That’s a wrap on Season 1 of Daryl in Paris, aka The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. But don’t worry, there’s more to come. The team from the hit AMC show is back together, and already filming Season 2, now titled The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol.

Yep, Carol Pelletier (Melissa McBride) is back in Daryl Dixon Season 2. And not only that — and spoilers past this point for the Daryl Dixon Season 1 finale — she makes a not-so-surprise return in the final minutes of this week’s episode. Not so surprising because AMC sent out a press release announcing her return earlier in this week.

“I’ve known there was much more to be told of Carol’s story as I felt her so unsettled when we last saw her, as she watched her best friend, Daryl, ride away,” McBride said via the press release provided to Decider. “Apart or (hopefully!) together, their stories run deep, and I’m so excited to continue Carol’s journey here. This team of storytellers have done amazing work to land these two established characters in an entirely new world to them, and I’m loving the discoveries!”

Here’s how things go down, as the final moments of Episode 6, “Coming Home,” have multiple cliffhangers. On Daryl Dixon’s (Norman Reedus) end, he’s brought the semi-mystical child Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) and his caretaker Isabelle (Clémence Poésy) to the safe haven of The Nest, aka Mont Saint-Michel. With that done, Norman heads to the beach of Normandy to find his grandfather’s grave (it’s revealed that Grandpa Dixon fought and died in World War II), then takes a boat back to America. Instead, Laurent wanders over to say goodbye and is surrounded by encroaching zombies as Daryl sees the boat, ready to leave, in the distance. So Daryl is caught between going home and saving Laurent.

…And then there’s that final scene. Cutting back to America, we’re reintroduced to Carol, who is trying to track down Daryl. She waylays a dude who bought Daryl’s bike in the way only Carol can (knocking him on the head with a lead pipe and leaving him to die in a car trunk), and heads off to follow Daryl’s trail. She may run into some problems once she gets to that whole “Atlantic Ocean” thing, but let’s see how it all pans out.

” I’ve always been a fan of Carol and I’ve always been a fan of Melissa’s performance in the show,” showrunner David Zabel told Decider over Zoom. “I was really thrilled that Melissa was up for [this].”

To find out much more about the season finale, the potential romance between Daryl and Isabelle, and the “Daryl killing a walker with a baguette” scene that never made it past the writers room, read on.

Decider: We end with Daryl standing on the beach, stuck between these two choices… How much of this was writing for an open ending and knowing there would be a season two, versus finishing up what you had to say over the course of six episodes?

David Zabel: Well, it was always, to me, the most dynamic ending of the story for season one… The ending of season one should be this choice that he makes because really it’s central to the pitch. And it was really even before he knew there was a season two… Sorry, let me go back, Alex, because the truth is, when I first pitched this idea, it ended with him on the beach, the way it ends. The first time I pitched the idea to Norman, when I I didn’t have the gig yet. And that was always the way it ends, because I just thought that was a dynamic way to end the story that was going to be told in six episodes.

Thematically, it made sense to me, because it’s about a guy who’s trying to get back home, who ends up forming connections to a different home in the place that he’s trying to get back from. And that to me was just dynamic and cool. So if it had been posed as “Oh, can you do a six-episode story and end the story in six episodes,” then I guess I would have rethought it. But I never imagined that that’s what they wanted to do, or what I would want to do. And so it was left there thinking that they’re hoping there would be a season two without knowing it. But thematically, to me, it was always the dynamic ending. There was never any other ending, there was never a closed ending that we talked about.

Are you thinking about it as a two-season arc? Does it go further than that? Is it ongoing? What’s your thought process like now?

My thought process pretty much is that it’s ongoing until someone tells me it’s not. [Laughs] No, it’s ongoing in the sense that we are filming season two. And I’m thinking about what season three could be. There’s no official word on season three. It’s just me thinking about it because that’s my job is to be ready for the next thing. And it’s logical and telling the story of season two that I have, just like in telling the story of season one, I was thinking about season two, I sort of have to think ahead. So that’s… I kind of think season to season. I don’t think in five seasons or seven seasons or anything like that. I thought I had a good idea for season one with a rough idea of what a season two would be. And now I have a good idea of season two, which is in the midst of filming with a rough idea of what a season three might be.

