The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 1 Recap – Did Daryl Leave France?

This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon season 1.

Some things never change. Even after the end of the world, French people love to fight with each other about politics. Albeit, politics with a particularly Walking Dead slant to them. Gone are the days of the conflict between the La Republique en Marche!, National Rally, and La France Insoumise. Instead, stepping into that power vacuum are the Pouvoir des Vivants (Power of the Living) and the Union de L’Espoir (Union of Hope).

Into the midst of this mess washes up Daryl Dixon, literally, climbing out of a shipwreck and stepping into a post-apocalyptic French anthill. Almost immediately, Daryl is drawn into yet another conflict between the forces of good and evil, except this time Good has a savior-figure versus Evil’s traditional science obsession. Here is what happened in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon season 1.

Daryl Meets the Young Messiah Laurent

Almost immediately, Daryl makes friends with a girl and her grandfather after getting burned by a new type of walker. The group are attacked by mysterious paramilitary soldiers who they kill. Daryl’s thanks for that? He gets robbed by his new friends and makes an enemy for life in the form of Codron (Romain Levi), a soldier for the Pouvoir des Vivants.

However, Daryl also ends up making friends with a nun named Isabelle (Clémence Poésy), who takes him to her convent for treatment and tries to recruit him to take the savior of France, a boy named Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) who may or may not have special powers, to the Union de L’Espoir headquarters in Paris in exchange for a boat trip back to America. After another attack by the Pouvoir, which decimates the Union battle-nuns, Daryl agrees.

As it turns out, Isabelle has a checkered past, and after a side-quest involving a group of feral children living in their old preschool, the secret of Laurent’s parentage comes out. Isabelle’s sister was pregnant by her boyfriend Quinn (Adam Nagaitis ), but died while giving birth, and Laurent was delivered via C-section from his undead mother’s womb. Quinn, who was abandoned by Lily and Isabelle, has moved to Paris and become a powerful underworld figure who runs the Demimonde nightclub and also occasionally gets shipments sent back and forth across the Atlantic.

He tries to barter for Daryl’s cruise fare, only for Daryl to reject handing over Isabelle and Laurent. Isabelle and Daryl fight, causing Laurent to run away just as Codron (remember him?) meets with evil Pouvoir scientist leader Genet, who makes an arrangement. Codron gets to hunt for Daryl, and Genet gets fresh meat for her walker experiments.

Genet’s Amped Up Zombies

Genet (Anne Charrier) realizes that Laurent, as the figurehead of the Union, is inspiring people to fight back against the new order of the Pouvoir. She turns to Quinn, Laurent’s father, who agrees to track his son down in exchange for Isabelle. In a dramatic scene at the ruins of the Eiffel Tower, Laurent is nearly killed by a herd, but before Daryl can rescue him, Quinn’s men grab him and drag him off to Demimonde. Daryl sneaks into the nightclub and rescues Laurent. Isabelle agrees to stay in Paris in order to help Daryl and Laurent get passage out of the city as Genet’s Pouvoir lock the city down.

The two nearly escape, heading towards the Union’s headquarters in Mont Saint-Michel, but after another fight with walkers and the death of some more friends, Laurent decides that he’d rather go to America with Daryl. Not so fast, my friend. The two are captured by Genet and she uses Laurent as her figurehead to support her gladiator pit-fight with Daryl versus some of Pouvoir’s super-powered zombie variants. Thankfully for Daryl, his friends from the Union have infiltrated the Pouvoir’s event and start wrecking the place, killing guards and causing general chaos.

Quinn is bitten, but sacrifices himself to buy Daryl time to leave. He comes back as a walker, forcing Laurent to kill his father. Daryl and his Paris friends separate, with his group heading back towards Mont Saint-Michel. Codron shows up with his goons, only to realize that he’s incapable of killing an innocent child, so he turns the gun on his friends, but vows revenge on Daryl. Codron’s betrayal doesn’t go unnoticed; Genet tortures him for information about the whereabouts of the Union and that pesky American.

Carol Is On Her Way

Daryl makes it to the nest, but is conflicted. Go back to America, or stay in France and raise the messiah to be an ass-kicker? Daryl goes to Normandy and finds the grave of his grandfather, who died on D-Day, and prepares to head to Canada only to discover Laurent has secretly been following him, and brought a horde of walkers along for his troubles. Uh-oh. Daryl isn’t going to let an otherwise nice kid get eaten. 

Meanwhile, in Maine, Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride) continues her search for Daryl Dixon, finding his motorcycle and battering its hostile rider to get information on where the bike was found. Don’t worry, Daryl; your plans might keep going wrong, but Carol knows how to get what she wants one way or another. She’s coming, and things in France will be a lot less confusing once The Walking Dead‘s favorite ship is together again.

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.