After that finale, showrunner David Zabel explains to The Hollywood Reporter the zombie spinoff’s next steps as production moves from France to Spain in season three.

Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon, Melissa McBride as Carol Peletier in ‘The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol’ finale. Stéphanie Branchu/AMC

The Walking Dead viewers don’t always get what they want. But more often than not, Daryl Dixon and Carol Peletier get what they need.

In the season finale of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol, Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride’s O.G. zombie-fighters finally escape France, but not exactly as they hoped. Heading into the hour, the fan-favorite duo were set to split from one another, as clutch rescue pilot Ash (Manish Dayal) couldn’t fit them both on his plane. Daryl decides to stay, despite Carol wanting to take his place in the sacrifice play. In the end, both of them get to stick around, thanks to the last gasps of the French autocrat army showing up right before takeoff.

Outgunned, Daryl briefly appears outnumbered until Carol shows up right in the nick of time to save his hide. Ash and maybe-messiah Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) manage to take flight, charting a course for the Commonwealth and presenting hope at alerting Daryl and Carol’s friends to their current European whereabouts. Whether or not that ever happens is a matter for another season — or perhaps even another spinoff — to resolve.

From there, the remaining moments of the finale focus on Daryl and Carol’s next steps, as they look to find a new way home. Their plan to travel to London via tunnel initially looks like a sure bet, until they wind up in a subterranean encounter with glow-in-the-dark zombies and hallucinogenic bat poop (you read that right). Having survived their fair share of shitty situations over the years, Daryl and Carol manage to persevere, conquering their respective demons: Carol squaring with the traumatic loss of her daughter Sophia so many years ago, and Daryl getting one last chance to say goodbye to the ghost of Isabel (Clémence Poésy).

The season ends with Daryl and Carol continuing down the tunnel to the tune of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” calling back to the episode’s opening scene, in which Laurent and Daryl sing the Rolling Stones song together. But it’s also a warning shot to our heroes, even if they can’t hear it through the fourth wall: Daryl and Carol’s plan to leave France for London isn’t going to go exactly as planned. Production is already underway on Daryl Dixon season three, currently shooting in Spain. How will Daryl and Carol wind up there? Impossible to say right now. But the decision to move these characters to another country required very little second guessing from the folks in charge of the show.

“We loved the reinvigoration we experienced going to France, and we wanted to continue doing that,” showrunner and executive producer David Zabel tells The Hollywood Reporter about the decision to move the show location. “On a story level, the characters should not settle down. It should be a road show. They have to keep moving [to return home]. At the end of season two, they’re going somewhere. We don’t know exactly where, and it’s not a direct line to the next place they go. But the idea is to keep the characters struggling and striving to get home and moving.

“On another level,” he continues, “we get to bring in a whole other culture and history and flavor and color and light and architecture. That’s going to be so exciting for reinventing the show. It felt like all signs pointed toward us continuing to move and get to the next place. In seasons five and six, it could be a different place. They’ll keep moving until they get home!”

Another country beyond Spain? What’s next on Daryl and Carol’s sight-seeing survival tour, a trip to Italy?

“I can’t tell you, but I do have a plan,” says Zabel. “I’ve talked to Norman about it. There is a very cool plan. But we don’t even know if we’re making season four yet…” (AMC released a season three teaser after the finale, previewing Daryl and Carol’s long journey home.)

What’s more, future plans surrounding Daryl and Carol could come down to a wildcard factor out of the Daryl Dixon team’s hands: The whims of the greater Walking Dead franchise.

Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol finale. Stéphanie Branchu/AMC

“I’ve had pretty free rein,” says Zabel. “I talk to [franchise chief creative officer Scott M. Gimple] all the time and he’s said, ‘You have free rein, at least for now. Keep doing what you’re doing.’ But at some point, I imagine some things might be determined by what other characters are doing and where they are. So, I don’t know if Negan’s [Jeffrey Dean Morgan] going to get on a raft on the Hudson and wind up [in Europe].”

Whatever the future holds, as long as The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon continues on, it’ll hinge on Daryl and Carol’s relationship moving forward. Says Zabel: “There’s so much they haven’t seen and experienced. They’re both characters who are [landlocked Americans], and in that way, they are these classic Americans in some sense who never got to travel the world. They both had reasons to stay close to home. That was part of what I thought was exciting from the beginning — taking those characters and exposing them to these things they maybe saw in a book once, or maybe saw a picture of, and now they’re in the middle of it.

“From the audience’s point of view,” he continues, “it’s a chance to see what the apocalypse looks like in these other parts of the world, and so the audience hopefully gets to experience the same thing as these characters. It’s like, ‘Wow, I’ve only seen the Eiffel Tower in pictures, and now I’m standing next to it… and also, there are walkers standing next to it, too.’”

***

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol is now streaming on AMC+. Follow along with THR‘s franchise coverage here, and keep track of all the spinoffs.