After four episodes of virtually single-handedly giving the The Walking Dead a new lease of life, it’s finally time for Daryl Dixon to have to dig into the franchise’s overfamilar bag of tricks in order to get all of its zombie ducks all in a line. Not only does Deux Amours have to quickly get everyone in the correct place for the rapidly approaching season finale, but it also has to tie up the mystery concerning how its squinty leading man found himself in France in the first place and in order to cram everything in, I guess some corners has to be cut.
It’s a shame, because I truly believed that the rather off-beat ending of the previous episode had opened up a completely revised status quo, but in the pressing need to get the show into a particular place, the show finally gives in to the lure of wrapping things up and impatiently shoving story arcs forward via the use of some frustratingly illogical plot twists.
After separating from Isabelle, Daryl and Laurent head out of Paris via boat in order to get the so-called chosen child into the protective arms of the settlement known as the Nest and away from the power hungry Genet. While they float down river like a bedraggled, French version of Apocalypse Now, Isabelle attempts to make their journey easier by trying to convince her shadey ex, Quinn, to help by moving back in with him. However, with her wild days far behind her thanks to a zombie apocalypse and joining a nunnery, she soon realises that she can’t go back to living that glitzy, but empty, existence and seriously contemplates either taking his, or her own life with a makeshift blade.
Elsewhere, Daryl and Laurent find they’re having troubles of their own after their guide has an unfortunate (and predictably fatal) run in with Walkers and Laurent decides to sabotage their quest in order to stay with his understandably pissed protector.
While all this plays out, we are occasionally strafed with flashbacks that reveal that Daryl had an unknowing clash with Genet’s zombie tinkering experiments even before he left America as he joined an group of people who will pay fuel for anyone who can provide them with still “living” Walkers to screw with. After a getting into a fight with a redneck whose methods of providing super fresh zombies proves to be especially disturbing, both Dixon and the offending hunter are bundled onto the boat bound for France as nourishment for the hordes of the living dead imprisoned on board. After a fiery escape that sees Dixon have his first encounter with one of Genet’s enhanced Walkers, we find that Daryl hurled himself overboard as a fireball took care of most of his worries, but as we bounce back to the present, our raggedy hero and his charge are captured by the guerriers around the same time that Quinn and Isabelle are exposed to Genet by a jealous Anna.
It seems like our heroes are now entering their darkest hour, especially when Dixon finds himself in a gladiatorial ring facing an enhanced Walker who looks ready to pop.
Before I roll up my sleeves and dig in to the all-too familiar issues that’s blighted many a Walking Dead season in the past, I feel like it’s my duty to point out that even though the fifth episode succumbs to a spot of lazy writing, it still remains far superior to anything else the series has attempted in close to a decade. The show thus far has done enough to keep things immensely watchable thanks to good characters and some truly engrossing world building, but in the rush to wrap up a six episode season, the show finally resorts to some disappointing tactics in order to awkwardly panel beat the story into something way more conventional.
While some of the decisions the showrunners make are sort of understandable when you take the approaching season finale into account not to mention the fact that, much like Dead City, a second season has already been ordered. However, while this news probably has a lot to do with the sudden switch in the quality of the writing, it’s still somewhat disappointing considering how much cracking work Daryl Dixon has put in thus far.
Take for example the flashbacks that finally reveal how Dixon ended up on his impromptu European holiday in the first place; given enough time, it would have been a prime opportunity for one of those full episode flashbacks as it tells a suprisingly complex tale that not only throws in fascinating hints about the zombie experimentation and some fiendishly memorable moments (the murder of a young man in order to obtain a fresh – and therefore more valuable – Walker is a nicely cruel sub-plot), it even feeds us a voice-only cameo from Melissa McBride’s Carol who delivers a seemingly huge teaser by announcing someone has come back. However, its potential impact is noticably defused by the stop/start nature of the flashbacks and they don’t truly come alive until a climactic speech from Genet merges with the explosive action aboard the boat.
Elsewhere, the difficult tightrope walk in making Louis Puech Scigliuzzi’s precocious Laurent remain on the right side of annoying finally takes a visible wobble thanks to the child’s shaky reasoning for cutting loose their boat in the dead of night. While he understandably can’t just cite the need to lazily manufacture drama in order to give the episode more twists, it just the latest in the long, lamentable history of the child characters making insane, selfish and idiotic decisions simply to lazily add another wrinkle in the story. While it doesn’t invoke Carl Grimes levels of punch-the-screen rage, it’s still a decision by the writers that simply makes Laurent unlikable when we’re supposed to be supporting him and Daryl’s subsequent tirade feels justified when it’s supposed to feel like a failure with our hero’s patchy parenting skills.
Scattered all across the episode are other such head scratching flaws that soon mount up due to the desperate attempts to squeeze everything in; Daryl and Laruent’s Muslim guide drops in a few pertinent issues about faith before somehow accidently impaling himself on a telephone pole; the inevitable betrayal by Anna that’s been building for a couple of episodes occurs despite only giving the character mere seconds of screen time; we’re shown that Sylvie, Fallou and Emile have infiltrated Genet’s impassioned speech without any real set up whatsoever and we still don’t yet know exactly why the bad guys are banging out super zombies – something that’s surely a bad idea in the midst of a decade-plus infestation of the undead.
As a result, while Deux Amours is still inherently watchable, everything that occurs is incredibly predictable and carries a palpable sence of been-there-done-that in a show that’s thus far avoided such tropes. I mean come on, does everyone in the zombie apocalypse really have a fucking gladiatorial ring just constantly ready to go?
Not a fatal head shot to the show by any means, but Daryl Dixon’s lapse in judgement is disappointing nonetheless.
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