Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet watched the Season 1 finale for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, so be warned!
Thanks to the festivities happening at New York Comic-Con, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon dropped some huge news that seemed to point a finger at what fans could expect to see in the Season 1 finale, with TWD vet Melissa McBride officially arriving in Season 2 for a full arc as Carol. The actress did grace the screen as the beloved survivor at the end of “Coming Home,” and it was pretty awesome, but I’m not sure it fully balanced out the oddball quasi-cliffhanger set up by Laurent interrupting Daryl’s attempt to cut and run, and the lack of any kind of conclusion for main antagonist Genet and her experiments.
Now let’s dig into the nitty gritty of Carol’s in-person return, as well as the unexpected ways the stories closed out for the season’s hero and villain, with an eye on how this episode could inform how things play out in other upcoming Walking Dead TV shows.
Carol’s Back To Badass Basics, But To What End?
Following her voice-only return in Episode 105, which set up a “Who came back?” mini-mystery, Melissa McBride was in Carol mode on screen for the first time since she said goodbye to her scruffy BFF in The Walking Dead’s emotional series finale. Nothing too cryptic about the sequence, which basically had her arriving near Freeport, the spot where Daryl radioed her from, and teaching a lesson to the goon who was in possession of a very familiar motorcycle.
But what happens next for her? It’s assumed that she took off looking for him after he didn’t make his “back in a week” deadline, but how far is Carol set to travel to find him? If she stumbles across a similar scenario where walkers are being gathered up for experiments, will she decide to cross the whole-ass Atlantic Ocean on just the chance of stumbling across him down the line? Or will her curiosity take over and have her trying to get to the bottom of that situation stateside?
Basically, I’m wondering if fans will be waiting nearly the entire season to see Reedus and McBride together again, or if the spinoff’s creative team will figure out a way to steamroll through the middle bits to pair them up early on. I know what I’m hoping, anyway, and it absolutely involves Carol and Isabelle sizing each other up the first time they meet.
Does Anyone Believe Daryl Won’t Save Laurent?
Rarely does The Walking Dead franchise leave me completely flummoxed the way I felt when watching the final minutes of the Season 1 finale that played out before Carol’s return. Daryl shared a difficult goodbye with Isabelle, and left a farewell message for the sleeping Laurent before heading out on the first leg of his planned journey back to the U.S. With the ship in the distance and an escape in his grasp, Daryl had to fight off a rather unrealistically large swath of walkers suddenly rising up from the tall grass, but not even that struggle was enough to stop his progress.
Then dropped the other shoe, as Laurent popped up out of nowhere hollering Daryl’s name from atop the grassy incline in the direct middle of all the still shambling undead. Why didn’t Laurent just quietly dodge the zombies and meet up with Daryl directly instead of yelling and putting himself directly in harm’s way? It’s not like the latter was stepping onto the boat or anything; there was still plenty of time. In fact, there was enough time for Daryl to mentally run through the dilemma a few times as he looked back and forth between the boat and Laurent.
Due to the lack of panic involved, I couldn’t quite figure out if this was actually meant to serve as a legitimate cliffhanger for the finale, as it wasn’t entirely clear if Daryl realized how many walkers were closing in on the messianic lad. Clearly, Reedus’ character isn’t just going to ignore the kid in order to hit the high seas, considering he spent so many episodes trying to usher Laurent to safety. So does that mean he’s considering taking the boy with him to the U.S., or is Daryl just struggling with knowing that he’ll have to tell the people on the boat that their trip was pointless? Maybe the true cliffhanger is actually for whoever’s piloting the boat.
No Closure For Genet Or Her Zombie Experiments
As much as I wholly enjoyed watching Daryl adapt to life with Isabelle and the other protagonists, Anne Charrier’s Madame Genet never really sat well with me as the overarching villain, in part because her immediate motivations as the Pouvoir Du Vivant leader were murky at best. She’s in charge of Wildfire Virus experiments that seek out walkers from across the globe for test subjects, yet those tests don’t seem to have produced any winning formulas, considering Daryl and Quinn dispatched the modified monsters without things getting too strenuous. (Quinn took a fatal blow, but whatever.)
So her science team sucks, and her army suffered a barrage of casualties going after Laurent and Daryl, even though Genet’s enforcers really only had one job: being more violent and badass than whoever they came up against. In the end, Genet is still aiming to find her targets, without anything getting resolved for her story, but at what point will it make more sense to her to back off and taper off the body count?
While we’re at it, I have to say I’m also quite a bit disappointed by the way Romain Levi’s soldier Codron ended things. Not in the sense that I truly wished he’d followed orders and murdered Laurent and possibly others in cold blood; I’m fine with his conscience not suffering for morally heinous choices in that vein. But I don’t really understand why this dude so hellbent on avenging his brother’s death not only spared Laurent & Co., but then felt that murdering his fellow soldiers was an additionally great move, despite knowing he’d have to answer for it later. It should have taken an entire episode to genuinely steer him into redemptive behavior.
All that said, I still thought it was a fun and exciting way for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon to wrap up its first six-episode chapter, and I can’t wait to see where things go in Season 2 once Carol presumably becomes more entrenched in the overall story. For now, the season is completed, but can still be streamed with an AMC+ subscription. And head to our 2023 TV premiere schedule to see what other new and upcoming shows are on the way.