Daryl Dixon: The Book of Carol Recap: “Moulin Rouge”

“Dear Lord, these are the things I hope for,” Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) prays. “I hope the people I care about will be safe and happy. I hope someday this feels like home. Everybody here says they love me. I see how they look at me. I know it’s not my destiny to be an ordinary child. I wish it was… but wishes are not hopes. I hope I can be the person they need me to be. But I also hope I can be the person I want to be.”

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon season 2 episode 2, “Moulin Rouge,” begins with Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Mathis (Théo Costa-Marini) returning to the Nest after rescuing Fallou (Eriq Ebouaney) and Emile (Tristan Zanchi), who were captured by Madame Genet (Anne Charrier) and her Guerrier. As Sylvie (Laïka Blanc-Francard) embraces her secret amour, Emile, Laurent greets Daryl with a wooden dog carving.

Laurent tells Losang (Joel de la Fuente) that he hopes Daryl stays in France, but he knows he misses Carol and the rest of his family back home in America. The monk knows that Laurent is unsure of his own future at the Nest, so he tells the boy: “Doubt is the question that faith answers. You doubt because you are special, not because you aren’t.” Jacinta (Nassima Benchicou) worries that Laurent will want to leave the Nest with Daryl, jeopardizing the deliverance that Losang promised the Union of Hope. “Even among our faithful, there are doubters,” she says, urging Losang to move up the ceremony and prove the boy is as he foretold: the messiah immune to the bite of les affamés. “The answer to doubt isn’t faith,” she says, “it’s proof.”

Elsewhere, Carol (Melissa McBride) and Ash (Manish Dayal) land their plane in Greenland to fix a fuel leak. Two locals, Eun (Minami Bages) and Hanna (Maria Erwolter), welcome the Americans to Kalaallit Nunaat: the Land of the People. The Greenlanders lead Carol and Ash through green fields of Tupilag — their name for walkers taken from an old Inuit myth about a flesh-eating beast — and tell the travelers they’re the first people they’ve seen in years. Eun and Hanna were doing climate research for their PhD when the world fell 13 years ago, and they’ve been the sole inhabitants of a Greenland research station ever since. Over cooked reindeer, Hanna posits that the apocalypse is the world trying to heal itself. “Tupilag is Mother Nature fighting back,” she tells Carol. “Never screw with somebody’s mother.”

Back at the Nest, a quiet Emile is shaken, but doesn’t tell Sylvie what happened with the Guerrier. She points out that he’s not hurt, so he explains: “I made a deal with God to bring me back to you.” Meanwhile, Daryl takes a break from training Laurent in self-defense and tracking to teach him an American pastime: baseball. He tells Laurent’s aunt, ex-nun Isabelle (Clémence Poésy), that he’s skeptical of Losang’s teachings. “A kid should question things. Be skeptical. Doubt,” she says. “It’s healthy.” When Daryl asks if she has doubts about Losang’s prophecy, she replies: “Like I said, it’s healthy.”

Daryl tells the former nun that she’s “not like them,” she’s “like us.” She believes that Losang will secure Daryl his boat ride back home to America and she’ll stay at the Nest with Laurent. “There’s always doubt,” she says. “Sometimes you let faith make up the difference.” Daryl invites Isabelle and Laurent to come with him to the Commonwealth, but his entire life has led to here. To the Nest. “Everything that’s kept us going.” “Maybe that’s all it was,” Daryl tells Isa. “Something that just kept you going.”

Later that night, Isabelle discovers Laurent is missing — and signs point to the Guerrier abducting him from his room. Losang deduces that someone gave up the location of the Nest, with Isabelle suspecting that the Pouvoir are taking Laurent back to Paris, so Losang instructs the Union to follow Daryl’s lead: “La Vérité est Espoir.” (Truth is hope.) As Isabelle leaves with Fallou and Daryl to find Laurent, Emile’s guilty look outs him as the culprit who made a deal with Genet.

In Greenland, Eun accompanies Ash to repair his plane. He tells her about flying Carol to Paris to find her daughter Sophia, and how he’s never thought of having more children after the death of his son, Avi. If everyone felt that way, she tells him, “Humans would die out like we were never here.” While Carol is ambushed at the research center, Eun explains that Hanna wants civilization to end. Eun wants to save humanity, however, by reproducing. The two women have been living in isolation, so… now that Ash has landed on their island, she’s going to let nature take its course. He politely declines Eun’s indecent proposal to procreate, so she draws her gun and tells him he doesn’t have a choice.

Hanna is supposed to kill Carol while Eun makes Ash her sperm donor. But Carol recognizes Hanna is conflicted about what she’s supposed to do, so she offers Hanna a way out of Greenland in Ash’s plane. When Eun returns without Ash, she tries to talk Hanna into shooting Carol, but Hanna instead fires a bolt into Eun’s forehead and kills her. Hanna then escorts Carol through the Tupilag-filled field at night, telling her that accompanying Carol and Ash to Paris is the first time that she’s thought about the future in years. Just then, Ash shoots Hanna dead with a flare gun. “She was going to kill you,” he explains. “I had to do it.” It’s the first time he’s ever killed a person. “I’ve killed a lot of people. I remember all of them,” Carol says. “It never goes away.” With that, they take off and head to Paris.