The big cliffhanger of course, is Carol heading in Daryl’s direction. Is she also going to have to float to France on an upside-down boat?

[Laughs] She’s gonna hang glide across… No, I don’t know the answer to that. You’ll have to tune in to see what Carol’s next step is in her attempt to get to Daryl. [What’s] set up is that she’s in the United States and she’s worried about Daryl and she’s looking for him… That’s what we see in episode six. And beyond that, there’s an open canvas. Except that it won’t be on an upside-down rowboat with her strapped to it. Like Norman was.

Obviously, fans were very upset about Carol joining the spin-off, then leaving the spin-off… And then ultimately, there she is, at the end of the season. What changed behind the scenes? What can you talk about there?

A lot of what you just mentioned [is] the story of this show before Daryl Dixon and France happened. That’s before I was involved, I wasn’t part of The Walking Dead universe. So I don’t know the details of some of the stuff that you’re alluding to about when it was going to be Daryl and Carol. I’ve heard things now a little bit in talking about what the future would be, and in being friends with Melissa and Norman, but I don’t know the details of what happened before that.

So when I came in, the task was very simple. We want to do a show about Daryl Dixon in France. Tell us a story, David. That’s how it started for me. So all of that had already happened. Since then, of course, as I’ve become ingrained in the world… I’ve always been a fan of Carol and I’ve always been a fan of Melissa’s performance in the show and I know how big the fandom is for her. And so I was very excited when, a little bit after I got going, I was able to talk to Melissa and say like, “Hey, I got this idea to keep the characters connected and to keep you as a character alive in the world. Could we do this little story where we have a radio call between you and Daryl in episode five, and then we see you in episode six?” And I was really thrilled that Melissa was up for that. I felt like it would signal to the audience that the character is still very much alive in the world and that we’re committed to her.

What I thought was really interesting thing thematically, in the last episode, you introduced the idea of Daryl’s grandfather, William T. Dixon, and then ultimately, he visits his grave at the end. Where did that idea come from? And why was that important to you to include in the final episode?

Yeah, it’s a good question, a really good question that hasn’t been asked. And I’m happy to talk about that. The first thing is, thematically, this show was always meant to be, we have to be consistent and live up to the standards of The Walking Dead, but we have to broaden the aperture and bring some new elements to it. So on a character level, we know who Daryl is, we know a lot about Daryl, we talked about Daryl’s background, we talked about how he was brought up in a dysfunctional household. We talked about his relationship with his brother. We’ve talked about the allusions to his father having been abusive and clearly not a good father figure. And we talked about how that interacts with his relationship with Laurent in this season. And we were in France.

We thought, well, how can we get some new piece of information about Daryl that connects somehow to the story of him and Laurent, and also connects to his being in France. And so we just went down the road, that line is saying, like, who was his father? Who was his grandfather? Oh, his grandfather’s probably a vet? Oh, what if he was a vet, who landed in Normandy in World War II? We followed that line of thought, to try to say, this is a great piece of specific history that is new to the audience but lines up with what they know. And also feels very specific to this show and this world, and connects, you know, it’s one of many connections between America and France that you see in our show. But the most intimate version of that.

And I assume that’s why Daryl ends up fighting on the beach of Normandy like his grandfather, having to make his own choice at the end of the episode.

That’s right. Jason Richmond, who works with me on all these stories, and all these scripts, he had this great idea that the last beat of that should be Daryl having to fight his way off the same beach that his grandfather had to fight his way on to. That last action beat with Daryl having to get through those zombies to get to that boat to try to get home… That was meant to be this interesting, kind of complicated inverse of this experience that his grandfather had there 80 years ago.

You mentioned Laurent. I wanted to talk about him a little bit. I think we pretty conclusively get that he is not a mystical savior who’s going to save the world. Did you at any point consider going in the other direction? I feel like that would change the world of The Walking Dead dramatically, if so.

