The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon season 1 recap: Adrift at sea after a mutiny aboard a French cargo ship transporting genetically-mutated walkers across the Atlantic, Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) washed ashore in Marseille, France. He encountered the nun Isabelle (Cl?mence Po?sy) and Union de l'Espoir (Union of Hope), which recruited the marooned American to deliver Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) to safety at The Nest in Mont-Saint-Michel, Normandy. Believing the boy to be immune to zombie bites and the cure to les affam?s ("the hungry ones"), the Union sought to protect him from Madame Genet (Anne Charrier) and her Guerrier: warriors for Pouvoir Du Vivant (Power of the Living), behind the zombie experiments that Genet plans to unleash and usher in France's Sixth Republic . The first season ended with a boat arriving to take Daryl back home -- just as Laurent needed saving on the beach outside The Nest .
In Sunday's "La Gentillesse Des ?trangers" season premiere of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon -- The Book of Carol , two weeks have passed since Daryl stayed behind in France. He's unsure if The Nest is where he's supposed to be, but Laurent recites the words of the children of ?cole Maternelle Simone Veil : "Home is wherever the people you love are." Daryl has been training Laurent to protect himself from walkers as he waits for the Union's leader, Losang (Joel de la Fuente), to arrange another ride home. The Buddhist monk is concerned about the impact of repeated violence on the boy, who is "meant for much more."
The Union receives word that Genet's Guerrier captured hostages in an attempt to extract the location of The Nest, including their allies Fallou (Eriq Ebouaney) and Emile (Tristan Zanchi), who helped Isabelle and Sylvie (La?ka Blanc-Francard) secure passage out of Paris . A prudent and pacifistic Losang doesn't want to risk going on the offensive despite Daryl's warnings that Genet will have them killed if they don't give up the abbey.
Confiding in Isabelle, Daryl says, "I don't know if this is the place I'm supposed to be." She thinks she could be happy living there with her nephew, Laurent, but Daryl has doubts. "I keep thinking about all the people I left behind," he tells her. "Wondering if they're still thinking about me."
Halfway around the world, in Freeport, Maine, Carol has tracked down Daryl's last known location : an auto repair shop outfitted with a French flag. Carol, posing as an unassuming "friendly" with the broken-down motorcycle she got from Mick, reclaims Daryl's crossbow and gets Jones (Gilbert Glenn Brown), Grady (Craig Gellis), and Drew (Tercelin Kirtley) to give up what they know about her missing friend. All they know is that the transient Dixon got himself thrown on a boat to France for a free European vacation, which Carol points out sounds like bullsh-t. Pointing to the Pouvoir flag, Jones explains the French came to them to round up American walkers, paid them, and left on the only boat they've seen in years. Carol's search for Daryl then brings her to a nearby boatyard on a beach littered with rotting, washed up boats.
Her search at a dead end, Carol hears the sound of a small plane circling overhead and, distracted, crashes into an old drive-in movie theater sign. Carol tracks the plane to the perimeter of a farm encompassed by a motorized fence, and pretends to get stuck like an animal in a trap. "You seem like a really nice person, and I'd like to think that, even still, we can rely on the kindness of strangers," she tells Ash (Manish Dayal), who offers to patch her up and send her on her way. The farm sometimes suffers power outages because of a faulty generator, which powers the fence and locking mechanisms. Carol is hurt and it's nighttime, so Ash kindly lets her stay in the barn on his property.
Ash opens the barn doors, triggering a traumatic memory: when Carol's lost daughter, Sophia, walked out of the barn at the Greene farm (in the season 2 episode "Pretty Much Dead Already"). As zombie Sophia steps toward her mother as she did all those years ago, a gunshot rings out that jolts her back to the present. Instead of a barn full of walkers, Carol sees the plane. Even though the noise attracts the dead, Ash flies the plane at the same time every day "just to get up above everything for a little while." When flyboy takes off at his scheduled time the next day, a snooping Carol comes across a well-kept grave inside a greenhouse, unaware that a power outage has allowed walkers to flood into the now-unlocked gates.
Carol narrowly escapes the throng of walkers inside the greenhouse, and emerges through the roof just in time to see Ash return from his flight. Carol attempts to explain that she was curious about him, and if she knew him better they could become friends. "That's something that I've been missing," she admits. "A friend." Ash's anger subsides as he tells her about his son, Avi Patel, nicknamed "A.P.," who died when he was seven years old. Ash sits at his son's grave at the same time every day, expressing remorse for letting his son wander off and for "not protecting him like a parent is supposed to protect a child." Avi loved planes, so Ash restored a crashed Beechcraft and figured out how to fly -- not to fly anywhere in particular, "Just up."
