Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol episode 4. “Who came back?” That was the question that Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) asked Carol (Melissa McBride) when his best friend connected with him over the radio to tell him that someone or something “came back” just before Daryl went missing in Freeport, Maine. But then the connection was lost, and Daryl didn’t get an answer to his question before he was transported halfway around the world to France on a cargo ship.
After Carol tracked down Daryl, following his trail from Maine to France, Sunday’s “La Paradis Pour Toi” episode finally reunited the duo for the first time since The Walking Dead series finale in 2022. The pair physically reconnected during an attack on the Nest, then emotionally reconnected during a trek through the French countryside.
“You said on the radio that time someone came back. Who was it?” Daryl asked. Carol then revealed “it wasn’t a person, it was a feeling.”
After settling at the Commonwealth community in Ohio, and then watching Daryl ride off on his bike, “Everything at Commonwealth got so quiet,” she said. “All that old stuff came back like ghosts. So I got out of there, and I was worried about you.” Carol also name-dropped Connie (Lauren Ridloff) and Judith Grimes (Cailey Fleming), telling Daryl, “She didn’t want me to go. Part of her knew I had to if there was a chance I could find you.”
It’s not unlike Daryl’s reason for leaving the Commonwealth: He told Judith that he would keep an eye out for her parents, Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira), while out on the road. Rick and Michonne eventually found their way back to each other and returned home in The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, placing the events of Daryl Dixon and The Book of Carol before that series.
“I always sort of took it as maybe that Rick had come back, and that it was Rick’s return that sort of triggered or reignited some of that trauma,” series executive producer Greg Nicotero told ComicBook about Carol’s visions of her dead daughter, Sophia. “And 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.”
“That’s one thing that I had talked to Melissa about: Maybe it’s actually the fact that she’s searching for Daryl, just like Daryl was searching for Sophia,” Nicotero added. “And that could have sort of 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 the desperation to find Sophia.”
New episodes of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon season 2 air Sundays on AMC and AMC+. Stay tuned to ComicBook/TWD and ComicBook TWD on Facebook for more Walking Dead Universe coverage.