It’s interesting because some people feel like it’s undefined. And they’re leaning into the idea that we tried not to define it, we tried in many ways to let the audience fill in some of the spaces and read it the way they want to read it, which I always think is interesting when I’m in the audience and it’s a way to respect the audience… We’re not telling you, it’s this or that. We’re showing you a story, and you can read certain things into it. I don’t think we would ever go full-fledged superpowers or anything like that. But the idea of when a person, a human being is imbued with the belief and hope of a large group of other people, what that does, on some mystical level, that was something we were interested in exploring. Whether you believe that a messianic figure is messianic, mostly because of the way that he affects other people. And maybe some of the other stuff connected with that, that stuff is not real, that’s sort of up to you to decide.

I’m really interested in Buddhism and I’m interested in how they have a to identify the next Dalai Lama, and there are other messianic stories, of course, in various religions. I’m always interested in that line between what makes them a special human being that seems to be motivational to a group of people, and what tips them into a place where they’re capable of things that other humans are not capable of. So we were trying to walk that line and leave room for interpretation, and we continue to explore that idea and that topic in season two.

One more thing about that actually. So I will say we are aware that The Walking Dead is essentially a realistic show about people surviving during an apocalypse that happens to have Walkers. The Walkers are the buy-in… The Walkers are the element, that is the special sauce as it were. So we weren’t going to… We were never trying to add another special sauce.

Let’s talk about Daryl and Isabelle. We have the clearest indicator of romance in this episode, with the sponge bath scene that’s going on, where he’s very gently washing off her wound. Having talked to other folks in the franchise, I know you all have to tread very carefully around Daryl romance. What was your take on that? How far can you go? Is there a flirtation? You’re giving me a little bit of a look that makes me think, “No, actually, it isn’t romantic at all.”

[Laughs] No, no… I wouldn’t say it’s not romantic at all. Norman and I talked about this a lot at the beginning and what I wanted to do was to not force anything or spoon-feed anything in terms of romance. What I wanted to do was create two characters – not create two because Norman/Daryl already existed – create a character in Isabelle, who was a great foil for him in the sense that they are people with very different worldviews coming from a very different perspective, who find themselves connected. And that connection keeps growing.

I used to say if romance happens, romance happens. But to me, that’s in the eyes of the audience. And the actors feel what they feel, and they play what they play. It’s not meant to either be romantic or not romantic, honestly, and that might sound a little bit like I’m obfuscating, but I really mean that. I just felt like what I didn’t want to do was a TV romance. Norman didn’t want to do that either. And I’m sure Clémence [Poésy] wouldn’t want to do that either.

So if it feels romantic, then that’s what’s coming through. And I think that’s great. And I certainly as a writer, and my whole team of writers, part of the beauty of television is you follow the performances to some extent as you’re writing. So we see this happening in this episode. So now we’re gonna write this in the next episode because that’s our reaction to the film. That’s our reaction to what the actors are bringing to it. And the dynamic they’re bringing to it without saying, it has to be this or it has to be that because to me, it wasn’t crucial to the story. It wasn’t vital to the story. But what I really cared about was that in a mature adult way, these two people with very strong opposing worldviews somehow were coming together, and were bound by the circumstances of their story and specifically by Laurent, this child who brings them together. There’s a deep connection there, there’s a deep sense of connection between them. And that romance could certainly be a part of that.

You’ve got an organized military organization here in France now. We’ve got the Civic Republic back in the United States. Are we headed towards some sort of World War Walking Dead?

[Laughs] That honestly, would be a Scott Gimple question because he runs the Walking Dead Universe. I don’t run the Walking Dead Universe. So I really don’t know. This show is apart and separate for the time being. But there’s certainly I suppose, a world in which one or two of these spin-offs comes together, or all of them, but that would really be a Scott Gimple question. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. I didn’t work in The Walking Dead Universe before this. So this show is my little area that I take care of, and the bigger questions like what you’re asking are outside of my field.

If I can make one request: I would love to see a zombie holding a baguette shambling in the background in the next season.

[Laughs] You know. We’ve talked about it in the room. We actually – one last thing I will tell you – It was sort of a joke, but we kind of loved it, was that Norman, at some point has to take a stale baguette and brain a zombie with it. A stale baguette. I really wanted to do that. But I knew that Norman wouldn’t do it, and everybody would say we’re being silly. We had a lot of good French jokes in the writers room.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.