Daryl Dixon Postmortem: Walking Dead Director Greg Nicotero Opens the Book of Carol (Exclusive)

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol premiere, “La Gentillesse Des Étrangers.” “Home is wherever the people you love are,” Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) says on the season 2 premiere of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. For best friends Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride), that was the Commonwealth, the Ohio community where they settled on the eleventh and final season of The Walking Dead. But then Daryl disappeared while making a pit stop in Freeport, Maine, so Carol left home, hit the road, and tracked down her friend, only to learn he was shipped halfway around the world by the French researchers importing American walkers for experiments. 

Overseas in France, Daryl embarked on a daring rescue mission to intercept Madame Genet’s (Anne Charrier) convoy transporting Fallou (Eriq Ebouaney) and other hostages from the Pouvoir base in Paris before they could be forced to give up the location of The Nest. The mission was successful, but the Buddhist monk Losang (Joel de la Fuente) was  willing to be patient and prudent for “the greater good.” That means the prophesied messiah, Laurent, who isn’t yet ready for a mysterious ceremony, according to Jacinta (Nassima Benchicou).

Meanwhile, in Maine, Carol spotted an aircraft circling overhead and tracked the pilot — a man named Ash (Manish Dayal) — to his farm. Taking advantage of the kindness of strangers, Carol lied to Ash, claiming she needed a ride to France to find her missing daughter Sophia (who has, in fact, been dead for years).

The episode, which was directed by Greg Nicotero, was filled with callbacks to The Walking Dead season 2. Callbacks like Carol’s flashbacks to a zombified Sophia (Madison Lintz) shambling out of Hershel’s barn (in “Pretty Much Dead Already”); a white-petaled Cherokee rose, like the one Daryl gave to Carol when Sophia was lost (in “Cherokee Rose”); and a barn burning to the ground as a farm is overrun by zombies (in “Beside the Dying Fire”).

“That was, without a doubt, something that was very calculated when we built that barn,” Nicotero tells ComicBook. “We literally built the facade of the barn to match the barn on Hershel’s property because we wanted to evoke Carol’s mindset at that point.”

That meant recreating the memory of Sophia stepping out of the barn, which happens before Carol lies to Ash about her real reason for flying halfway around the world.

“We know how cunning Carol is. And I always talk about, for me, the idea that Carol is not Rambo. She’s just efficient, and smart,” Nicotero says. “If you watch her character’s evolution from season one with Ed, and then when we get into season three, and then season four, Carol starts doing things that are very questionable.” Nicotero references Carol’s murders of Karen and David and then burning their bodies to prevent further spread of a virus, which led to Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) banishing her from the prison in season 4.

“There’s a lot of things that Carol sets into motion that she really doesn’t think too much about the consequences. She just does it,” Nicotero continues. “And then [season 5 episode] ‘No Sanctuary,’ of course, that’s her only option. Her only option is to raid [Terminus] and blow up the propane tanks and get her friends out. What we’ve always seen about Carol is that she’s been efficient. She knows exactly what she needs to do to save her friends and to protect people.”

In this instance, Nicotero explains, “She’s got a lot bigger path ahead of her, because now she has to figure out how to get to Europe. And the fact that she evokes Sophia in the lie to Ash to convince him to fly her over there, I think that’s one of the most interesting moments in the episode. Because you realize that the level of desperation that Carol is willing to go to, and the fact that she herself is partially reopening those wounds.”

When Daryl and Carol exchanged goodbyes in The Walking Dead series finale, also directed by Nicotero, she seemed relatively at peace. And then she radioed Daryl while he was on the road to tell him that someone or something “came back,” but the transmission broke up before she could answer. So what happened between The Walking Dead and Daryl Dixon to set Carol on this journey?

“That’s a great question, because we never really got too deep into that,” the director says. “I always took it as maybe that Rick had come back, and that it was Rick’s return that triggered or reignited some of that trauma. When you really get into the visions of her seeing Sophia, it’s interesting, because you would have thought that she had sort of dealt with that trauma already after so many years.”

“So it definitely had to have been something that kind of reignited it,” Nicotero teases. “One thing that I had talked to Melissa about was, maybe, it’s actually the fact that 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, because of the sense of loss that she was feeling and the desperation to find him. She had that desperation to find Sophia.”

Sophia’s disappearance and death also left its mark on Daryl, and Nicotero agrees with the suggestion that Daryl is trying to put distance — both literally and figuratively — between himself, Laurent, and Isabelle (Clémence Poésy) by boarding the next available boat back to America.

“Daryl is a unique character in the way that he enters the situation,” Nicotero says. “He changes the people that he’s met, and the people change him. In the end of season one, when he’s on the beach, he’s struggling with the idea that he’s bonded with this little kid. And so I definitely think that that plays into it, his desire to reunite with his family. But he finds himself, in that particular instance, that he’s got a new family and new responsibilities between Isabelle, and Laurent, and Sylvie. So he finds himself in a situation where he can’t quite extract himself yet, because he has those responsibilities. And that’s what I love about the character.”

Read our post-premiere breakdown with Melissa McBride about Carol’s return and stay tuned to ComicBook/TWD and ComicBook TWD on Facebook for more Walking Dead Universe coverage. New episodes of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol premiere Sundays on AMC and AMC+.