I don’t know. Maybe I’ve become so resigned to the spiralling quality of the writing behind Daryl Dixon that now my expectations are down and I’m willing to accept any old crap that the Book Of Carol can throw at me just do we can just get to the end of the season with a minimum amount of bother. With that being said, while the penultimate episode of season 2 certainly doesn’t endear itself when stacked against the high points of season 1, when it comes to rapidly shuffling through all the lingering plot threads in order to clear the slate, Vouloir, C’est Pouvoir does the job well enough.
In a season full of Amper zombies that don’t seem that much more powered than average Walkers, devoted men of God who almost immediately shift their outlook to fit whatever turn the story takes and writers who seemingly don’t know how to write Carol’s survival skills anymore, I suppose it’s a good thing that the show is clearing the road to make way for a season finale, but it’s tough not to feel at least a little short changed.
Genet may be dead, but the Nest has also fallen and in the resulting disarray, many of the Guerriers suddenly deside to make the captive Losang their leader and continue his task to locate Laurent and continue to make him the holy figurehead in his flawed cause. As unlikely as this may seem, it still means that despite both of their motal enemies taking gargantuan body blows, Daryl and Carol still have the exact same problems as they had before and choose to check up on Ash (Carol’s pilot) before they finally track down Laurent. However, while they locate Laurent at Fallou’s rooftop community where they break Isabelle’s death to the young boy and discover that Pouvoir and Maison Mere has also fallen along with the Nest, a quick stop at Ash’s plane reveals that he’s vanished for some reason.
With communities dropping like flies, Daryl and Carol return to the underground nightclub, Demimonde, in order to get some much needed supplies and intel while everyone seems to be zig zagging here, there and everywhere in order to build some momentum, Losang and some troops storms the Rooftop to try and claim Laurent once and for all inly to find that Fallou and his people have now totally rejected his methods, allowing the remorseful Codron to spirit Laurent away in the nick of time.
While all this is transpiring, Daryl and Carol manage to find out what happened to Ash as his attempt to source more fuel has resulted in him concussed and trapped in a car for two days after being surrounded by Walkers. However, after an audacious escape that proves that the Amper fluid has some use after all, Carol has to try and figure out how to break the news to Ash that she’s been lying to him all along.
Still, as raw as that’s going to be, a final showdown in the catacombs of Paris and a sobering truth about how many people Ash’s plane will hols means that our heroes aren’t out of the merde yet.
I know, I know. Last episode I complained that the relentless parade of overly fast plotting and too many massive shifts in the status quo meant that a lot of huge moments never got to stretch their legs and carry the weight they so deserved (Clémence Poésy’s rushed exit, for exame, felt more rude than moving); and yet now I’m saying that a similarly speedy pace here is now a good thing. Well, my reasons are simple – last episode, it felt like the entire season was at a turning point where they had a real good chance to turn things around; however after fluffing that by having an episode full of twists, shocks and deaths that utterly failed to engage me as someone who likes the show, I think I’ve given up on Daryl Dixon managing to pull up out of its nose dive and now I’m just glad we’re speeding though this thing just to get to the end.
It’s still watchable in a one-eye-on-the-TV-one-eye-somewhere-else kind of way (kind of like the Whisperers era of the main show), but it now feels less like I’m watching it for the characters and more like I’m just curious how they’re going to end it after two whole episodes of clumsy wrap up. For a start, the episode is an utter mess when it comes to the fact that all of its main characters are now zipping all across Paris in some form of a undeserved victory lap as it finally chooses to visit a whole bunch of locations from the first season. While heading back to the rooftop community and the Demimonde does make thematic sense to keep the world still feeling large and varied, people are now just rocking up with a minimum of fuss as if the streets of gay Paree suddenly weren’t crammed with flesh eating ghouls. On top of all this location shifting, we take some time to cement Cordon’s attitude shift to the good guys, watch the Rooftop turn their backs on Losang and finally have Carol come clean about the fact that she’s been lying about virtually everything she’s told Ash since the second she first met him and while Manish Patel does a good job getting across the hurt and humiliation of being conned, the writers seem to want Melissa McBride to act like tricking a man to fly from America to Paris on nothing more than a string of bullshit isn’t that big a deal. Now, while we’ve always known that Carol is about as cold blooded as they come when needs must (she once executed a fucking child, remember?), it still seems a little weird that with everything that’s gone on, this is the big plot point the season wants to go with while so many other, larger pieces are in play.
For example, it seems once again that Daryl Dixon is on yet another villain purge, taking out Losang before the episode’s end and essentially leaving us free and clear to now drop everything and just focus on who is going to get to leave France. Of course, there’s a few other speedbumbs along the way, of course. Firstly, Laurent did originally want to leave France, but now he doesn’t (but he does again by the end of the episode) and secondly, the episode takes a moment to give us one of those little Walker sequences that once used to power the entire franchise when Daryl and Carol discovering what has happened to a missing Ash.
It’s with this section that that old wish arises once again, you know, the on that wishes The Walking Dead would go back to focusing on the walking dead once again as all the clashing community stuff is starting to disappear up its own butthole. Thankfully the scene – which sees Daryl infect two Walkers with the Amper drug to get them to kill their fellow zombies for them – may be utterly ridiculous and doesn’t make a iota of logical sense, but you wish that the season had managed to contain more zombie-themed pallete cleansers such as this just to stop it being yet another season of the show where it’s just humans fighting one another.
With the end in sight, chances of Daryl Dixon pulling a last second blinder that saves the season are about as low as a zombie’s vitamin C intake, but fingers crossed it at least makes it more interesting than this.
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