Melissa McBride Breaks Down Daryl Dixon: The Book of Carol Premiere (Exclusive)

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol premiere, “La Gentillesse Des Étrangers.” A mother’s love knows no bounds, but boundaries were crossed on Sunday’s premiere episode of Daryl Dixon season 2. First, after appearing in the final scene of last year’s season finale, Melissa McBride’s Carol continued her search for Norman Reedus’ Daryl in Freeport, Maine, where her best friend disappeared before he was transported by boat halfway across the world to France. Carol came across an abandoned boatyard that seemed to be a dead end — until she met a kind stranger named Ash (Manish Dayal), a pilot and parent grieving the death of his seven-year-old son, Avi.

Carol tracked Ash’s single-engine aircraft to his farm and presented herself as a hapless transient in need of help after crashing her car, a facade she maintained even after the opening of a barn door triggered a traumatic memory: that of her little girl, Sophia, stepping out of Hershel’s barn as a walker in The Walking Dead season 2 episode “Pretty Much Dead Already.”

After learning that Ash’s son died because he failed to protect him “like a parent is supposed to protect a child,” Carol lied to Ash when asked about her own child. Carol claimed she lost contact with Sophia after her father took her on an overseas excursion to visit relatives in Paris just before the outbreak 13 years earlier, and was visibly conflicted about manipulating Ash into flying her to France under false pretenses. 

“It was my only option. I couldn’t do nothing,” Carol said later in the episode, still pretending not to know her daughter is dead. When asked why she’s only now making the journey, she answered: “Couldn’t keep waiting, feeling stuck. I had to move forward. I had to try.” The episode ended with Carol’s secret intact and Ash piloting the plane headed for France, and it’s a secret that will hang in the air as Carol works through “dealing with some things that, over the years of The Walking Dead journey, that she has experienced.”

“That world never slows down,” McBride tells ComicBook. “It never has slowed down until Commonwealth. She’s going to seek out her friend. He hasn’t come back yet, and she really needs her friend right now.” As for what it was that stirred up old ghosts — Carol mentioned over the radio last season that someone or something “came back” — McBride teases: “I’m excited for the fans to see her dealing with some of the past trauma, talking about things she’s never talked about.”

The Greg Nicotero-directed premiere not only recreated the Sophia barn scene from “Pretty Much Dead Already,” but incorporated flashbacks from The Walking Dead‘s “Cherokee Rose” episode that can be traced back as the beginning of Caryl: the bond between the two characters that outlasted the flagship and spawned the Walking Dead Daryl-Carol spinoff. In bringing Carol full circle back to Sophia, Nicotero points out, “She’s searching for Daryl, just like Daryl was searching for Sophia. And that could have brought a lot of that back to the surface — the sense of loss that she was feeling and the desperation to find him.”

Adds McBride, Carol’s visions of Sophia “play a lot into the rest of the season in her search for her friend.”

“In a way, Daryl is such a touchstone for her. He’s been there from the beginning,” McBride explains. “Him not having come back yet — she cannot lose him, too. And I think that brings up a lot of this that she’s feeling and experiencing in Commonwealth, that she’s just got to go on this mission to find him. And then things unfold. Him not being there is a great catalyst for that to come up, when it does.”

New episodes of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol premiere Sundays on AMC and AMC+. Stay tuned to ComicBook/TWD and ComicBook TWD on Facebook for more Walking Dead Universe coverage.