Have The Walking Dead’s Carol and Daryl fixed their friendship?

Did The Walking Dead “A Certain Doom” end Carol and Daryl’s painful rift?

After more than half a season of tension, The Walking Dead season 10’s finale “A Certain Doom” seemed to bring some emotional closure to the rift in the much-loved Daryl and Carol relationship that seemed so broken.

The intense and deep friendship between Carol and Daryl was a vein running through off of season 10, and took us into new territory with the pair as they were at odds over Carol’s constant focus on killing Alpha – a focus that almost cost the lives of Magna and Connie.

Never had we seen them at so odds with each other, even though when the series began we appeared to see Carol and Daryl at their BFF best. However, the underlying strain on their relationship was there even then.

Carol had spent prolonged time away at sea – not even saying goodbye to Michonne before leaving – a symptom of her grief over her son Henry’s death at Alpha’s hands.

That grief and pain is the fuel that causes the cracks in the Carol and Daryl friendship, cracks which widen through the first half of the season and eventually explode in the season finale with the dynamite Carol drops in the cave they find themselves trapped in.

Carol’s obsessive need for revenge on Alpha, and her desperation to destroy the herd, lead her to reckless action upon action. Each move seemed to bring her closer to ending Alpha, but also managed to push Daryl further and further away.

As the season progresses we first first Michonne and Daryl, and then Daryl alone, struggle with watching Carol self-destruct. We see Daryl’s frustration and helplessness grow in tandem with Carol’s heat-seeking-missile focus on destroying Alpha.

Desperately Daryl tries to get through to her, though as he says he may as well be speaking to a ghost. And though Carol promises to reign her revenge in, to stop acting on impulse, almost immediately she breaks the promise by attempting to plant the dynamite they in the cave – in a bid to destroy Alpha’s herd of walkers.

Carol doesn’t care a jot for her own safety, her own life is a tiny afterthought in her all-encompassing thoughts of destruction of all of Alpha’s power. Her love for Daryl seems utterly quashed by the anguish and self-disregard, and when Magna and Connie seem to pay for the events with their lives, it’s his last straw.

It looks like in the process of losing friends in the cave, she may have lost the one friend she holds most dear.

Yet, when it comes to the crunch Daryl admits to her that he can’t hate her. We know of everyone, he understands why she is doing what she’s doing. He hates her lack of care about her own life. He hates what the results of her revenge have cost them, but he can’t hate her.

It matters not, however, as long as Carol hates herself. And she does, Alpha’s daughter Lydia can see it. Yet even with Alpha dead Carol still wrestles with herself, with who she is and what she wants.

Solitude, revenge, anger, even her own death all fail as concepts to bring her peace and give her what her heart desires. Only when she works through her own demons does she understand what she needs to find peace with herself.

She needs redemption and love. She needs to give and receive both, as Melissa McBride said in her tease about “A Certain Doom” -the theme of the episode is “lost and found”.

In the build up to the finale she gains acceptance and forgiveness from Kelly, Connie’s sister and the one person who can help heal over that chasm of pain. And although some of her friends do not forgive or accept her release of Negan, Lydia does.

So with those scars over her wounds starting to heal, it leaves her friendship with Daryl as the chasm she still faces.

In the tower stairs, Daryl expresses his sadness at Michonne’s departure and his pain that people keep leaving, and it’s almost as though for the first time Carol can see through the fog of her grief to see what she has been doing to Daryl.

With Daryl keeping her at arms distance she is put in his shoes and realises just how much her own pain has been blinding her to his own over her. And when Daryl ignores her plea that “I’m still here” it feels to her it might be too late. She’s pushed him too many times, too far away.

However, by the end of “A Certain Doom” we see it’s not true.

Carol pushing him away was painful, but it’s not the most painful thing Daryl can imagine. And when he says that Carol has returned from the cliff-edge – literally and figuratively – having reached a peace with Lydia, with Alpha and seemingly with herself, that’s all Daryl needs to know.

His moment in reassuring her that though she may have lost so much, she still has him, is a moment of heart-breaking vulnerability for them both. It feels like for the first time they have acknowledged that Carol could have lost Daryl but also how much she needs him, and how much he needs her in return.

As he said earlier in the season, he wants to be the one person she talks to, he wants to be her perpetual team-mate, he wants to be the one she turns to for anything.

The very fact he verbalised that is in itself a massive indicator of how close Carol was to pushing him away completely, and how desperate he was to reach through the herd of emotions and pull her out.

With Carol’s “yeah?” in response to Daryl, we see just how aware she is now that she nearly lost him for good, and how utterly relieved she is to know it’s not too late – just as she hoped in “Look At The Flowers”.

So where does their friendship go from here?

Show-runner Angela Kang said they have a “long road” to get things back on track, and that makes sense. Carol still has work to do on herself and on ensuring she lets Daryl in on everything she feels and plans and wants.

Whilst Daryl has to know he can trust that she’s not going to disappear on him again, that he’s seeing the real Carol and she’s going to reach out to him the way he wants her to.

Perhaps it will all boil down to the conversation they had in the cave in “Squeeze”? Carol says she never told Daryl she was claustrophobic. Daryl says if he only knew what she told him he wouldn’t know much at all. “Look who’s talking,” retorts Carol.

After 10 years it’s time these closest of friends stopped treating each other with kid gloves and told each other absolutely everything about all they have gone through, all they have suffered and all they feel, so there’s no more “You good?” and “Gotta be” exchanges.

You don’t just “gotta be” when you have a best friend like Carol and Daryl to share your burden. It’s about time they realised that.