The Walking Dead Season 10, Episode 21: "Diverged" Recap and Review
‘THE WALKING DEAD’ TRIES ITS HAND AT A “DAY IN THE LIFE” EPISODE, BUT POOR ATTEMPTS AT COMEDY AND A LACK OF THEMATIC COHESION MAKE ‘DIVERGED’ ONE OF THE WEAKEST ENTRIES IN RECENT YEARS.
Leslie Stevens, the creator of “The Outer Limits”, coined the term “bottle show” to describe an episode made quickly and cheaply, like “pulling an episode out of a bottle like a genie.” Now more commonly referred to as “bottle episodes”, their purpose has expanded beyond mere budgetary compromises. By generally focusing on a mere handful of main characters - if even so many - in only one or two locations, some of television’s best writers and showrunners have crafted memorable, introspective hours where we gain a more complete understanding of the people we’ve spent the episode with, and form a deeper bond with the overall series.
The world of COVID-19 has created an interesting dynamic in television. We’ve been able to see, only in recent months, the litmus test of what fruits a quarantined set and limited crew can bear, as shows have begun to air the first episodes produced during COVID. “The Walking Dead” has been uniquely impacted by these changes. First, the original tenth season finale, “A Certain Doom”, was delayed by six months due to its post-production having been preempted by lockdowns. Then, AMC and showrunner Angela Kang announced that the season would be extended by six “bonus” episodes as we wait for the eleventh and final season to begin later this year. Nearly all of these new episodes - the first, “Home Sweet Home”, being the arguable exception with its larger character roster and bigger action sequences - are bottle episodes.
The results have been mixed. Where “Find Me” gave us much-welcomed insight into the past of Daryl (Norman Reedus), and “One More” stands as an all-time great episode of the show, last week’s “Splinter” and tonight’s “Diverged” both feel cyclical, repetitive, and ultimately unnecessary. However, where “Splinter” was at least anchored by an immersive lead performance and an intriguing, cerebral style, “Diverged” is more an outright mess. Picking up immediately after “Find Me”, as Daryl and Carol (Melissa McBride) return to Alexandria with Dog, the two split up, with Carol and Dog returning to the town while Daryl continues to look for food and supplies on his bike. Before they part, Daryl lets Carol borrow his pocket knife so she can open her canteen.
The remainder of the episode has both characters in pretty much the same spot: Daryl is out in the woods when his bike gives out, and has to venture on foot to repair it, while Carol is at Alexandria, practically locking herself in the kitchen to try and make soup for the town. Carol runs into Jerry (Cooper Andrews) a couple of times when she heads out to gather ingredients, and while their interactions are friendly, Carol keeps a part of herself visibly closed off. McBride subtly shows Carol’s guilt over her actions earlier in the season when she let Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) loose in order to defeat the Whisperers, which came at a tremendous cost to their community. It’s worth mentioning that she and Reedus don’t really do anything wrong as actors this week - they’re two of the show’s most engaging performers, and significant contributors to its longevity - but that the issue is more that they aren’t really given anything to do in the first place.
While Carol attempts to prepare the soup, Dog manages to make a complete mess of the kitchen. When Carol goes to scold Dog, she realizes he did so in an attempt to capture a rat running loose. What follows is a series of attempts to kill the rat that is played largely for laughs, and they uniformly fall flat. "The Walking Dead" has never done slapstick well, and the scenes of Carol chasing after the rat - particularly when it escapes a makeshift trap and she chases it through and under furniture - play like a poor imitation of Laurel and Hardy, right down to the incidental music.
The soundtrack of "The Walking Dead" doesn't generally bear mentioning week to week, which is a compliment to it: it subtly enhances most scenes while staying out of the way, which is what the music for a show like this should do. This week's score does the opposite, particularly in the aforementioned "mouse hunt" scenes. It's abrasive, distracting, and wildly unbecoming of the show's overall musical palette. That's akin to how "Diverged" feels out of place with the larger series. With no real antagonist or serious threat in the episode - though we'll get further into that in a moment - the core idea of the episode, showing a day in the life of these people, is a welcome idea in concept. The one problem, in execution, is revolving such an episode around one person rather than the whole group. The other, larger problem, is using such a story merely as a framing device to delve into Carol’s mental state for the umpteenth time.
