The following contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 2, Episode 4, “La Paradis Pour Toi,” which premiered Sunday, Oct. 20 on AMC.

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 2, Episode 4’s title “La Paradis Pour Toi” translates to “paradise for you,” yet it’s anything but a paradise. The deaths of two major characters shake up the AMC series by implying that unless you’re two Americans named Daryl Dixon and Carol Peletier, you’re not going to make it far in the apocalypse. Death is a normal guest in The Walking Dead franchise, but should it be welcomed so casually that it’s just a box to check off a to-do list?

“La Paradis Pour Toi” follows up immediately after the events of the previous episode, where Losang holds Daryl and Isabelle Carriere hostage for helping Laurent escape. Unbeknownst to them, Marion Genet has an army of enhanced walkers outside their front door and Carol on her side. The standoff between the Power of the Living and the Union of Hope brings Daryl and Carol under the same roof and into each other’s arms, but at the cost of both Isabelle and Genet. But that’s not even the tip of the iceberg for “La Paradis Pour Toi,” which takes a bizarre detour into a cozy neighborhood in the midst of all this death.

Daryl Dixon Resorts to Fridging to Eliminate Isabelle

Isabelle Joins the List of Women in Refrigerators in Season 2, Episode 4

There was a time when death meant something in this franchise. The Walking Dead would spend an entire episode or season formulating its storyline around the death of a character. When someone died, characters fundamentally changed. Nowadays, the death of a human character is as effective as that of a random walker. Sylvie’s death in Season 2, Episode 3 bears no weight on the story in Episode 4. The death of Laurent’s father Quinn in Season 1 still hasn’t been digested. Isabelle and Genet fall into the same trap as both of those characters, and in the same episode, no less.

The circumstances surrounding Isabelle’s death are uncanny and distasteful. After being stabbed by Losang, she survives just long enough for Carol to meet her and attempt to save her — solely to prove that Carol can be a good person. In realistic conditions, Carol would’ve immediately questioned Isabelle’s character, just as the remaining members of both French groups wouldn’t immediately team up after Genet’s death. But because the plot requires a meeting between Carol and Isabelle, and an ultimately bigger group to challenge Daryl and Carol, Daryl Dixon fabricates a reality that necessitates the suspension of disbelief.

Isabelle: I can see them. The fireflies, they’re so beautiful.

There’s a big elephant in the room when Isabelle dies: she’s been fridged.The concept of fridging is a harmful trope in media, originally coined by writer Gail Simone as the “women in refrigerators” trope to describe female characters being purposefully harmed and/or killed to motivate male characters. Green Lantern vol. 3 #54 inspired the phrase when it killed Kyle Rayner’s love interest Alex DeWitt and stuffed her in a refrigerator to motivate him to defeat Major Force. Fridging is unintentionally used in apocalyptic stories where death is normal, and it frequently visits The Walking Dead franchise like an old friend. But this is 2024, and stripping female characters of their agency for the sake of a male character’s story is getting old.

Isabelle’s death both fulfills and confirms her purpose in the series: she was always just meant to be Daryl’s motivation. Her kiss with Daryl bonded them just enough so that he feels emotionally obligated to look after her nephew when she dies. That was never about a connection between two people who grew stronger from the apocalypse; it was about softening up a hardened male character to make him a family man. Daryl Dixon can’t even pull off the heartbreak her death deserves, because it relies on the reactions of Daryl and Carol — an emotionally unavailable person and someone Isabelle just met. If Isabelle had to be fridged, it should’ve been to Laurent, who would be rightfully moved by her death. The only redeeming quality about Isabelle’s ending is the acting of Clémence Poésy, who is fabulous even when weakened and bleeding to death.

Genet’s Death and the Daryl/Carol Reunion Save Episode 4

The Second Half of “La Paradis Pour Toi” Salvages an Off-Putting Episode

At least Genet is granted a cool goodbye. It’s easy to forget that The Walking Dead was once a horror franchise, because the characters are so accustomed to the terrors of the world. But Genet’s death is a reminder that the franchise can be cruel. She dies in a symbolically karmic fashion: being injected with her own walker serum and slowly transforming into a ghoulish, distorted monster while screaming in agonizing pain. Anne Charrier’s performance is impressively transparent, making one wonder how she made these traumatic howls sound so realistic. In a perfect world, Genet would’ve given her last Big Bad speech to someone she’d had a longstanding quarrel with, not Daryl or Carol. Her death scene has the same problem as Isabelle’s — it’s a mundane ending because Daryl and Carol aren’t the proper characters to deliver the dramatic impact. But Genet dying by her own hands is a perfect exit for a villain.

But the heart of the episode isn’t the two major deaths or the climactic confrontation between France’s biggest groups. It’s a domestic break away from chaos. “La Paradis Pour Toi” has the strangest structure out of all of Season 2’s episodes so far. The first 10-15 minutes feature a war-ridden showdown pillaged by death and riotous walkers. The rest of the episode is “Daryl and Carol Go Live in the Suburbs.” The light tone is off-putting, suggesting that Isabelle’s death and Laurent’s absence have no effect on the plot. Daryl Dixon wants Daryl and Carol to catch up on their lives since The Walking Dead finale — yet it’s also ignoring the bigger tasks at hand.

The positive in these domiciliary scenes is the calmness between Daryl and Carol. Daryl and Carol’s friendship is so naturally comfortable that they can just look at each other and know what the other is saying. They bicker like an old married couple, and respect each other’s boundaries due to their emotional and physical trauma. These are two characters that perfectly understand each other, even if they don’t quite resemble who they were in America.

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Is Heading Toward the End of an Era

Season 2, Episode 4’s Cast Reductions Foreshadow a Lonely Future

Daryl and Carol’s reunion in Daryl Dixon Season 2 has been long-awaited, so there’s a sense of relief that viewers can now watch how these two characters operate together in a foreign country. It’s a little weird how they moved past the near impossible circumstances of the reunion so quickly, along with the fact that Carol was the only survivor of Genet’s massacre. The plot armor is a hindrance to Daryl Dixon, removing any perception of logic that Daryl and Carol could die at any moment. If there is any living character who is raising the life-and-death stakes on this show, it’s Codron. Codron is crucially underused this season, and ideally, there would be more time to unlock his psychological trauma and his shift in loyalty to Laurent. But his demolished physical appearance and blood-curdling fear of dying to a horde of enhanced walkers is Daryl Dixon nudging that this world is still dangerous.

But for how long will Codron live in fear until he succumbs to Sylvie, Isabelle and Genet’s fates? Three major deaths in two episodes is a lot to take in. And with two episodes left, Daryl Dixon Season 2 raises a concern about where exactly this series is going. Daryl and Carol’s reunion suggests that their endgame is to go home to America. But premature Season 3 announcements say otherwise — they’re actually heading to Spain with over a dozen new faces joining them, including Emmy Award-winning comedian and actor Stephen Merchant. Season 2, Episode 4 feels like Daryl Dixon is cleaning house of the French characters to start fresh in Spain. But does that mean the wheel of dead characters will keep spinning until Daryl and Carol run out of countries in Europe?

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 2 airs Sundays at 9:00 p.m. on AMC.