TWD: Daryl Dixon Reveals the Truth About Laurent’s “Miracle” Birth

[This story contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon season 1 episode 2, “Alouette.”] “The truth can wait.” Those were Isabelle’s (Clémence Poésy) words to Daryl (Norman Reedus) regarding Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi), the orphaned 12-year-old boy who has been described as “special” and “not like other children.” But the truth could not wait for long. After last week’s series premiere introduced Laurent as “the new messiah” destined to “lead the revival of humanity,” Sunday’s “Alouette” episode of Daryl Dixon divulged a major reveal about Laurent and his mother in a flashback to post-outbreak 2010.

After escaping zombie-plagued Paris with her controlling boyfriend Quinn (Adam Nagaitis) and her younger sister Lily (Faustine Kozie), Isabelle discovers a secret Lily kept hidden for seven months: she’s pregnant. When Quinn suggests they drop Lily off at a clinic so they can stay mobile, Isabelle instead hijacks his car and ditches her abusive beau. The sisters are on the road when Lily suffers painful contractions, causing them to pull over and seek help from a stopped ambulance. Finding the paramedics have reanimated as les affamès (“the hungry ones”), they narrowly escape back into the car and eventually end up at the Abbey of Saint Bernadette in Lourdes. 

As Father Père Jean (Hugo Dillon) and the abbey’s nuns deliver the baby, Jean realizes that Lily has been bitten. Lily goes into premature labor, and before she can name her baby’s father, she succumbs to the bite’s infection and dies during childbirth. She quickly reanimates, but the zombified Lily gives birth to a healthy baby boy. “It’s a miracle,” says Père Jean of the zombie birth, handing the blessed child to his aunt. Isabelle christens her nephew Laurent after the martyr Saint Laurent, patron saint of the poor.

In “L’âme Perdue,” set 12 years later in 2022, Isabelle tried to convince Daryl that Laurent is “special” after the Union Del’Espoir’s (Union of Hope) leader, the Buddhist monk Lama Rinpoche, declared Laurent “an answer to the prophecy.”

“He’s shown abilities, perceptions, compassion beyond any child. He sees into people,” Isabelle said, referencing the uncanny moment Laurent repeated, word for word, what Judith Grimes once told Daryl on The Walking Dead: “You deserve a happy ending, too.” Laurent — who is unaware of his origins or why he’s “special” — only knows only that he gets a gut feeling, something he feels in his stomach. Père Jean was to escort Union Del’Espoir’s new hope to safety at The Nest in northern France, but after the priest’s death, it’s now Daryl’s mission to chaperone Isabelle and Laurent in exchange for passage home to America.

New episodes of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon air Sundays on AMC and AMC+.

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