The comedic body of the episode suddenly turns dark when Carol once again hears the rat late at night, and tears down an entire wall’s worth of drywall in an attempt to finally get rid of it. All she comes up with instead is a hollowed-out space, a thin metaphor for her guilt, and how she feels isolated from the larger group in Alexandria. Although it’s probably more a result of COVID-related shooting requirements, it’s notable that almost every scene set in the common areas of the town rarely has any extras in the background, and only one or two when they do appear. This gives Alexandria the appearance of a ghost town, like something that is slowly fading away. Perhaps, with the damage the Whisperers did to the town earlier in the season, this is supposed to be a hint that Alexandria will fall at some point between now and the end of the series. The imagery is a bit ham-fisted and on the nose, while simultaneously feeling disjointed.
Daryl’s half of the episode is really unremarkable. There’s no effort made to create a thematic or narrative symmetry with Carol’s story. Instead, we get to watch Daryl look for a piece of tube to fix his motorcycle with. He comes across an abandoned car with a walker trapped inside of it. Instead of doing the rational thing, which would be to open the car door and kill the solitary walker - something Daryl is more than capable of - he opts to crawl under the car with the walker inside of it, almost causing the car’s weight to shift on top of him when the walker predictably moves around. Scenes like this were a frequent - and annoying - hallmark of the Scott Gimple-led seasons of “The Walking Dead”; sitting there as an audience member, thinking, “[insert character] almost died for the dumbest possible reason.” Of course, Daryl escapes more or less unscathed, but this particular moment really brought back unpleasant memories of a time when this show used to be a chore.
Unfortunately, an even more egregious moment comes when Daryl goes to fix his bike, but realizes - complete with a hand-holding flashback - that he never asked Carol for his pocket knife back, which he needs in order to fix the bike. The idea that Daryl, who grew up as a tracker and who takes extraordinarily good care of his equipment, would forget that he had just given someone a valuable tool, breaks suspension of disbelief. All we get for this is padding, where Daryl kills a handful of walkers, including one in military gear, so that he can get his hands on a Leatherman PST instead. He fixes the bike, and heads back to Alexandria. If all of that sounds a bit thin, it is. Now add to that the fact that it took about 20 minutes’ worth of screentime to tell that story.
There’s a pretty good scene towards the end of the episode, where Jerry comes to check in on Carol, and tries to reassure her that she still has a family in Alexandria, despite Carol’s fears that she is “broken.” It’s something the episode could’ve done with more of. Unfortunately, it’s one really good character moment among a bunch of…nothing. When we look back at the great bottle episodes of television - “Fly”, from the third season of Breaking Bad, particularly stands out as a two-character episode set almost entirely in an isolated space - that deeper bond we establish with the characters more than makes up for the relative lack of plot advancement. “Diverged”, on the other hand, has neither. Just as “Splinter” felt like it ended in the exact same spot as “A Certain Doom” before it, “Diverged” feels like we leave Carol and Daryl in the exact same spot they were in at the end of “Find Me”. Their relationship is still fractured, they’re still off in their separate ways, and both of those points are just as frustrating as they were three weeks ago when you remember that they had patched things up in “A Certain Doom”.
Overall, “Diverged” represents all of the biggest weaknesses of these “bonus” episodes of “The Walking Dead”. It’s a tall task to request of your audience to go through nearly a half-dozen bottle episodes in a row, particularly when you’re talking about a show where “zombie slaughterfest” is the general tone week-to-week. These aren’t just “bonus” episodes; they’re presented, aired, and referred to as proper episodes of “The Walking Dead”. And, while this is the only one so far that has been overall rather poor, some of its problems apply to some of the other episodes as well.
There’s been a missed opportunity to really catch up with Ezekiel (Khary Payton) or Eugene (Josh McDermitt) because they were only in a few moments of “Splinter”; and there hasn’t been a chance to catch up with Connie (Lauren Ridloff) at all, because we’ve now had three Daryl-centric episodes rather than more of an equitable share between the cast. Sure, Daryl is the long-term fan favorite, so AMC are going to want to emphasize him as much as possible. Still, it’s not like he’s the only compelling character on the show. Especially given the fact that Carol and Daryl are going to have their own spin-off after the final season concludes, it’d be nice to spend as much time as possible with the rest of the cast before we part ways.
Thankfully, next week’s episode appears to be all about the best character in the entire run of “The Walking Dead”: Negan.