Filming that scene by the lake with Norman was the most difficult scene on this show that I’ve ever had to get myself through. It was an absolute mixed bag of Carol and Melissa. I knew going in that it was going to be difficult… those words on the page, the first of our last two scenes together, the impending finality was feeling very real.

Once I sat on that bench, once Norman sat next to me, that was it for me… I knew I couldn’t get out of my own way. To battle it would’ve been a mistake. Come what may, it had to be honest. It was Carol with Daryl, and it was me with Norman, and I will miss them both. It’s a beautiful scene about friendship and trust. I loved it.

We did several takes of the scene where we last see Daryl & Carol together, when they tell one another “I love you.” One of the things I love about working together with Norman is that we don’t rehearse, which was the case with this scene. Each take was a little different. These are the last words we hear them say to each other. In this final scene, I was struck by Daryl’s deliberateness to tell Carol that he loves her, the stillness he held as he said it, and then her reaction to seemingly try to intercept the weight of it, tossing it back to him lightly, playfully, for the road ahead. It’s a good way to remember them, taking care of one another.

“I think of the dead all the time, and about the living. Who I lost. I think about them all every day. Their faces, what I learned from them, how they made me who I am. So much more than all this made me who I am. All of our lives, becoming one life. We’re together, pieces of a whole that just keep going for what we gave each other. One unstoppable life. You showed me that. You gave me that. We’re the ones who live.“

WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN by Angela Kang: Carol & Daryl ride off together!

The change with Melissa not going into the spin-off happened pretty late in the game. So we’d always planned that the two of them were going to ride off together. In the original version, they would’ve gone on the bike and pointed west and then would’ve gotten sidetracked.

And then when we were running the finale, we were like, “Okay, let’s reconceive how they end.” So it becomes, he rides off, and she’s there to support him because there’s no anger or anything between them about it. It’s just he’s going to go off on a mission, and she has a different mission right now.