S02.E01: The Book of Carol: La Gentillesse Des Étrangers

[Mr. Sparkle]

Carol Peletier and Daryl Dixon confront old demons in their fight to reunite with each other halfway around the world and protect the people they love.

Sunday, September 29th on AMC. 

Edited September 28, 2024 by Mr. Sparkle

[Starchild]

I like Ash, but he gon' be mad

[Brown44]

Can that plane even fly that long to Europe? Carol is gonna get Ash killed over a lie about her kid for DD.

Edited September 30, 2024 by Brown44

[Boofish]

I feel like she could have told him the truth and he would have still helped her. I didn't like how she manipulated him emotionally. 

I'm enjoying these sequels and all the good people our favorite survivors are coming across.

Ash come on man. It's been at least 12 or 13 years now. Carol was neatly dressed, well groomed, well fed and had a car. You can't possibly think she just surviving in the wild trying to hitch a ride to France. But I like you and Carol so I will handwave this one.

Solid start. 

[Brown44]

They justify Ash leaving bc his place would have been overrunned by walkers anyway. 

[slaterain]

Am enjoying this and feels like this spinoff is doing the best job of introducing new characters ( same with season 1). It’s different enough that I’m intrigued again. Only thing that I don’t quite buy but will roll my eyes and move along… how did that many walkers get through the one gate that only partially pops open when the power goes out let alone how many came in during her brief jaunt in the greenhouse. 

[MrPissyPuppy]

Continuity error:  Carol has her head out of the (open) side window looking up at the plane, then crashes her car into a tree.  Window is closed when walkers start arriving. 

[iMonrey]

I didn't think this was very good. I got kind of bored with it towards the end of last season so I've forgotten a lot of what went on and who the characters were. Every time the story shifted back to France I was bored. 

The stuff with Carol and Ash was slightly more interesting, but have we seen Ash somewhere else before this? In another spin-off maybe? He seems familiar. In any event, if his front gate opens whenever the generator shuts down he should have been overrun years ago. Talk about a basic design flaw.

[DonnaMae]

12 hours ago, Brown44 said:

Can that plane even fly that long to Europe?

They're going to stop over in Greenland to refuel.

[nodorothyparker]

It's kind of a major design flaw that every time the generator goes out your gate immediately pops open enough to let a whole herd inside the compound. But I realize this is yet another in-universe example of someone who was managing well enough until one of our crew showed up just in time for everything to go to hell, just as I understand that they needed to torch this guy's current entire setup to make almost literally flying blind across the Atlantic in a small rickety-looking plane on what would be a needle in a haystack search even if it wasn't based on a lie seem like a plausible thing to do.

I'm happy to have Carol back on my TV even if I'm still not sure how well she's going to integrate with the French crew or aesthetic. Ash seems like a fundamentally decent guy if a little too eager to take a stranger at her word. Maybe it would be different at the end of the world when most everything you ever cared about is gone anyway, but it never ceases to amaze how people in this world so easily latch onto total strangers with even the vaguest of ideas or promises. Carol bald-faced lying to the guy about Sophia feels like something that should bite her in the ass hard at a date to be named later assuming she doesn't get him killed right away. Maybe I'm just realizing I'm not terribly interested in watching another potentially interesting character be introduced and then sacrificed an episode later as a conveyance to get the lead from point to another. And yes, Ones Who Live, I'm still looking at you.

Daryl's scenes felt mostly like an afterthought in a show named after him.

 

[Mr. Sparkle]

11 minutes ago, nodorothyparker said:

Maybe I'm just realizing I'm not terribly interested in watching another potentially interesting character be introduced and then sacrificed an episode later as a conveyance to get the lead from point to another.

No way in Hell is Ash lasting until the end of this season. 

[Charlemagne]

2 hours ago, iMonrey said:

The stuff with Carol and Ash was slightly more interesting, but have we seen Ash somewhere else before this? In another spin-off maybe? He seems familiar. 

I don't think that he has been in The Walking Dead before but he was a main character in the TV series, The Resident.

[Straycat80]

I’ve always like Carol. One of the best flashback scenes was always the ones with Sophia. I don’t like that she lied to Ash. I don’t think he’ll last long when he makes it to France. Carol has not been very good luck for him thus far. 
I can’t remember what the whole story is with Daryl and those people he’s with in France. I’ll keep watching because I’ve always liked the relationship between him and Carol. 

[Brown44]

4 hours ago, DonnaMae said:

They're going to stop over in Greenland to refuel.

Ok. I thought they was in Virginia but there in Maine which makes more since that the plane can get to Greenland.

[Morrigan2575]

7 hours ago, DonnaMae said:

They're going to stop over in Greenland to refuel.

Which is exactly the route small jets take to get to Europe at least according the the crew man I spoke to on a private jet.

I didn't watch S1 and FF through the Daryl/France stuff. I really like Ash and, I'm really annoyed with Carol using Sophia to manipulate Ash to fly them to France.  I hope he doesn't die but, my expectations are low.

