Within the premiere episode of The Strolling Lifeless season 2, “What Lies Forward,” the RV breaks down and the survivors are pressured to search for alternative elements on a stretch of freeway when walkers assault. Carol watches, helplessly, as Sophia is separated from the group and chased into the woods by walkers. Carol by no means offers up hope within the seek for her daughter, due largely to the help of grasp tracker and newbie horticulturist Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus), who leads the search efforts and retains going lengthy after everybody else aside from Carol has given up hope that Sophia may be discovered alive within the wilderness. Sadly for Carol, Sophia isn’t hiding within the woods; Sophia is trapped in Hershel Greene’s barn together with a complete bunch of different walker-fied folks, with Sophia Peletier being the final of the bunch to shamble out into the pasture to be gunned down by Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) whereas Carol struggles to flee from Daryl’s grasp to be reunited together with her undead daughter.
The seek for Sophia, and Carol’s helplessness, modified one thing within the character, with Carol slowly reworking from laundry-scrubbing housewife to gun-toting bad-ass. She might nonetheless bake unimaginable cookies and care for a home, however she might additionally assault a railway station stuffed with cannibals utilizing walkers as a defend and maintain her personal alongside the opposite hardened survivors in her group, be they in Alexandria, The Kingdom, Oceanside, or wherever the stinking winds of the undead world carried her with Daryl and her mates at her aspect. She transforms from a follower to a pacesetter, and even when she tries to maintain herself separated from different folks, 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 those finish significantly effectively for Carol. Nevertheless, even after he leaves the Commonwealth on the finish of the ultimate season of The Strolling Lifeless, Daryl stays an necessary individual in Carol’s life, and that’s why she began the method of monitoring him all the way in which to Maine in the ultimate episode of Daryl Dixon season 1. Discovering the man on Daryl’s stolen bike was the 1st step; step two is discovering the junkyard the place the bike was purchased from. Daryl’s not there, however Carol will get the news; he’s been taken away to France on some type of Nationwide Lampoon’s European Kidnapping scenario, and there’s just one one who can get her there.
Carol ingratiates herself with Manish Dayal’s Ash by resorting to all of her previous methods. She’s a kindly girl in peril, by herself with a busted car. All the methods she realized pacifying Ed and manipulating different folks reappear in Carol’s strategy, however then she sees one thing that stops her useless in her tracks and utterly modifications her mindset: a barn with double picket doorways that appears virtually precisely just like the Greene household barn. That triggers a flashback to Sophia’s final moments of undeath, and the second the place Carol Peletier’s authentic motivation to maintain going was immediately snuffed out.
That’s not the one reminder of Sophia’s presence. Dinner options flowers on the desk, particularly a Cherokee rose, the very flower that Daryl used as a technique to reassure Carol about Sophia’s security and one of many first moments that launched the “Caryl” ship. Ash, like Carol, misplaced a baby within the apocalypse, and moderately than in search of out others, Ash retreated into routine, sustaining a greenhouse shrine for his son and painstakingly restoring a Beechcraft prop airplane owing to his son’s love of planes.
Carol makes use of that in opposition to him, spinning a narrative of Sophia and her father on a visit to France previous to the tip of the world, and a separation of years plus an ocean to tug at Ash’s heartstrings. The motivation she’d needed to maintain Sophia secure, and the ache of her failure, rework right into a fable of discovering her long-lost daughter gallivanting by Europe on a backpacking journey from hell designed for one objective, to permit her to trace down the final hyperlink Carol Peletier has to her daughter.
