I like where they’re going with it, I just think they could have done more with the runtime. I like that they showed how far Manousos was willing to go to avoid getting help from the plurbs, and I’m glad they gave us some time to appreciate how far he was going, but it just stretched out. He’s collecting rain water, he’s fishing in a creek, there are two separate scenes where he’s siphoning gas for his car. Two! Beautiful shots and great character development, but you have to let something land on the editing room floor.

Same with Carol. Do we need 20+ minutes to reaffirm that she is, in fact, lonely and sad? They could easily have carved 5-7 minutes out of this episode to give us a C plot or additional scene about one of the other survivors, give us some more clues as to what’s going on, shown us a bit of this weird universe they’ve established.

The comparison to TWD is apt, although TWD had 16-episode seasons, plus the pressure of being on linear TV and having to occasionally work in filler episodes for budget reasons to meet the episode quota. There’s no excuse for that on these streaming shows.

I do think they’ve set us up well for a meeting between Carol and Manousos. Hard to tell what’s going to happen, but your prediction is as good as any. It would save Carol from being the bad guy on the show.