Season two of the hit spinoff sees Melissa McBride join the cast, reprising her role as fan-fave walker killer Carol Peletier
The past four-and-a-half years have familiarized humans from all walks of life with the concept (and harsh realities) of a viral outbreak. Indeed, the Walking Dead franchise began airing on TV a full decade before the COVID pandemic, but the show’s themes have only become more frighteningly relatable.
Since the pilot of The Walking Dead premiered on Halloween in 2010, it has spawned a whopping six spinoffs, with a seventh, titled More Tales From the Walking Dead Universe, currently in development. At the moment, however, fans looking for their zombie fix must look to the just-premiered second season of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — tellingly subtitled The Book of Carol — which reintroduces stone-cold killer of zombies and baker of cookies Carol Peletier. As ever, she’s played by Melissa McBride, who’s been with the franchise since season one of the original. And indeed, while Daryl (Norman Reedus) remains very much a key cog in this second season, it’s Carol’s turn in the spotlight.
Carol’s story has been promised to viewers for quite some time but has — until now — taken a backseat to those of not only Daryl, but Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan), who paired up for the spinoff Dead City, and Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) in The Ones Who Live. There is good reason for that, as McBride previously backed out of season one of the Daryl Dixon spinoff (originally titled Daryl & Carol) after the show changed its shooting location from the U.S. to France. But then the actress made her illustrious (albeit brief) return via a cameo in the season-one finale, with a subsequent promise from producers that Carol would be back full-time and with a vengeance in season two.
Indeed, as McBride was eventually able to make the shift in locale work, she grew just as excited as the fans to continue the arc of a character who’s grown from a traumatized victim of domestic abuse to a grizzled survivor of the apocalypse. “I’ve known there was much more to be told of Carol’s story as I felt her so unsettled when we last saw her, as she watched her best friend, Daryl, ride away,” McBride beamed in a statement, upon the announcement of Carol’s return. “Apart or (hopefully!) together, their stories run deep, and I’m so excited to continue Carol’s journey here. This team of storytellers have done amazing work to land these two established characters in an entirely new world to them, and I’m loving the discoveries!”
Joining McBride and Reedus on screen are Clémence Poésy (In Bruges), Louis Puech Scigliuzzi (Show Me More), Laika Blanc-Francard (Reign Supreme), Anne Charrier (Chefs), Romain Levi (Franklin) and Eriq Ebouaney (Kingdom of Heaven), all of whom also appeared in season one as an array of French survivors at odds over the future of the the country, and seemingly now hurtling towards all-out war. Among the new cast members this year are Manish Dayal, late of Fox medical drama The Resident, as Ash, a mysterious engineer from Boston who gets around in the apocalypse via a retrofitted single-engine plane.
That said, for most fans, this season is all about the Daryl and Carol of it all. But everyone involved is quick to caution, you shouldn’t expect a speedy reunion. As Carol hits the road and Daryl grapples with his choice to stay behind in France instead of heading home at the end of season one, the two best pals are on separate journeys. Speaking with Collider, showrunner David Zabel teased: “Season two keeps deepening that dilemma for Daryl, and all the stories in season one really come to fruition over the course of season two . . . all that stuff that was around Daryl. Now we add this parallel story, which is Carol searching for her friend and how that all comes together, and it gets really exciting and compelling and kind of massive by the time you get towards the last three episodes of season two.” Added exec producer and special effects guru Greg Nicotero: “We know that Carol is searching for Daryl, but Daryl has no idea that she’s going to show up there.”
Meanwhile, brace yourself for some gnarly new walking corpses: “We really keep ratcheting up the ways in which we’re switching up the world,” said Zabel, “specifically in terms of the different kinds of walkers that we experienced in France. We experienced what we call ‘ampers,’ these amped-up walkers, in season one. That gets ratcheted up a number of times in season two. Then there’s also, towards the end, a whole other different kind of walker that we’ve never seen before.”
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon airs Sunday, October 6, on AMC