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This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol episode 1.
In the first season of The Walking Dead, quiet, submissive Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride) spends most of her time trying to keep out of trouble, both with the walkers who routinely invade camp and with her husband, Ed (Adam Minarovich). Carol’s primary job in the camp is to do laundry while Ed shoots his mouth off and butts heads with more capable members of the survivor group. With her husband domineering in public and abusive in private, Carol acquiesces to all of Ed’s demands, except where one person is concerned. When a convalescing Ed tries to get Sophia (Madison Lintz) to spend time alone in the tent with him, Carol stands up for her daughter and goes outside with the girl to bond with the rest of the group.
Carol and Sophia’s bond with the survivors only strengthens after walkers attack in “Vatos,” killing Ed and a whole bunch of other people. Carol’s concern isn’t with saving her husband, but in ushering her daughter to safety, which she does so successfully. Throughout the first season of the show, when Sophia is in trouble, Carol is right there to argue on her behalf such as in “TS-19” or physically shield her from the dangers of the new post-apocalyptic world. If nothing else, Carol has her daughter to give her a reason to go on, to keep struggling, to do the best she can in a world where her skills she picked up covering for her husband’s abuse are suddenly more valuable than any of her other homemaker tricks.
Then, Carol loses her primary motivation.
In the premiere episode of The Walking Dead season 2, “What Lies Ahead,” the RV breaks down and the survivors are forced to look for replacement parts on a stretch of highway when walkers attack. Carol watches, helplessly, as Sophia is separated from the group and chased into the woods by walkers. Carol never gives up hope in the search for her daughter, due in large part to the assistance of master tracker and amateur horticulturist Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus), who leads the search efforts and keeps going long after everyone else other than Carol has given up hope that Sophia can be found alive in the wilderness. Unfortunately for Carol, Sophia isn’t hiding in the woods; Sophia is trapped in Hershel Greene’s barn along with a whole bunch of other walker-fied people, with Sophia Peletier being the last of the bunch to shamble out into the pasture to be gunned down by Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) while Carol struggles to escape from Daryl’s grasp to be reunited with her undead daughter.
The search for Sophia, and Carol’s helplessness, changed something in the character, with Carol slowly transforming from laundry-scrubbing housewife to gun-toting bad-ass. She could still bake incredible cookies and take care of a house, but she could also assault a railway station full of cannibals using walkers as a shield and hold her own alongside the other hardened survivors in her group, be they in Alexandria, The Kingdom, Oceanside, or anywhere the stinking winds of the undead world carried her with Daryl and her friends at her side. She transforms from a follower to a leader, and even when she tries to keep herself separated from other people, her nurturing instincts draw her into relationships with Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Henry (Matt Lintz), and the orphaned Lizzie (Brighton Sharbino) and Mika (Kyla Kenedy).
None of these end particularly well for Carol. However, even after he leaves the Commonwealth at the end of the final season of The Walking Dead, Daryl remains an important person in Carol’s life, and that’s why she started the process of tracking him all the way to Maine in the final episode of Daryl Dixon season 1. Finding the guy on Daryl’s stolen bike was step one; step two is finding the junkyard where the bike was bought from. Daryl’s not there, but Carol gets the scoop; he’s been taken away to France on some sort of National Lampoon’s European Kidnapping situation, and there’s only one person who can get her there.
Carol ingratiates herself with Manish Dayal’s Ash by resorting to all of her old tricks. She’s a kindly woman in peril, by herself with a busted vehicle. All of the tricks she learned pacifying Ed and manipulating other people reappear in Carol’s approach, but then she sees something that stops her dead in her tracks and completely changes her mindset: a barn with double wooden doors that looks almost exactly like the Greene family barn. That triggers a flashback to Sophia’s last moments of undeath, and the moment where Carol Peletier’s original motivation to keep going was suddenly snuffed out.
That’s not the only reminder of Sophia’s presence. Dinner features flowers on the table, specifically a Cherokee rose, the very flower that Daryl used as a way to reassure Carol about Sophia’s safety and one of the first moments that launched the “Caryl” ship. Ash, like Carol, lost a child in the apocalypse, and rather than seeking out others, Ash retreated into routine, maintaining a greenhouse shrine for his son and painstakingly restoring a Beechcraft prop plane owing to his son’s love of planes.
Carol uses that against him, spinning a story of Sophia and her father on a trip to France prior to the end of the world, and a separation of years plus an ocean to tug at Ash’s heartstrings. The motivation she’d had to keep Sophia safe, and the pain of her failure, transform into a fable of finding her long-lost daughter gallivanting through Europe on a backpacking trip from hell designed for one purpose, to allow her to track down the last link Carol Peletier has to her daughter.
Daryl never abandoned the search for Sophia Peletier; he spent an entire season combing the woods for her. He was a one-man search-and-rescue team. In turn, Carol will leave no stone unturned in her pursuit of Daryl Dixon.
New episodes of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol premiere Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on AMC, culminating with the finale on November 3.
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