The kind stranger cooks Carol dinner, but the sight of a familiar flower triggers another flashback: when Daryl gave her a Cherokee Rose back at the farm, when she still had hope they would find Sophia. As legend goes, when the Native Americans were forced off their land on the Trail of Tears, "The Cherokee mothers were grieving and crying so much, 'cause they were losing their little ones along the way from exposure and disease and starvation. A lot of them just disappeared. So the elders, they said a prayer, asked for a sign to uplift the mothers' spirits, give them strength and hope. The next day this rose started to grow right where the mothers' tears fell." That Cherokee Rose bloomed for her little girl -- and so bloomed Daryl and Carol's friendship.
Carol lies, telling Ash that her husband, Ed, took Sophia to visit relatives in France just before the outbreak. She hasn't seen or heard from her since. Ash realizes that Carol wants him to fly her to France to find her daughter, so she says: "If you knew Avi was out here, wouldn't you do anything, whatever it took, to find him?" The next day, Carol leaves the farm -- alone.
In France, Losang wields a j? as he practices Aikido -- the self-defense martial art that is the Art of Peace . The Union has learned that Genet is transporting the captives from Maison M?re in Paris to another facility, so Mathis (Th?o Costa-Marini) is going to lead a team to intercept the convoy. Losang reminds Daryl that the Union is a pacifist movement and "we resist violence," to which Daryl responds, "Same here. When I can." Losang uses a j? not as a weapon, but to prepare in case he might need a weapon. He then instructs Daryl to bring their people back safely.
In Maine, Ash goes after Carol and tells her, "I would do anything to find Avi. I mean, what parent wouldn't? But that's not the question. The question is, would you search for him? Would you give up everything to look for somebody you haven't met?" Carol answers: "If there was hope of finding them alive, then... yes." They'll be flying blind across the ocean with no communication, no weather forecast, and no idea what's waiting on the other side, but Carol says it's her only option. "I couldn't do nothing," she tells Ash. Why now? What changed? "Couldn't keep waiting. Feeling stuck. I had to move forward. I had to try," Carol says, so the kind stranger will try with her. The plan is to head north and hug the coast, make a pit stop in Greenland to minimize their time over the open sea, and switch out the tanks with the cache of homemade ethanol he keeps in the barn.
Carol claims she has an address for Ed's aunt where Sophia was staying in Paris, so that's where they'll start. Ash is hopeful her daughter is still there, but Carol, really talking about Daryl, is tempering expectations. "I have to remind myself there's a chance she won't be," she says. "She may not even still be alive." Ash, still hopeful, tells her, "She could be. I'm glad you still have that." Asked about his own reservations leaving the farm and Avi, Ash explains that he didn't leave the house for months when Avi died. Then when he did, he found the plane, and it saved him. "If you're not moving forward," Ash says, "then you're dying."
On the other side of the world, Daryl and Mathis have laid a tripwire to trigger an explosion to blow out the tires of Genet's convoy as it passes through a small French village. Meanwhile, back at Nest, Jacinta (Nassima Benchicou) tries to get Losang to move up a ceremony because he'll "never win them over," and "certainly not the American." Losang counters that the boy isn't ready, and as he looks over at Laurent playing chess with Sylvie, Jacinta presses him further: "He's not? Or you're not?"
Switching between America and France, Carol and Ash are forced to accelerate takeoff during a storm, and Daryl and Mathis move on the Guerrier convoy. A lightning strike short circuits the electric fence, igniting the ethanol-filled barn as walkers flood onto the farm. At the same time, the tripwire fails to blow, so Daryl fires on the truck, killing the driver, and sending Genet's convoy crashing onto its side as a gunfight erupts between the Union and the Pouvoir. Ash gets the plane off the ground through their makeshift runway besieged by walkers, and Daryl rescues Fallou and Emile from the truck just as a bloodied Genet crawls out of the wreckage.
"I should have known," she laughs as Daryl reloads his rifle. "Angels always send their most vicious demon to do their dirty work." Daryl goes to shoot Genet, but the explosive device detonates, and she escapes in the chaos. Carol and Ash, airborne, have escaped the zombie-invaded farm and are up above the storm. "There's nothing to be afraid of up here," Ash says, telling Carol to look to see sunrise breaking through the clouds. Carol, spirits lifted, and her strength and hope renewed, smiles as the plane charts a course for France.
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.
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