Daryl scanning the walkers with his binos looking for one who might be carrying a useful tool. Nicely done. Other than that…pretty dull.
Daryl looking like he was limping when he was walking down the train tracks to get his army walker, but I didn’t catch why.I’ve noticed they’ve picked up a spoken intro, like Snowpiercer. And now they have an improvized rat trap, like Snowpiercer. Coincidence? Probably.
Carol makes soup…Daryl fixes his bike…literally all that happened
Two things: – It’s nice there is a Home Depot in the A town – Carol had no trouble picking up a new piece of drywall to fix her “rage” wall punching the night before. – More serious observation: so, they live without “juice” because the Whisperers busted solar panels. And no one tried to fix them??? Carol waltzes in, and because she wants to make soup, it takes her 15 min to fix a solar panel and get “juice” in a blink of an eye??? really? Shouldn’t they tell Carol when she asks how she can help, dude, go fix our solar panels! we need “juice” and apparently nobody else thought of it ? idk all in all, dumb episode.
In addtion to the drywall, another peeve this week: the consternation about the soup ingredients spilling on the floor and speaking about them in the past tense as if they were now wasted. Like they should be maintaining restaurant levels of sanitation after the apocalypse and not picking them up to cook.
Like I wouldn’t pick that stuff back up from my floor in the present day.
yes! but she did go out and got some yummy weeds instead, covered in zombie putrid blood – how dumb.
Honestly this review was too……kind. Ugh. So much time invested in this show that I need to get to the finish line. No doubt they are all lumberjacks a la Dexter when we get there.
The only tension in the episode is the question of carol making rat stew if she caught it or vegetable stew if she didn’t.