That being said I love Carol, she's a survivor and is able to use whatever means necessary...she'd totally win in Game of Thrones 😆

[Boofish]

Carol taught me a very valuable life lesson. Years ago me and my sister went on a cruise and signed up for an Amazing Race at one of the ports. Now if you were to describe me and my sister in 100 words "athletic" would be number 101. Everyone else was young and agile but neither one of us are competive. There was no prize. Just fun. 

But I told my sister. We don't have to be the fastest we just need to be the smartest. Even if we get everywhere last perhaps we can make up the time with our brains. We came in second 😍 That's why Carol has always been a favorite. She

[KeithJ]

Let me see if I have this right.  Ash has had this secure compound for what is probably years.  His generator goes out every now and then but he has NEVER had a problem with a gate just popping open when the power goes out until Carol gets there?

Then, after he gets the power back on and Carol cleans up the walkers, he doesn’t think so put some sort of manual lock on the gate as well?

Finally, we get a storm that completely fries his generator, blows up his ethanol, and lets how many hundreds of walkers through the gate?

Carol absolutely cursed this guy.  No way he makes it through the season.

[Iguessnot]

Just like with the Rick & Michonne series, after the premiere, an episode called the Return plays. In it the main characters of the new series reminisce about the Walking Dead series. It's really great getting the actors insights. I asked if any saw Rick & Michonne's episode and I don't recall that anyone replied. Did anyone catch the Carol and Daryl episode? My Tivo automatically recorded the episodes.

[Straycat80]

2 minutes ago, Iguessnot said:

Just like with the Rick & Michonne series, after the premiere, an episode called the Return plays. In it the main characters of the new series reminisce about the Walking Dead series. It's really great getting the actors insights. I asked if any saw Rick & Michonne's episode and I don't recall that anyone replied. Did anyone catch the Carol and Daryl episode? My Tivo automatically recorded the episodes.

I watched it. It was nice watching the actors reminiscing about their characters journeys. They were on the sets they filmed on too and talking about the people they had worked with. It was fun to reminisce with them. I always liked the early Walking Dead seasons. 

[Mr. Sparkle]

Crap, I meant to watch that last night and completely spaced it. I'll try tonight. 

[iMonrey]

12 hours ago, Iguessnot said:

Just like with the Rick & Michonne series, after the premiere, an episode called the Return plays. In it the main characters of the new series reminisce about the Walking Dead series. It's really great getting the actors insights. I asked if any saw Rick & Michonne's episode and I don't recall that anyone replied. Did anyone catch the Carol and Daryl episode? My Tivo automatically recorded the episodes.

Yes, I watched it last night. It was good. However, it really brought back to me what a wonderful show this used to be back in those early seasons and how much I was into it before it all went to shit around season seven. So in hindsight, maybe not a great idea to remind the audience your franchise has really gone downhill since its glory days.

That's kind of the problem now, the franchise just isn't offering anything fresh anymore. It's the same basic scenarios played out over and over again. Some new cabal of bad guys terrorizing the locals and the plucky freedom fighters trying to bring them down. (This time in France, that's the only difference.) It's the same-old same-old. That's not even a zombie apocalypse story, it's just any post-apocalypse story. 

I like the smaller story with Carol and Ash but even these stories are getting tiresome because it's just leading us to the main story about taking down the latest bad guys.

[Brown44]

20 hours ago, KeithJ said:

 His generator goes out every now and then but he has NEVER had a problem with a gate just popping open when the power goes out until Carol gets there?

Then, after he gets the power back on and Carol cleans up the walkers, he doesn’t think so put some sort of manual lock on the gate as well?

Finally, we get a storm that completely fries his generator, blows up his ethanol, and lets how many hundreds of walkers through the gate?

Carol absolutely cursed this guy.  No way he makes it through the season.

He can build a plane but he can't do something simple as tie a rope around a big rock to fortify the gate just in case the gate pops open from a power outtage. Aaand hundreds of storms have passed thru out the year's he's been there and this is the one time lightning hits.

Edited October 1, 2024 by Brown44

[Iguessnot]

7 hours ago, iMonrey said:

Yes, I watched it last night. It was good. However, it really brought back to me what a wonderful show this used to be back in those early seasons and how much I was into it before it all went to shit around season seven. So in hindsight, maybe not a great idea to remind the audience your franchise has really gone downhill since its glory days.

That's kind of the problem now, the franchise just isn't offering anything fresh anymore. It's the same basic scenarios played out over and over again. Some new cabal of bad guys terrorizing the locals and the plucky freedom fighters trying to bring them down. (This time in France, that's the only difference.) It's the same-old same-old. That's not even a zombie apocalypse story, it's just any post-apocalypse story. 

I like the smaller story with Carol and Ash but even these stories are getting tiresome because it's just leading us to the main story about taking down the latest bad guys.

The first episode had some annoyances. Carol got the Lori treatment crashing her car on a near empty road for no reason. The French kid mimicking the "Jessica get out of the water" videos, put him on my death wish list.  

[heisenberg]

I guess I will root for Ash (For the time he will be there).  Carol is annoying right from the start.  Why does she have to lie?

[Crashcourse]

I never liked Carol, and it pisses me off that Ash probably won't survive in Paris, and she will.