Photo: Emmanuel Guimier/AMC
What made the first season of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (a.k.a. The Walking Dead: Study Abroad) so refreshing were the ways it immediately set itself apart from its parent series. After watching an ever-fluctuating group of survivors wander around the American South for over a decade, periodically attempting to restart society while fighting off zombies and increasingly interchangeable human threats, it felt great just to go somewhere new, with mostly new characters and new dangers and new history and even a new language.
Did any of us need to see Daryl’s journey continue? No. But he made for a surprisingly reliable protagonist, a sort of enigmatic Old West cowboy type who makes friends in a new town and considers abandoning his lone-wolf ways. Watching Daryl bond with characters like Isabelle and her nephew Laurent, you understood why he’d struggle to return to America and the Commonwealth. After all, I don’t want him back there. I’m enjoying the change of location too much.
But “La gentillesse des étrangers,” which translates to “the kindness of strangers,” actually spends more time in America than any other episode of the show so far, including that flashback-heavy episode that showed us how Daryl ended up in France. That’s because we’re no longer just watching The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. We’re watching the cumbersomely titled The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol, which promises to reunite a fan-favorite friendship from the original show. In our brief glimpse of Carol at the end of season one, she’d tracked Daryl as far as Freeport, Maine, where he was initially captured and sold to French sailors as food for the walkers they were transporting. Unlike in The Ones Who Live, which reunited Rick and Michonne very quickly, an ocean still separates our two main characters.
So it’s somewhat understandable that Daryl takes a slight backseat in this season premiere, even if the show is named after him. And there’s still promising material in his few scenes. Two weeks have passed since his group’s arrival at the Nest, and he’s still in the same headspace, torn between looking after his new surrogate family and finding his way back to the old one. In fact, he’s actually leaning more toward the latter option, considering the mixed signals he’s getting from Losang, the leader of the Union of Hope.
Losang’s deliberate decision-making and pragmatism make him a compelling foil for trigger-happy Daryl, whose intense walker-killing training regimen differs from Losang’s more ambitious plans for Laurent’s education. Now, I can’t count the number of times we’ve seen seemingly benevolent, pragmatic leaders turn out to be evil or fatally misguided in this franchise, so I’m primed to look at Losang with some suspicion, especially considering the discussion of a mysterious ceremony he has planned for the young potential messiah. But Joel de la Fuente brings a distinct energy to the role, assisted by the context Azlan (RIP) provided last season. Losang’s best efforts at pacifism will inevitably fall short, but he clearly has more up his sleeve than just blind faith, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it all goes down.
When the Nest receives news that three of their own have been captured by Pouvoir Du Vivant, including Fallou as well as Sylvie’s chéri Emile, Daryl immediately insists on taking part in the rescue. He doesn’t make any promises when Losang requests a little tact; when their planned ambush during a prisoner transfer almost falls apart because of an untriggered bomb, Daryl does the predictable thing and shoots Madame Genet’s driver himself, forcing the plan forward despite the risk. It pays off, though, and he even almost executes a creepily cackling Genet before she frustratingly manages to scurry away. (Come on, man. You gotta take that shot quick.)
The Carol half of the story takes up much more screen time, and its two-hander character study feels more reminiscent of the original show. But for now, it works surprisingly well. From the beginning of the episode, everything Carol does is in service of finding her old friend, starting with her visit to the body shop where Daryl left his bike behind. But crossing an ocean is a difficult task these days, so when she sees a Beechcraft flying overhead, it’s like a sign from God.
The plane belongs to Ash (Manish Dayal), a guarded and hypervigilant man who has everything he needs at his beautiful fenced-off compound, complete with trip wires and traps. Like many a fool, he falls for Carol’s “I need help!” routine, though she’s not necessarily planning to murder the guy for his plane. (I don’t doubt that she would if she had to, though.) She takes him up on his offer and stays the night in his barn, leading to one of two direct flashbacks to early The Walking Dead, when Carol relied on Daryl in the wake of her daughter Sophia’s disappearance and death. That image of Sophia stepping out of the barn is iconic and powerful enough that I didn’t need it spelled out so obviously here — even just the shot of Ash opening the barn doors with Carol’s reaction would’ve done the trick — but I suppose it has been almost 13 years since that episode aired, and some viewers might not know or remember the full context.
