Melissa McBride has shed light on flashbacks featuring her deceased daughter Sophia in the Season 2 opener of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol. In the search for her best friend, Carol tracks down the group responsible for Daryl’s disappearance in Freeport, Maine, and learns he’d been transported overseas to France on a boat.
Carol later meets Ash, a stranger grieving the loss of his seven-year-old son. Discovering Ash is a pilot, Carol lies about her daughter’s fate, who died in the seventh episode of Season 2 of The Walking Dead, “Pretty Much Dead Already.”
Carol falsely tells Ash that her husband, Ed (killed off in Season 1), took Sophia overseas on a pre-outbreak incursion to visit relatives in Paris. As Carol maintains the lie, Ash is left none the wiser of her deceit as he flies her to France.
“That world never slows down,” McBride explains in conversation with ComicBook. “It never has slowed down until Commonwealth. She’s going to seek out her friend. He hasn’t come back yet, and she really needs her friend right now.”
The episode, directed by Greg Nicotero, has skilfully recreated moments of significance from the flagship series, from Carol reliving the traumatic memory of Sophia emerging from Hershel’s barn to a Cherokee Rose, a flower given to Carol by Daryl in a Season 2 episode of the same name.
“She’s searching for Daryl, just like Daryl was searching for Sophia. And that could have brought a lot of that back to the surface — the sense of loss that she was feeling and the desperation to find him,” says Nicotero, who recently reflected on an episode of The Walking Dead marking its tenth-anniversary.
“In a way, Daryl is such a touchstone for her. He’s been there from the beginning,” McBride adds. “Him not having come back yet — she cannot lose him, too. And I think that brings up a lot of this that she’s feeling and experiencing in Commonwealth, that she’s just got to go on this mission to find him. And then things unfold. Him not being there is a great catalyst for that to come up, when it does.”
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol is available to stream in the UK on Sky and Now TV.
