Daryl, Carol, Ash and Laurent go home. But not necessarily together.

The season finale is basically two stories happening at once. That’s not a bad thing at all, and there’s a sense of this being a chapter of an ongoing story.

The first half of the episode ties up the Paris plot and does so with a remarkable body count and a surprising amount of emotion. That body count is sufficiently large I suspect we’re not going back to France at all, which is a shame as this episode gives Eriq Ebouaney as Fallou some really nice moments. He’s been the Daryl to the Daryl show, a stalwart, competent man who is overlooked until he isn’t. Here he gets a happy ending, one of the few, as he opts to stay in France with Soraya Hachoumi’s Akila. A new arrival, and a hastily essayed in love story shouldn’t work but it really does. Both Ebouaney and Hachoumi are great performers and their presence lifts the show and shifts the focus to everyone’s benefit. The emotion comes from the sense of finality to these events. Even before they leave, Daryl is visibly emotional in a way we’ve never seen before and the dire stakes, as is always the case in this show, really focus everyone in on what’s important.

Those stakes are truly dire too. Of the major French cast, only Sabine, played with wonderful lugubrious venom by Tatiana Gousseff, survives and even then her status is unknown. It’d be nice to catch up with these characters again but at the same time there’s a sense of them having done their job, and the story spinning out from them and spinning down onto a far tighter focus. Specifically, one on Carol and Daryl. So much so that Ash (who lives!!!!) and Laurent take the plane back to the US while Daryl, Carol and Codron take the long way home.

That brings us to the second half, as they’re led through the Channel Tunnel back to the UK by Angus (Matt Swift) and Fiona (Sarah McCardie), two Scottish travellers. We get an enticing hint of how England and Scotland are at this stage, but the second half is far more about some creatively unpleasant action and a subtle hint of something the show’s touched on before.

The action comes from the hallucinogenic piles of guano in the tunnel, which causes every character to hallucinate and Angus and Fiona to flip out. It’s a nice contrast to the hard-fought community that’s always been at the heart of The Walking Dead and gives the episode some smartly explored and creatively unpleasant violence. The action, playing out against the glowing mushrooms growing from the dead, is pleasingly crunchy and it’s also possible to read it an entirely different way. The hallucinations the characters see could be viewed as just that, or a brief touch of the supernatural. Daryl in particular gets a kind, subtle visit from Isabelle that could be read as an actual supernatural event if you wanted it to be. Much like Tyreese’s death in the original show and some of the fleeting hints of intelligent Walkers that Fear The Walking Dead hinted at. Your mileage will vary, but the story is very strong, regardless.

There are beats that don’t quite work, and it’s immensely frustrating to see Codron written off so soon after finally getting on side but I suspect we’re not done with him.

Verdict: We are closing the Book of Carol, a season defined by huge ambition and a refusal to compromise. Next season, Spain. I can’t wait. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart