Spoilers below for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon’s Season 2 premiere, subtitled The Book of Carol, so be warned if you haven’t yet watched!
Of all the upcoming horror TV shows popping up in time for Halloween, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon’s second season gave fans a lot to anticipate in the form of an eventual reunion between Norman Reedus’ Daryl and Melissa McBride’s Carol, who parted ways in TWD’s emotional series finale. I’m happy to say Carol was firing on all cylinders in “La Gentillesse des Étrangers," both as a walker-destroying badass and as an emotional lynchpin.
McBride’s return was set up in the spinoff’s Season 1 finale, and after nearly a year of waiting, I don’t think any Walking Dead fanatics out there expected her first full Daryl Dixon episode to be a snoozer. But even with the actress and showrunner’s teases about callbacks to Sophia’s Season 2 demise, I honestly didn’t expect that narrative thread to be the biggest gut-punch by the end credits. Poor Carol.
Give Melissa McBride All The Action Sequences
Carol being a badass was something fans could almost always look forward to throughout The Walking Dead’s eleven-season run, save for the sporadic arcs where she was dealing with more depressing issues. Thankfully, things got off to a perfectly exciting start for the survivor on the way to embarking on her ocean-spanning trip to find her BFF in France.
Right away, and not for the only time in the episode, Carol gets what she wants from others by slightly nefarious means. I guess leaning on threats and shooting someone in the foot with a crossbow bolt is pretty damned nefarious, and it only got worse for everyone else from there.
But it was later, after she’d fooled Manish Dayal’s Ash into welcoming her into his home, that she pulled off one of the smoothest walker-escaping moves of any Walking Dead franchise character. Surrounded by walkers inside Ash’s greenhouse, She pulled three tall shelves around her to make a triangular cocoon held together by encroaching walkers. And she managed to climb up and out of the greenhouse with satisfying ease. (Completely ridiculous in any other setting, but just right for a Carol escape.)
I don’t know if Melissa McBride is interested in a project like Bob Odenkirk’s Nobody or Dev Patel’s directorial debut Monkey Man where she stars as a character on a feature-length mission in handing every other character an ass-whupping, but it’s a deserving career path. It would be feasibly easy for her to differentiate a new action-geared hero from Carol and her years on The Walking Dead, too. Somebody get her a revenge thriller script, stat.
The Surprising Way Carol Reflected On Sophia’s Death
Even though I'm one of those people who was genuinely disappointed with The Walking Dead's second season, largely due to the search for Sophia, I can in retrospect buy into Greg Nicotero's defense that this arc was the origin story for Carol and Daryl's kinship. And so I was also open to the idea that McBride wanted to show Carol dealing with her compartmentalized grief in ways that weren't fully explored in the mothership series.
The Season 2 premiere handled Carol's first Sophia-related flashback in a semi-impressionistic fashion across multiple timelines and locations, with new footage of Sophia (not Madison Lintz) emerging from Hershel's barn and shambling amongst other walkers. It went down as she was talking to Ash — not the best way to make a good first impression — and she was drawn out of it by echoes of what could only be Rick Grimes' gunshot that put Walker Sophia down for good.
I thought that and the actual TWD footage-infused flashback with Daryl would be the full thrust of why the creative team wanted to reflect on the trauma caused by Sophia's death. But no, Carol upended my expectations by lying about her grief and weaponizing it to convince Ash to fly her halfway across the world.
Ash unburdened himself with a story about his son Avi "A.P." Patel — whose memorial Carold almost immediately destroyed — and the guilt he felt about not being able to protect the 7-year-old. Not to mention sharing the reason he even got into flying in the first place is because Avi loved planes. It was his way of expressing forgiveness and again welcoming Carol into his life. And how did she respond in kind? Emotional subterfuge.
When it was her turn to get candid about her family, she was honest about having problems with Ed, but completely distorted the way things actually went down. Despite already having pissed Ash off, she lied to him about Ed taking Sophia to France before the outbreak, and that she was clueless about her daughter's fate, taking full advantage of Ash's parental guilt.
To his credit, Ash got angry with her, believing that she'd hid her true intentions about befriending him, not realizing that she was only then investing in selling the long con. And what's more, Carol clearly feels a sense of guilt about taking advantage of this generous saint of a man, and you KNOW she's going to get caught in that lie as well before all is said and done.
I don't feel very good about his chances of surviving all the way to meeting Daryl, either, given his constant good deeds, and Carol's penchant for being around people who get mauled. But I still doubt that he'll get killed off without first feeling the pain of finding out that he crossed the ocean based on a bald-faced lie about a dead child. That pain is inevitable.
Will Sophia continue to inspire Carol's actions throughout her journey to France? Find out when The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon - The Book of Carol airs new episodes every Sunday on AMC and AMC+.