Every week for the sixth season of AMC’s post-apocalyptic drama The Walking Dead, Lenika Cruz and David Sims will discuss the latest threat—human, zombie, or otherwise—to the show’s increasingly hardened band of survivors.
David Sims: There comes a moment in every season when The Walking Dead kills time in preparation for a blockbuster finale. “Twice as Far” was it. It was a meandering hour, focusing on fringe characters and dwelling on plot developments that largely occurred off-screen, during the time jump between episodes nine and 10. It included a fairly unnecessary death and the baffling return of a character from the first half of season six, a one-episode villain who escaped with Daryl’s crossbow the last time we saw him. It grasped for emotional weight, but came off as confusing. It was, in short, a bad episode.
For some reason that final minute, and Carol’s voice-over monologue breaking up with her boyfriend Tobin, chafed the most of all. A lot of this season has focused on Carol’s tentative experiments with domesticity since arriving in Alexandria, and her relationship with Tobin was part of that (along with all her cookie-making). But Carol and Tobin’s romance has played out almost entirely in the background—I still have to think for a second to even remember his name—and whatever crucial decision they made to move forward as a couple, it happened during the months the show skipped, in between the pit of zombies and the war with Negan’s Saviors.