In France, Daryl’s group tracks Laurent’s trail through the woods, but Sylvie discovers that Laurent never left the Nest. As Daryl, Isabelle, and Fallou are ambushed and almost killed by their Union escorts, Sylvie finds Laurent locked away with Losang. Emile reveals that Isabelle and Fallou weren’t supposed to be there — the plan was to lead the American away from the Nest and kill Daryl so that Laurent wouldn’t leave the Nest. “Everything the Union had fought for would be lost,” Emile explains. “Meaningless. Everything we did.” Fallou tries to talk him down, and the trio discovers that a ceremony is planned for tomorrow to prove that “Laurent is special. That his birth was a miracle. That he represents a future where we can no longer be hurt by les affamés.” At the ceremony, Laurent will not succumb to a hungry one’s bite, “And all doubt will be dispelled.” Isabelle asks Emile: “Does this look like salvation to you?” Before he can shoot Daryl, Isabelle executes Emile.

Carol and Ash land at an old racetrack just outside Paris. He wants to go with her to find her daughter, but she wants him to stay at the plane. It’s safer, and he’s going to need to fly them out of there when the time comes. He reluctantly agrees to guard the plane and track down fuel, and Carol tells him not to keep waiting if she’s not back in two weeks. With a crossbow slung over her shoulder and her recollection of high school French, Carol leaves to find Daryl. “Bonne chance,” Ash calls out. “It means ‘good luck.’” To that, Carol replies: “Au revoir!”

The Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe tower over the City of Lights, long dead and dark and decaying. Making her way into Paris, Carol comes across Pouvoir propaganda — a symbol she recognizes from the rouge, blanc, and bleu-colored French flag planted outside the Maine auto repair shop where she got a lead on Daryl’s disappearance. The posters read: Pournous (“For Us”), Unir (“Unite”), Genet Nourrit le Peuple (“Genet Feeds the People”), Genet Protège les Vivants (“Genet Protects the Living”), Contre Lamaladie (“Against Illness”), Contre l’Invasion (“Against Invasion”), and Leprenons le Pouvoir (“Let’s Take Power”). A food truck with the same symbol makes a stop, so Carol cuts into a bag of seed and follows the trail of literal breadcrumbs to outside the Grande galerie de l’Èvolution.

Carol joins the Parisians lining up for food distributed by the Pouvoir. Sabine (Tatiana Gousseff), a Guerrier officer, tells the huddled masses that it is just “a small taste of what Maison Mère offers” — if they’re willing to support Madame Genet. Carol is loaded into a truck with other volunteers and meets Rèmy (François Perache), a French former English teacher who worries about his husband on the other truck. He tells Carol that Genet is trying to restore order and start over by creating France’s Sixth Republic, and it’s hard for the starved population to argue with food and warm beds. Vive la France!

On the Normandy coast, Daryl, Isabelle, and Fallou are waiting out the tide as they look out at the Nest: once believed to be their haven, it’s now a fortress. Laurent’s prison. “All these years, I believed in that place. In Losang,” Isabelle tells Daryl. “I thought it was the one thing that would save us.” She promised her sister, Lily, that she would protect Laurent, and now he’s going to suffer the same fate as his mother: a zombie’s bite. Isabelle then tells Daryl that she and Laurent will leave with him, if the offer still stands. 

“There’s a word in French: dépaysant,” Isabelle tells Daryl. The word is difficult to translate into English, but it means “a nice change of scenery. Makes you look at things a different way.” Daryl sounds it out: “Day-pay-ee-zon. I like that.” They share a glance, and Daryl kisses Isabelle.

Inside the Nest, Losang recites the words of the French philosopher René Descartes to Jacinta: “Doubt was the origin of wisdom.” If there’s any doubt that doubt is the theme of this episode, Losang assures Jacinta that he isn’t doubting their plan. “We’ll go through with the test. It will work,” Losang says. “But we’ll still have to deal with Daryl when he comes back.” It was Jacinta who amended the order — by ordering Daryl’s assassination. “I told them the truth,” she explains. “Daryl was in the way of our mission. That you felt he would be an obstacle as long as he was around.”

Furious, Losang asks about the fates of Isabelle and Fallou. While they weren’t part of the plan, Jacinta tells him, “Your prophecy inspired these people, held them together all these years. We’ve come too far to let it all be foiled now by weakness.” When the monk asks her if this is who they are, and who they want to be, she answers: “What we want — what we all want — is to be certain. Without that… everything falls apart.”

At the Pouvoir base at Maison Mère, Sabine reports to Genet that they are preparing the Atelier (the Workshop). She is Genet’s right arm, and it could have been the man she is now torturing: Codron (Romain Levi), a former Guerrier who spared Daryl and Laurent before pointing them to the Nest. Bloodied and beaten, Codron resists giving up the location of the Nest, even as he’s tortured with a cork. “The nun, the boy, the American… you’ll tell me where they are,” Genet grins. On a nearby table is Azlan’s pocket watch, which contains an image of what Genet seeks: the Nest at Mont-Saint-Michel, Normandy.

So ends the second chapter of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol. Stay tuned to ComicBook/TWD (and find us on Facebook) and follow @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for more TWD Universe coverage.