Daryl Dixon: The Book of Carol Showrunner on That First Onscreen Daryl Kiss

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Oct. 6 episode of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol, “Moulin Rouge.” Mon amour! While Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Isabelle (Clémence Poésy) didn’t quite say Je t’aime in this week’s episode, “Moulin Rouge,” they did share a kiss during a romantic interlude overlooking the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, France. Isabelle isn’t Daryl’s first love interest — that was Lynn Collins’ Leah on The Walking Dead — but the scene marked Daryl Dixon’s first onscreen kiss, as the Daryl/Leah romancing happened off-screen (in part due to being filmed during the pandemic).

The episode included scenes of Daryl teaching Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) and his aunt Isabelle to play American baseball, and Daryl inviting Isabelle and Laurent to come with him when he returns to America. After Jacinta (Nassima Benchicou) staged Laurent’s kidnapping to lure Daryl away from the Nest so that Union de L’Espoir‘s more fanatical followers could ambush the American and proceed with a ceremony to test Laurent’s immunity to zombie bites, Daryl and Isabelle had to fight their way back to the abbey with Fallou (Eriq Ebouaney). 

As they waited for low tide before they could go in and get Laurent out of the Nest, Isabelle accepted Daryl’s offer for the three of them to go home to America. She then taught him the French word dépaysant, which translates to “a nice change of scenery” that “makes you look at things a different way” in English, and Daryl leaned in and kissed Isabelle.

“The meaning of home takes on a different meaning for Daryl,” Reedus explains in AMC+’s The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol Episode Insider. “And I think these relationships start to form and these connections are made.” Adds series creator and showrunner David Zabel, “What we’ve seen in season 2 is that has deepened a bit. You absolutely see Daryl, Isabelle, and Laurent as a family unit.”

“From the beginning, there was always the hope that there would feel like a dynamic chemistry between the two of them,” Zabel adds of Daryl and Isabelle. “But it wasn’t a given, and it wasn’t a necessity. And of course, it happened, and so it made sense to us to want to give that more visual realization.”

Meanwhile, after a detour to Greenland, Carol (Melissa McBride) and Ash (Manish Dayal) landed in Paris so that Carol could track down her missing best friend. While Caryl shippers have long hoped for a Daryl-Carol romantic pairing, the show won’t be exploring a Daryl-Carol coupling or a love triangle.

When ComicBook asked Zabel about a possible Daryl and Isabelle romance as part of our first season postmortem, the showrunner said “there is a deep connection that forms between these two people over the course of this story.”

“It was very specifically meant to be drawn as an adult relationship of two people becoming connected to each other, drawn to each other in various ways, and understanding each other,” Zabel explained. “And of course, that could carry romance with it. I think that depends on the viewer in some ways, how you read into that right now.”

Zabel and Reedus wanted to avoid a “TV romance” that was “too much of a TV trope,” he added. While The Walking Dead flirted with Daryl and Connie (Lauren Ridloff) before pursuing Daryl-Leah, “There is this history that’s interesting, and I didn’t want to undermine that history or contradict it, either. So from the beginning, I think we’ve been successful in drawing the kind of relationship that we set out to draw between Isabelle and Daryl. That’s largely because of the performances of Clémence and Norman, but it was always the design that you should feel deep connection between the two of them.”

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.