Almost anytime Daryl or Carol says the word “friend,” you get the sense that they’re thinking of each other, and this premiere definitely emphasizes how much Carol craves that closeness with someone again. Sure, she makes a dumb error in making a beeline for the now-unlocked greenhouse when the generator goes down, not stopping to make sure the perimeter is clear of walkers attracted by the sound of Ash’s plane. But she explains that she did it because she wanted to get to know her host better. And while grief and trauma are a constant in this world, the peaceful site of Ash’s son Avi’s grave tells Carol a lot about the man.
Ash gradually opens up about Avi, who died at seven years old (five years younger than Sophia was). Only a month after his death, Ash found the plane, which solidified the philosophy by which he lives his life these days: “If you’re not moving forward, then you’re dying.” If he hadn’t forced himself out of his grief spiral, he wouldn’t have found something to live for, a way to take to the sky and leave all the horror behind for a while. It’s basically the same lesson Losang taught Azlan with the pocket watch.
I spent much of this episode primed for Ash’s death, or at least primed for Carol to do something awful like steal the plane that symbolized hope for him after losing a child. But “La gentillesse” goes a different route — similarly cynical, but less predictable and more stakes-raising. Ash has ostensibly agreed to help Carol with her broken-down car, but she eventually manipulates him into offering to fly her to Europe by making up a lie about her ex-husband Ed taking Sophia to visit his aunt in France right before everything went to shit. Carol plays this pretty impressively, beginning with the choice to hold off on sharing her own grief story after learning about Avi. She doesn’t push Ash when he’s already angry at her for lying, and she doesn’t let the true nature of those lies come to light. She banks on him taking pity on a new friend, a practical stranger who has experienced a gut-wrenching pain similar to his.
It’s disturbing to see Carol reappropriate her loss just to get what she wants, especially because I remain convinced that this man will be dead by the end of the season, if not the end of episode two. But it’s fruitful dramatic territory for the show, and Ash is a solid new friend and scene partner, just like Izzy is for Daryl. It should be painful (in a good way) to watch this story unfold and wait for Ash to learn that he uprooted his entire life just for a woman searching for her buddy. You can already see the guilt on Carol’s face whenever he expresses his excitement and asks questions about the present-day Sophia.
Perhaps this premiere is a bit disjointed in its hopping between protagonists, lacking the focused drive of the first season. It’s true that, in general, the sooner Carol gets to France and integrates into the world of Daryl Dixon — as opposed to the world of The Walking Dead — the better. But as a reintroduction to a beloved character and a rich friendship dynamic, “La gentillesse” gets the job done. For an episode so heavy on the America, this season is off to a pretty solid start.
Un Petit Plus
• Bienvenue! I’m your new recapper. Like many (most?) Walking Dead fans, I have a very mixed relationship with this franchise, but I do find this spinoff to be a real breath of fresh air, even if it’s nothing groundbreaking. Excited to continue this journey with you all!
• You might recognize Manish Dayal from 90210 on The CW or, more recently, his main role on The Resident. To me, he’ll always be Ryan, Joe’s protégé from season three of Halt and Catch Fire. If you know, you know.
• No sign of Stéphane Codron yet, and it remains to be seen if his quest for revenge against Daryl for killing his brother is still active. If so, he really should’ve done it when he had the chance.
• Love the shot of the walker through the smudged glass in the background while Carol looks at Avi’s grave.
• Obviously, my favorite kill of the episode has to be Carol pushing the walker into a propeller, mainly because of that beautifully gross stuttering squelch. Great sound editing.
• The ethanol explosion seems like a problem, but hopefully it won’t lengthen the journey too much.
