We’ve made it into the back half of “The Book of Carol” with The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon 2×04. I was suddenly reminded of something that The Walking Dead was very good at in it’s prime. When we’d reach the middle of the season, there would always be a midseason finale that would kill off a main character, bring back a lost character, blow up something, or reveal something that we’d then have to wait months to find out more about. While there’s no break after this week’s episode, it sure does follow that tradition of the midseason finale.

Last week’s episode ended with everything going as badly as it possibly could. Daryl and Isabelle are locked up for not revealing where Laurent is while Carol is outside of the Nest moments away from becoming one of Genet’s walker experiments. Carol somehow manages to not get shot or injected by Genet’s men and is able to steal a vehicle (with former bad guy Codron chained to the back Mad Max style) and get inside the Nest before Genet. Meanwhile, Isabelle is taken to a separate room from where Daryl is so that she can be questioned even more by Losang. She refuses to break and even slices his face a bit, but tragedy strikes when Losang decides to stab her in the gut for her actions and leaves her on the ground bleeding.

Carol sets Codron loose in the Nest to fight the walkers that slowly begin to pour in. As she fights her way further in, she comes across a weak and bloody Isabelle. She gets her to a safe area and asks her about Daryl, who we then see finally getting out of his cell and fighting a group of walkers. He clears the room and just as we think there’s more coming, the moment we’ve waited all season for arrives: Daryl and Carol are reunited.

They hug and share a tender moment, but that moment quickly vanishes as Carol informs Daryl of Isabelle’s current state. They rush to her side and Daryl attempts to pick her up to carry her out of the Nest, but it’s too late. A shocked and broken Daryl and a concerned Carol escape from the Nest and head to the secondary meetup location to look for Laurent, but he seems to have already come and gone from it.

Carol begins to see a change in Daryl that she was not expecting — he genuinely cared about these people. They decide to follow the tracks left behind by Laurent and end up at a beautiful house in a small town in habited by an elderly couple. The couple take in Daryl and Carol and feed them and provide them with living accommodations while they find a vehicle to catch up with Laurent (who had also just been there).

While the couple is very kind and generous to Daryl and Carol, the husband betrays their trust and alerts Genet that they are hiding out on his property. He immediately regrets his decision to rat them out while Daryl and Carol and forces to fight their way out of the house. Just as it seems that Carol is done for at the hands of Genet, Daryl swoops in and shoots Genet with her own walker experiment dart and we get to see the truly horrifying and brutal effects of it on a living subject instead of a recently dead one.

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon 2×04 ends with Daryl and Carol heading out to track down Laurent and hopefully fly back home. Back at the Nest, news of Genet’s death has arrived and in a strange turn of events, Genet’s soldiers and followers decide to reinstate Losang as leader and help him harness this new walker experiment.

This series has finally found its stride with The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon 2×04. The plot moved at a brisk pace to keep up with the several important moments that occurred. We got the reunion that we’ve all been waiting for, plus a major character death and the loss of Daryl’s first true love interest Isabelle, and we got the long overdue defeat of Genet with the bonus of using her own messed up experiment to finally finish her.

The reunion of Daryl and Carol was so much better than I was expecting. It wasn’t the typical reunion; Daryl has been through so much since he last saw Carol and has invested his life in France to these new people. He shows his conflicted feelings about leaving without first saving as many of these people as he can, but he also misses his original family back home. We also see once again that Carol is still struggling with the death of Sophia all these years later and is triggered by barn doors. And in a powerful moment, Carol compares Daryl’s fear of losing Laurent to “not wanting to end up like her” having lost Sophia.

As far as the visuals go, once again this show continues to impress with its gorgeous sprawling French landscapes and fantastic walker designs in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon 2×04. And with the invasion and takeover of the Nest we got some great fight sequences, one of which was a very pissed off Daryl swinging his mace and using his knife to take out a large group of walkers and Genet’s soldiers alike.

My only real complaint with The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon 2×04 is not even about the episode itself. This episode gave us the big reunion, the big villain death, and the love interest death all in one episode, and more importantly not in a finale episode. Losang was “reinstated” as the villain in place of Genet, but other than that what else is there to make these last few episodes mean more than we just got in this episode? We’ll have to wait and find out next week!