The Walking Dead' Season 5, Episode 6 Review: The Adventures Of Carol And Daryl

Spoiler warning through Season 5 of AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead.’

Sunday night’s episode of The Walking Dead, “Consumed,” follows Carol and Daryl was an exciting, if predictable, voyage into the heart of darkness. Or into Atlanta, as it were.

Despite Daryl’s presence and companionship here, the episode was largely a story about Carol. Conflicted, consumed-by-guilt Carol.

We get the odd flashback here and there to remind us of where she’s been before saving the rest of the group from the Termites. The episode opens to her being banished by Rick after she revealed she’d killed the other prisoners during the plague.

It’s the strangest opening this show has ever had. Carol drives off. She finds a safe place. She stays there for a while. Nothing happens. Then she sees smoke and rushes back to the prison to find it burned to the ground, its inhabitants dispersed or slaughtered.

In other words, we discover nothing new or exciting, and it turns out Carol just went and chilled on her own for a bit before tracking them down again. Why even bother showing such mundane hardship?

In the City

In any case, the episode is primarily about Daryl and Carol going into the city after Beth, or at least after who they’re pretty sure has her.

The city seems somewhat less overrun than before. The walkers come in small groups, but nothing like the hordes we saw in the first season, or the massive herd we saw at the end of last week’s episode.

Atlanta feels pretty empty, now, whether that’s because the walkers have shambled on, or because AMC’s budget isn’t big enough to do another tank trick.

Carol and Daryl

Whatever the case, other than running out of gas while they tail the cops from the Atlanta hospital where Beth is trapped, Carol and Daryl (our rhyming duo!) make good progress into the city, making their way to a safe house Carol knows about. The occasional zombie here and there proves harmless enough for a pair of seasoned veterans like these two.

They make their way to an assisted living center and a nice, untouched room with a bunk-bed. After a bit of a heart-to-heart they hear thumping and find another room with a walker banging at the door. It seems unremarkable enough at first, until we see the silhouettes of children behind the foggy glass. Daryl tells Carol she doesn’t need to kill them, and they go back to the room. When she wakes in the morning, he’s killed the walkers and is burning their bodies.

So, of course, we get a flashback to Tyreese burning the bodies of the girls from Season Four—as if that episode is one we’ll ever forget.

Noah

So they move on the next day, but are accosted by a familiar character: Noah, the guy who helped Beth almost escape and shuffled off with his leg all messed up a couple episodes back. He manages to grab Carol’s gun and take Daryl’s crossbow at gunpoint and then escape off into the city. Carol tries to shoot him but Daryl stops her.

They trek on, Noah having eluded their pursuit, and make their way to a white van with the telltale white crosses on it that they’d spotted.

Once arrived at the van they find medical equipment and start piecing it all together. The base of operations for their prey could be a hospital. Then they’re swarmed by walkers and can’t escape, presumably because they’ve been robbed of their arsenal, though I felt like this was sort of forced. I suspect both Daryl and Carol would have re-armed with better melee weapons before heading to the van. They would have paid closer attention to the zombie encroachment. They’d have found some way to get out of the situation other than the way they choose: to let the van, which is already a ways over the edge of a highway bridge, plummet with them buckled into the front seats.

However implausible, Daryl makes the dive without a scratch but Carol is pretty beat up. After the van falls a bunch of walkers fall also, splattering grotesquely on the van’s roof. Actually this made me very happy. When the van fell and the zombies didn’t come right afterword I found myself getting irritated. Surely the walkers are brainless enough to walk off the edge of a cliff, right? In any case, the show followed through on that note.

Exciting, but Predictable

All of this is decent enough drama. The conversation between Carol and Daryl sprinkled throughout the episode is pretty good, given that Daryl is the strong-and-silent type and Carol has become so disenchanted.

She talks about her days with an abusive husband, how she went to assisted living only to run back to the man who beat her. How the apocalypse and the days at the prison in particular allowed her to become the person she always thought she was supposed to be: strong, unwavering, the sort of woman who would take action rather than wait for something to happen. She was able to forget her old self, even forget her daughter. Somehow the guilt and tragedy over the prison and then over the girls in Season 4 has dragged her back into self doubt and despair.

Daryl, meanwhile, has transformed from boy to man she tells him. And if you go back and watch that first encounter with Daryl, you’ll probably agree. It’s not just his hair that’s changed, though Daryl was always a pretty cool character. He was, for a long time, dragged down by his brother Merle and his less than squeaky clean past. Now, as he puts it, he’s trying to start over.

This is all good stuff, the kind of talk you’d expect these two to have. It’s not much of an action-packed episode, and it’s not even all that tense, but it moves the story forward and gives a couple of the better characters a nice spotlight. When they find Noah again they learn about Beth and then rush to get away from police who’ve come to investigate the gunfire (Noah shot at some walkers.) As they flee, Carol is hit by the cops and taken away on a stretcher, leading us full circle back to where Beth saw her at the end of Episode 4.

Since I’m sort of on the edge of my seat wanting the story to move forward, I’m glad to see some progress made. The last two episodes felt like running around in circles. Hitting dead-ends.

It’s all pretty predictable, though.

We knew Carol was going to show up at the hospital already, and that Daryl would show up at the church with an unknown companion. I guessed that this was Noah a couple weeks ago (though it also could have been Morgan or somebody else entirely.) It wasn’t hard to see where the episode was going, and it was no great shock that Noah showed up and that the group teamed up, however briefly.

It was interesting to see Noah convince Daryl to let the hospital cops take Carol so that they could treat her injuries. It was probably the right thing to do, though it certainly complicates matters. There’s little doubt in my mind that as soon as she can, Carol will make a run for it.

But none of it was unexpected or surprising.

The real question is how Rick and company are going to get Beth and Carol back. Go in guns blazing? Use diplomacy? Make a hostage trade?

Next Week

Watching the promo for next week’s episode, it certainly looks like we’re moving away from the one-group-per-episode storytelling we’ve had the past three installments. I’ve been griping about that for a while now, worrying that the show would slide back into something like the second half of Season 4. Fortunately, it looks like we get at least a glimpse of Rick’s group, Glenn and his ragtag adventurers, and Beth/Carol. All our stories intertwined.

Yes, some of these more focused, one group or character-driven episodes are nice ways to build character and deepen the drama, but I think they should be the exception not the rule.

I like how Carl says “We can’t stay in one place for too long.” I concur! The show is best when it’s on the go, with only brief respites.

All told this was a pretty good episode with some nice character drama, but it could have used some more action and maybe a bit in the way of surprises or twists. I enjoy being wrong about where a story is going but “Consumed” was exactly what I figured it would be.