In the zombie infested rebirth of the Walking Dead universe, the biggest surprise among all the dead cities and belated reunions was the fact that the middle series, Daryl Dixon, managed to be a genuine breath of fresh air despite all the rotting flesh on display. Taking the enigmatic loner and dumping him in another country altogether, his adventures in France managed to take a lot of the typical aspects of the series that had grown incredibly stale over its impressively long run.
Well, for the second run of the Walking Dead spin-offs, Dixon’s leading the charge for a change and he’s bringing the one long running character who was conspicuous by her absence in the original run of separate shows. It’s time to open the Book Of Carol as we welcome back the shows most prominent, middle-aged killing machine – but will her return offset all the hard work Daryl Dixon managed to achieve?
We rejoin Daryl about two weeks after the climax of the previous season after he chose to remain with the Union of Hope’s fortress and train young Laurent in the finer points of zombie killing despite the fact that the higher ups of the Union worry that all that brain splatter will affect the pacifist ideals they need the boy to embody. This leaves Daryl feeling a little like a fifth wheel and an outsider as the feeling that he’s not much more than the Union’s blunt, American instrument, but he shifts back into killer mode when word gets out that the troops of the depot Genet has managed to capture allies Fallou and Emile and is transporting them to somewhere undoubtedly nefarious.
In the fracas that follows, Daryl manages to put his homesickness on hold as he manages to get Genet in his gunfights…
But what of the Carol of which this series is partly named after? Well, as we discovered during the coda of the previous season, Carol has decided that Daryl’s mysterious disappearance needs to be investigated and continues to track down his last known whereabouts by tearing through various groups of survivalists and hunters until she finds proof by tracking down Dixon’s trusty crossbow. From there, she discovers her friend’s fate as she learns that he was spirited away to France in an unlikely series of events and vows to bring him home.
Exactly how she’s going to accomplish that when there’s no boats around to hijack proves to be something of a conundrum, but luckily she spots a passing plane, tracks it back to where it came from and introduces herself to Ash Patel, the pilot who has spent most of his days mourning his dead young son and learning to fly the planes he was so obsessed with when he was alive. As Carol plays on his grief while offering up a fabricated story about her husband and daughter (both actually dead) being stranded in France when the apocalypse first struck.
The first season of Daryl Dixon almost single handedly brought the entire franchise back up to the level of must-watch TV after the main series managed to plant the reputation of the show six feet under and it was a huge improvement over the previous spin-off, Dead City, that simply chose to reheat many older themes that even fans had become weary of. However, it’s with a sizable amount of frustration to report that Daryl Dixon mostly goes the same way as it thrusts Carol back into action with a surprisingly amount of lazy writing – something that eventually pole-axed a lot of the previous series. But first, in the spirit of respect for the first season, let’s focus on the good of the episode which, unsurprisingly, continues to examine Norman Reedus’ stranger in a strange land as his survival instincts butt up uncomfortably with the pacifist leanings of the Union. However, while all the French set stuff still continues to be engaging, all the built up plot is rudely shoved aside in order to accommodate its new co-star. While Daryl’s bond with Laurent strengthens in the face of the rather intense destiny that faces the young boy and the continuing battle with the forces of Genet gors up a notch, they’re only side notes as the show seems far more interested in bringing Carol up to speed as we introduce Melissa McBride’s fan favorite roaring up a road on a motorcycle like she’s a fucking Terminator. From here, it’s standard Walking Dead stuff as she blows through all in her way with her trademark mix of smarts, lies and acts of brutal violence that gets her exactly where she wants to go in almost a single episode.
However, this presents something of a problem as the effort of pushing her forward in the story results in some of the most scoff inducing plot contrivances the show has seen in quite a while. While the show’s creators would no doubt defend this as fast tracking the character back into the universe and into out hearts by having the insanely resourceful woman do her thing, she effortlessly cruises through the whole thing like the show was somehow switched to easy difficulty. Her outwitting gangs of tough-types without even trying is one thing, by her spotting a easily trackable plane casually passing in sky the exact moment she hits a seemingly insurmountable speed bump is more than a little insulting in 2024.
While most of Carol’s sped-through adventures are just a disappointingly glorified, convenient, victory lap, there’s still some moments that hit home with Carol rejigging her tragic life story in order to tug on Ash’s heart strings brings back the more machiavellian parts of her personality being a reminder that her single-minded nature doesn’t just involve shooting people in the foot with a crossbow to get info. Also, while long time Walking Dead honcho Greg Nicotero’s direction can’t raise the IQ of most of the episode, he does reliably deliver some startling visuals. Watching a walker take a pair of shears in the mouth and keep on staggering and another get utterly shredded by the propeller of a plane still reliably fires up the gorehound within you and a wide shot that sees a horde of walkers loping through a forest while illuminated by lighting is as awesomely gothic as the franchise has ever gotten. But these quality moments of horror can’t change the fact that the way the showrunners have injected Carol back into proceedings has simply knocked the momentum of the best Walking Dead show in yonks noticably off the rails.
Maybe it would have been best they’d thrown Daryl and Carol back together immediately and then back tracked in a flashback episode as it might have stopped from drawing so much attention away from the French plot threads and it worked just fine in The Ones Who Live. However, while the return of Daryl and Carol proves to be a disappointing lapse back into the sort of storytelling that ran the franchise aground in the first place, we still have a whole five episodes to go that could turn things around – but the way things are going, the sooner the show merges it’s two leads the better or things might just turn to merde.
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