Daryl Dixon Season 2 opener finally pays homage to one of The Walking Dead’s biggest deaths

Daryl Dixon Season 2’s first episode finally paid homage to one of the most pivotal early deaths in The Walking Dead after 13 years. 

The first episode of Daryl Dixon Season 2 is out in the wild, and the second outing of The Walking Dead spin-off series is off to an explosive start. 

As a lifelong The Walking Dead fan, I eagerly anticipated this season, given its focus on one of the franchise’s longest-surviving characters, Carol Pelieter (Melissa McBride). While I was expecting Daryl Dixon Season 2 to delve deeper into her character, I thought this would be a gradual process, exploring the complexities of her humanity through her epic friendship with Daryl.

I was not expecting the death of Carol’s daughter, Sophia, to be pivotal to her character development in the first episode, especially given that the franchise has barely discussed this moment since it happened 13 years ago.

Daryl Dixon season 2 opener finally acknowledged Sophia’s death

When Ash rescues Carol in the first episode of Daryl Dixon: The Book of Carol, he offers up his barn as a place for her to rest for the night. When watching, I thought the simple inclusion of the barn was a clever callback, a moment that fans of the original series would appreciate but ultimately would be a small and insignificant detail.

However, when Carol faces the barn, the scene completely shifts and cuts to a flashback of The Walking Dead Season 2. Instead of Ash’s barn, Hershel’s farm is reimaged, the dead bodies of Walkers littered on the ground and hiding behind the door is the silhouette of a young girl. Like in The Walking Dead Season 2, Sophia emerges from the shadows as a Walker, just as she did 13 years ago.

Later, when Carol joins Ash for dinner, the flower in the vase on the table triggers another flashback, this time to a conversation between Carol and Daryl, just an episode after Sophia’s death, in which the latter attempts to comfort Carol after losing her daughter.

While I love Carol and was jumping for joy when McBride’s involvement in Daryl Dixon Season 2 was announced, to say I was apprehensive would be an understatement. After all, when Season 11 of The Walking Dead ended, Carol felt like a fully realized character who had gone on her journey and didn’t need to be touched again.

After all this time, the franchise finally acknowledges Sophia’s death, and the importance this moment held for the rest of the show has now fully sold me on Carol’s return and left me excited to see how she evolves again.

Sophia’s death is what made Carol the fan-favorite character she is today

In many ways, Sophia’s death also signified a huge shift in Carol, so to see her finally reconciling with the loss of her child 13 years after is a huge win for Daryl Dixon Season 2. 

While Carol is killed off very early in the comic book series, the TV show flipped the script and turned her into one of the franchise’s best and most compelling figures. When first introduced in The Walking Dead Season 1 Episode 3, Carol is a quiet woman, a loving mother and a wife to an abusive husband named Ed.

When Ed is murdered, Carol begins to have some agency over her life finally however, the death of her daughter Sophia in Season 2 kickstarts one of the best evolutions to a TV character I’ve ever seen.

Throughout the series, Carol transforms into a complete action hero, a leader and sidekick to Rick Grimes and singlehandedly saves the group from cannibals and other rival survivors countless times.

Throughout Season 2 of The Walking Dead, the group searches for Sophia after she goes missing. While searching for her with the help of Hershel and his family for most of the season, she is revealed to have already been turned into a Walker when the barn that Hershel has secretly been housing Walkers in is blown open.

This revelation paves the way for one of the most significant early moments of The Walking Dead, with Rick cementing himself as the leader by shooting Sophia and kickstarting Carol’s transformation into the one-man army she has become.

Given that one of the main criticisms the second season of The Walking Dead faced was its slow pacing and prolonged search for Sophia, the rest of the series rarely, if ever, mentioned her death again. Therefore, having multiple flashbacks to Sophia in Daryl Dixon Season 2 was certainly surprising.

Not only does it pay homage to the early days of The Walking Dead, but it also makes me excited to see Carol return and finally, after all this time, come to terms with the version of herself that she shed when she saw her daughter stumble out of Hershel’s barn as a Walker.

This throwback breathes new life into Carol once more

There is no denying that she was often given her time to shine in The Walking Dead; however, Daryl Dixon Season 2 is finally giving the character her flowers (don’t look at them, Carol, please) and for someone who has been a Carol stan for a decade now, I’m so excited to see what the season has in store for her.