Summary
The second episode of Daryl Dixon remains very French, but also very on-trend with explanatory flashbacks detailing the backstory of Isabelle and Laurent.
Well, it was only a matter of time before The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon deployed the franchise’s all-time favorite storytelling device – flashbacks. “Alouette,” the French word for “lark,” referencing a rather grim children’s song sung in the episode, uses snippets of the past to contextualize the present, delving into Isabelle’s backstory and giving a bit of shape to the undead downfall of France.
In the present day, meanwhile, Daryl plays do-gooder to some people he encounters on the road, with a surprising amount of fish-out-of-water comedy thrown in for good measure.
Lily
In the opening flashbacks, we meet a younger party animal, Isabelle, as well as an Englishman she clearly has a history with named Quinn, and Isabelle’s sister, Lily, who is also Laurent’s mother.
True to form, “Alouette” is deliberately ambiguous about Quinn’s relationship with Isabelle, how Isabelle has been spending her time, and what her relationship is like with her sister, whom she scoops up from her apartment and takes on the road, hoping to outrun the rapidly spreading infection.
We do get a glimpse of Quinn’s darker nature, though. Lily, as it turns out, is pregnant, which she has obviously kept from her sister. When Quinn learns of this, he proposes just straight-up abandoning her, so Isabelle takes the car and abandons him instead.
A funny note here is that it isn’t until the sisters later arrive at a hospital that Isabelle even mentions the whole zombie apocalypse thing to Lily, which is hilarious.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 1, Episode 2 – “Alouette” (Credit – AMC)
Who is in charge of the preschool group in Episode 2?
Anyway, in the present day, Daryl, Isabelle, Sylvie, and Laurent stumble upon a gang of ruffians who are the slightly grown-up preschool children whose parents never came to pick them up – an extraordinarily bleak idea and one I’m glad was included.
The kids have historically been led by Madame Dubois, who is now badly sick and bedbound, so one of the older kids, Lou, is in charge. Isabelle softens their initial resistance by claiming that Daryl is an American pastor, which as far as I can tell is just an excuse for a quite funny bit in which “Father Daryl” has to say Grace.
Madame Dubois needs medicine, and Daryl needs a horse, so he figures both objectives can be accomplished by raiding the castle – yes, literally a castle – of a hoarder who turns out to be a fellow American. He believes that the zombie plague is contained in France and that his family is waiting for him back in Texas, so you just know this guy is going to die immediately.
Madame Dubois
The fact he does is one of the weaker elements of the episode and historically the show itself – the abandonment of logic just for cheap drama. This is a guy who has survived over a decade in a highly visible local landmark, and yet the script requires him to be idiotic and useless, and thus he is. Even Daryl suffers from having to be saved by a bunch of literal children, but that’s nothing new.
Anyway, when everyone gets back to the preschool base, Daryl has to own up to the fact he was blagging about the medicine to get his hands on a horse to pull his cart, so it dawns on Lou that Madame Dubois isn’t long for the world and someone needs to euthanize her. Lou volunteers, figuring she owes her that much, and everyone gives her a nice send-off complete with a Mork and Mindy catchphrase.
At the end of the episode, after Daryl and the gang have departed the preschool, more flashbacks bring Isabelle’s backstory up to the present day.
After Isabelle and Lily arrived at the abbey, they settled there. A few months later, Lily gave birth to a son, but during labor, she passed away and turned. Laurent is, technically, the child of a zombie, and Isabelle named him after Saint Laurent, a Christian martyr, which perhaps doesn’t bode especially well for his future.
What did you think of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 1, Episode 2? Comment below.
RELATED:
