What Daryl and Carol’s Fight in “Find Me” Means for Their Walking Dead Spin-Off

Has luck run out between best friends Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride)? Carol spent months away at sea between Seasons 9 and 10 grieving her son after he was brutally murdered by Alpha (Samantha Morton) of the Whisperers, who would later be killed by Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) under Carol’s orders. Daryl spent the first half of the season trying to rein in Carol during her vendetta against Alpha, telling her in the midseason finale: “You never came off that boat. It’s been like talking to a ghost.”

After Carol’s reckless pursuit of Alpha left their group trapped inside a cave teeming with walkers in last year’s midseason premiere, “Squeeze,” Daryl begged Carol to stop before people she cares about get hurt. Carol broke her promise that same episode when she saw an opportunity to destroy Alpha’s walker horde threatening their people, accidentally fumbling a stick of dynamite that caused a cave-in trapping Connie (Lauren Ridloff) and Magna (Nadia Hilker) inside.

While preparing for battle against the Whisperers at Hilltop, Carol asked Daryl not to hate her for Connie’s disappearance. “I’m never gonna hate you,” Daryl said at the time, later reconciling with Carol after she and Lydia (Cassady McClincy) finally destroyed the horde to end the Whisperer War.

With Alpha and Beta (Ryan Hurst) both dead, the survivors are left picking up the pieces amid the destruction the Whisperers left behind. When Daryl and Carol go hunting in “Find Me,” she asks him a question: “You think our luck’s run out?”

The survivors lost Hilltop and Alexandria is falling apart. Things feel different, Carol says, “Like everything that’s good in the world is not on our side anymore.”

Daryl and Carol come across an old cabin that once belonged to Leah (Lynn Collins) — Daryl’s lover during the years he spent away from the group searching for Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln). Daryl doesn’t know what happened to Leah but Carol knows it’s not his fault. “Losing Leah, that’s not on you,” she tells him. “Neither is Rick. Or Connie.”

“No, that’s on you,” Daryl shoots back, “because you never know when to stop.”

She’s sorry for Connie, but she’s not sorry for going after the horde or for making Alpha pay for killing her son. “Because I was right.”

Daryl tells her she only came hunting to run away from Alexandria. “You couldn’t deal with the guilt. So you made it my problem.”

When Carol says she doesn’t need a savior or a martyr, just a friend, Daryl says they’ve been having “the same damn conversation over and over again” — and he’s sick of it. “You should have just let me get back on the boat,” a teary Carol tells him.

She’s right. “I should have. I stopped you from running, and I shouldn’t have,” Daryl growls. “You want to run? Run. I know where I’m supposed to be. I won’t stop you this time.”

Carol says she was right again. “Our luck’s run out, you and me.”

But this isn’t the end of the road for the decade-long best friends. After the 24-episode final season of The Walking Dead culminates in 2022, Daryl and Carol will hit the road in their own spin-off in 2023.

“In the particular place that they’re at now, it feels pretty far away from where they would have to be in order to go off into their spinoff, but it’s part of their ongoing story,” showrunner Angela Kang told Den of Geek. “We’ve got kind of a long runway to do it because we have 24 episodes ahead in Season 11.”

With the extended Season 10 episodes “Find Me” and the upcoming “Diverged,” a Carol-centric episode, Kang said, “We felt like we needed to kind of pay off some of the emotional territory we explore with them in Season 10, where they were sometimes at odds, there were some dark moments, and things were hard.”

“They are so close and sometimes there are really painful confrontations to be had when that’s the case,” Kang said. “It’s all part of the roller coaster of emotions those two will go through together over time.”

Daryl and Carol will be in a better place when they set off in a new direction in their spin-off, a show with a breezier and lighter tone.

“I’ve always loved the relationship with Daryl and Carol, and we play off of each other so well,” Reedus said on a past episode of Talking Dead. “It’s a different type of show. It’s a show of hope. It’s not two groups fighting for territory, or something like that. It’s she and I on the road, seeing who is left out in the world, and it kind of opens up a lot of possibilities.”

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. New episodes of The Walking Dead extended Season 10 premiere Sundays at 9 pm ET/8c on AMC.