(This story contains major spoilers for the season finale of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – Carol’s book.)

The Walking Dead viewers don’t always get what they want. But more often than not, Daryl Dixon and Carol Peletier get what they need.

In the season finale of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol, The OG Zombie Fighters of Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride eventually fleeing France, but not exactly as they hoped. As the time approached, the fan-favorite duo was on the verge of splitting up, as clutch rescue pilot Ash (Manish Dayal) couldn’t fit them both on his plane. Daryl decides to stay, despite the fact that Carol wants to take his place in the sacrifice game. In the end, both remain around, thanks to the last gasps of the French autocratic army which appeared just before takeoff.

Outgunned, Daryl briefly appears outnumbered until Carol appears just in time to save his skin. Ash and perhaps Messiah Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) manage to take flight, charting the course for the Commonwealth and presenting the hope of alerting Daryl and Carol’s friends of their current situation in Europe. Whether or not that happens is a question for another season – or maybe even another spin-off – to be resolved.

From there, the remaining moments of the finale focus on Daryl and Carol’s next steps, as they seek to find a new path home. Their plan to travel to London via a tunnel initially seems like a safe bet, until they find themselves in an underground encounter with glow-in-the-dark zombies and hallucinogenic bat droppings (you get well read). After surviving their fair share of shitty situations over the years, Daryl and Carol manage to persevere, overcoming their respective demons: Carol dealing with the traumatic loss of her daughter Sophia so many years ago, and Daryl having one last chance to say goodbye to ghost of Isabel (Clémence Poésy).

The season ends with Daryl and Carol continuing down the tunnel to the tune of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, reminiscent of the episode’s opening scene, in which Laurent and Daryl sing the song together. Rolling Stones. But it’s also a warning shot for our heroes, even if they can’t hear it through the fourth wall: Daryl and Carol’s plan to leave France for London is not going to go exactly as planned. Production is already in progress on Daryl Dixon season threecurrently filming in Spain. How will Daryl and Carol end up there? Impossible to say at the moment. But the decision to move these characters to another country required very little second-guessing on the part of those responsible for the series.

“We loved the invigoration we experienced going to France and we wanted to keep doing it,” showrunner and executive producer David Zabel tell The Hollywood Reporter on the decision to move the venue of the show. “At the story level, the characters must not calm down. It should be a road show. They have to keep moving (to get home). At the end of season two, they’re going somewhere. We don’t know Exactly where, and it’s not a direct line to the next place they go. But the idea is to have the characters struggle and strive to get home and move.

“At another level,” he continues, “we can introduce a whole other culture, another history, a flavor, a color, a light and an architecture. It’s going to be so exciting to reinvent the show. It felt like all signs were pointing to us continuing to move forward and get to the next place. In seasons five and six, it might be a different place. They will keep moving until they get home! »

Another country beyond Spain? What’s next on Daryl and Carol’s survival tour, a trip to Italy?

“I can’t tell you, but I TO DO have a plan,” says Zabel. “I talked to Norman about it. There is a very cool plan. But we don’t even know yet if we’ll do season four…”

Additionally, future plans regarding Daryl and Carol could come down to one generic out-of-the-box factor. Daryl Dixon the hands of the team: the whims of bigger Walking death franchise.

“I had carte blanche,” explains Zabel. “I talk to (franchise creative director Scott M. Gimple) all the time, and he said, ‘You have free rein, at least for now.’ Keep doing what you’re doing. But at some point, I imagine some things might be determined by what the other characters are doing and where they are. So I don’t know if That of Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) I’m going to get on a raft on the Hudson and end up (in Europe).

Whatever the future, as long as The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon continues, it will depend on the future of Daryl and Carol’s relationship. Zabel says: “There are so many things they haven’t seen or experienced. They’re both characters who are (landlocked Americans), and in that way, they’re these classic Americans, in a certain sense, who never had the opportunity to travel the world. They both had reasons to stay close to home. That was part of what I found exciting from the beginning: taking these characters and exposing them to these things that maybe they saw in a book once, or maybe they saw a photo, and now they are in the middle of it all.

“From the audience’s point of view,” he continues, “it’s a chance to see what the apocalypse looks like in these other parts of the world, and so the audience, we hope, can experience the same thing as these characters . It’s like, “Wow, I’ve only seen the Eiffel Tower in photos, and now I’m standing next to it…and also, there are walkers standing next to it too.” »

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The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol is now streaming on AMC+. Follow with THRfranchise coverage hereand keep track of all the fallout.