As the second season of Daryl Dixon races through proceedings in order to turn the Book Of Carol into a flip book, there was a real feeling that if this France-based arm of The Walking Dead didn’t pump the brakes and pay more attention to the details, it would be in danger of blasting right through the big stuff without giving it the weight required to actually mean anything. Well, with its fourth episode, it’s finally happened as Le Paradis Pour Toi ranks up numerous seismic plot points that all seem worthy of finale status, yet are ploughed through in rapid succession in order to point the entire series in a new direction.
Still, you feel the showrunners were banking on the reunion between Daryl and Carol to gloss over the more ungainly examples of writing, but when it comes to this episode, not even a magical resurrection of Glen, Dale and T-Dog could detract from the fact that Daryl Dixon is backsliding ever further into the worst of The Walking Dead’s most annoying habits.
After finding herself in a certain death style situation that sees her in a mass execution that will result in all the dead being turned into an Amper army, Carol apparently grabs herself an invincibility power-up and not only survives a hail of bullets, but manages to somehow escape, steal a buggy, coincidently rescue Codron and manage to instantly gain entrance to the Nest without barely breaking a sweat. Menwhile, in the chaos of Genet’s advancing forces and her army of super zombies, numerous other things go down that will have a major impact on those who will survive.
For a start, Isabelle is brought before Losang in order to tell him the current location of Laurent, but the interrogation takes a tragic turn when tempers flare; elsewhere, Daryl manages to escape his chains and fight his way out of the Nest only to run into Carol whom he had no clue was even in the same country, let alone the same battle. However, their reunion is soured somewhat by an immense loss which only galvanises Dixon into searching that extra bit harder for Laurent who has vanished from his hiding place by the time Carol and Daryl manage to reach it.
While Genet takes control of the Nest and gloats to a captive Losang about God favoring her more if she locates Laurent, Daryl and Carol go searching and stumble upon a small village of elderly residents and are taken in by kindly couple Theo and Didi who not only tells them that Laurent has passed through this way with a reformed Condron, but they can also supply them with a car – if they don’t mind fixing one up first. However, one quick betrayal later and another shock death means that the pieces on the board are all in flux once again, but what will this shift in the status quo mean in the long run?
While Daryl Dixon is still a diverting watch, any hope that it would regain the mojo found within its first season quickly evaporated after an opening, pre-credits sequence showed Carol escape from certain death with all the believability factor of a cliff hanger from one of those old, black and white serials that often stretched credibility like it was a Stretch Armstrong doll. I’m willing to buy that she survives a burst from a gatling gun by hiding behind one person (although the same trick doesn’t seem to work for anyone else) and I’m even down with her getting shot with an Amper fluid dart and pulling it out before she gets a dose; but the moment she drives the stolen buggy that has Codron chained to the back Mad Max style up to the sealed gates of the Nest, only for a blast of cannon fire to immediately blow it open was just too convenient for even me to bare. I don’t know about you, but I long for the days when Carol’s survival exploits where born from quick thinking, wit and an awe inspiring desire to live that saw her running rings around numerous adversaries with thrilling results. However, these days, watching her stroll through countless fatal situations by utilising more uncanny luck than a sack of four leave clovers is just getting steadily more exasperating – however, as much as it has been pulling me out of the story each and every week, watching her be a human cheat code proves to be far more fun than the bizarre fumbling of multiple huge moments that will prove to have a long lasting effect on the show.
In one single episode, we see Genet wage war on the Nest; Losang stab Isabelle in the stomach; Daryl and Carol reunite; Codron escape; Isabelle die in Daryl’s arms; Daryl and Carol discovering help in a hidden town; Daryl and Carol getting betrayed by said town; Genet getting her just desserts and Losang merging his and Genet’s forces to continue to search for Laurent and any one of these twists are ripe for high drama and prime, edge of the seat television – however, the way the episode treats every single one of these major plot points is so throwaway, they all end up canceling each other out.
For a start, the murder of Clémence Poésy’s Isabelle is a massive thing to pull off randomly in the middle of the season, but the final moments of one of the series major characters is handled in almost a matter of fact kind of way that just sucks all the impact out of it despite the fact that she lives long enough to expire in Dixon’s arms. However, if one devastating death isn’t enough, the end of the episode sees series big bag, Genet, meet a literally sticky end when she is shot with one of her Amper darts which proves to have a rather extreme effect on human psychology. But again, the moment is presented so off-hand, the importance of it is lost in an incredibly crowed episode that seems to be sprinting as fast and hard as it can to a finish line that’s still two whole episodes away. With the episode ending with Losang being approached by Genet’s underlings to create a new group that still wants to believe in the legend of Laurent, you can’t help but feel that the Daryl Dixon writing room is still desperately trying to pare down the playing field to accommodate the arrival of Carol – I mean, why else would you annihilate the previous female lead?
However, maybe all this would have been worth it if their much touted reunion actually felt worth it, but even this is flubbed by being reduced to a single hug and some weak brotherly/sisterly banter and the episode even retcons that earlier, apparently vital radio broadcast where Carol claimed that something or one had came back, now explaining it away that she was taking about her feelings.
It’s a shame because the section of the episode that covers the little town with an elderly population proves that thd show still has that core concept of looking at a zombie apocalypse from a French point of view and the idea of a town where anyone who dies of old age and is locked up in their own home as a sign of respect is fascinating – especially as the survivors still wave and say good morning to them as if they weren’t flesh hungry beasts. However, it’s blatantly been stuck in an episode that has far too much going on as it is and all it does is make proceedings even more uneven than they were before.
Still, as much as chapter four of the Book Of Carol epically drops the ball, I guess I’m locked in until the finish regardless, but it’s still disheartening that it’s the writers who are skimming through the titular book and not the readers….
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