The Walking Dead's latest episode focused heavily on Melissa McBride's Carol and Norman Reedus' Daryl. It was the second to do so since the two characters were announced for their own spin-off series, which is set to follow the main show's finale.
Diverged is the 21st episode of Season 10 of The Walking Dead, with the series having added six extra character-driven instalments due to the pandemic. This has led to more intimate stories expanding the character arcs of Gabriel, Aaron, Princess, some spoilery characters, and even Dog.
The penultimate chapter of this season explored the relationship between Daryl and Carol, two of the most popular characters in the show, but it does so with almost zero conversation between the two. Instead, Dog is heavily used in the episode to the point where Carol deals with Daryl's issues by talking them out with her new canine companion.
Due to the strange structure of the episode, Daryl and Carol are actually apart for most of it, and their story was instead told by cutting together scenes of what each of them was dealing with - separate, but together.
Showrunner Angela Kang spoke with EW about why the episode was put together the way it was.
"We actually had a very different structure to this episode. They were in this short story structure where there were separate little vignettes and there were sort of like bookends and a middle piece. But with the way filming turned out, the pieces were so uneven, so we were like, 'You know what, actually, let's just intercut the whole thing, but we'll intercut it in a way where those pieces all feel they're feeding into each other emotionally.' And then the way that Bear McCreary instinctively scored it, it connected so much better that way at the end of the day."
"We definitely wanted to purposely have these moments where they're so similar that they'd even just have similar reactions to certain things, so that even on their own, their own little things, they're just connected psychologically. Daryl's thinking about her, she's thinking about him, and she's got his little Swiss Army knife in that story. That's how it came about. We knew that we were limited in terms of scope of episode, and so using what sets and backlot locations we could, we thought it would really be more about where they were emotionally as people and friends."
What do you guys think about the extended Season 10 of The Walking Dead? Do you prefer the character-driven episodes, or would you rather fewer episodes with more action? Let us know in the usual spot, and zombie fanatics can listen to our Army of the Dead chat with Joe Fidler below!