Apologies to anyone who has been keeping up with my ever more frustrated takes on the gradual decline of Daryl Dixon’s second season, but in order to make my views felt on the season finale I’m going to have to take the broken record route and lay things out once again.
So… here goes: after what I felt was a lackluster return for The Walking Dead with Dead City, suddenly the fortunes of the undying zombie franchise got the best boost it had gotten in years when the first season of Daryl Dixon premiered. Removing the need for almost all of the show’s suffocating continuity, Dixon’s unlikely but welcome relocation to France managed to be the freshest and most enjoyable thing to emerge from AMC’s show for years and left the door open for the next season, The Ones Who Live, to pretty much do the same. However, as we went into Daryl’s second season, the need to inject a returning Carol into matters seemed to unheave the balance the first season had manage to forge meaning that the most the show pushed Carol, the more the established world the show had spent an entire season building so well suffered with the overly convenient and rudhed plotting of Dead City making an unwelcome return.
And yet, after episode after episode of the show crapping on its own good points in order to squeeze a legacy character in, a weird question has seemingly arose: what if it actually, finally worked?
With numerous arch villains dead via various brutal means (beaten to death with a skull, poisoned by super-zombie juice) it seems that the good guys are now free and clear to finally hop on that plane and buzz off back to the infected states of America and leave their French gap year in the rear view mirror. However, things aren’t that easy as there’s one glaring issue that’s ramming that zombified fly right in the ointment – Ash’s plane can’t carry him, Carol, Daryl and Laurent so someone has to make the awkward choice to stay behind. Obviously, Daryl and Carol are virtually falling over one another to be the one to make the sacrifice as offering themselves up for the greater hood comes about as easy to them as pouring milk on cereal, but they find that they have to fast track their decision as they still have Guerriers on their trail.
After a whole bunch of soul searching and a final reconciliation with Codron, it’s decided that Daryl will stay behind and fight off the bad guys with his new buddy and Fallou while the Guerriers third leader in as many episodes prepares to make a last ditch effort to capture Laurent. But in the aftermath, decisions are made that change the rules slightly and while Ash and Laurent manage to escape terra firmer and soar off into the wide blue yonder, we find Carol stayed behind to offer some last minute assistance.
So with both Ash and Laurent safe (for now, at least) and the threat of the Guerriers finally put down, all Daryl and Carol have left to do is figure out how to meet back up with them and thanks to Fallou’s contacts, they meet a young Scottish couple who agree to get them to England via the Chunnel.
Of course, taking a stroll under the English Channel in a gargantuan tunnel in the midst of a zombie apocalypse comes with its own set of challenges, not least because all that dried up bat poop down there can cause freaky hallucinations; but can our heroes fight off a horde of bioluminescent Walkers and their own inner demons in order to make it out?
So, one last time for the cheap seats: the fact that the showrunners tried to prioritise integrating Carol awkwardly into a story that was already well underway cause almost the entire second season of Daryl Dixon to feel disjointed, lazy and unsatisfactory even though the first season was a break from the very same writing issues that hobbled this one. Arch villains and romantic leads were thrown under the bus haphazardly in order to keep the six episode run moving and everytime Carol was called upon to do her super-smart, survivalist thing, it felt like the writers just gave her absurd amounts of plot armour just to make their jobs easier. I could go on about how any of this may have been easily averted (more episodes, less unnecessary twists, fast track Carol’s story instead of Daryl’s), but episode six offers up the damndest thing… after an entire season of slashing and burning the established world it took the first season to build, the people behind Daryl Dixon finally managed to achieve the equilibrium it’s been working so hard to get right. Admittedly it had to wipe out an entire season of characters and plot to do it, but in its final episode, season two finally gets it mostly all right and manages to tap into what made this spin off so interesting in the first place while finally getting Carol to fit.
Now, while I hardly agree with the methods used to obtain this long, sort after sense of balance, I will admit that it’s something of a relief as I was starting to get quite disillusioned with the whole thing. However, the season finale manages to offer up poignant character beats, satisfying closures for some supporting characters, another villain to vanquish and most of all, we even get an extended Walker sequences that offers up something new and visually interesting that not only calls back to Daryl Dixon’s heyday, but to The Walking Dead as a whole.
Not to zip through them too fast, but giving Fallou room to have a happy ending while still allowing him to muse over what France was like before the fall is genuinely sweet and touching and a man to man chat where Daryl finally clears up who exactly killed Codron’s brother is a long overdue moment where characters actually take time to address the shit between them that rarely seems to happen anymore. Similarly, Daryl and Laurent get some heart to heart time before they separate which involves a moving rendition of “You Can’t Always Get Want You Want” by The Rolling Stones and Carol and Ash patch up their differences too just in time for the action to kick in and while the new minted big bad Jacinta is hardly a threat on the level of Genet (if the Guerriers lost any more leaders they’d be taking orders from their janitor, next), it still manages to give the taking off sequence some sense of tension – although you’ll totally predict the “surprise” twist of Carol staying.
However, with all the plot threads of two whole episodes wrapped up with still half a season finale still to go, the episode gets stuff into some of that good old fashioned world building the series used to do so well and the introduction of the Chunnel, now a massive underground hike packed with stunning looking, bioluminescent zombies and trippy, guano-caused freak outs that cause our heroes to face past traumas, continues to keep those good hit coming. Is it a little convenient that both Daryl and Carol’s literal bat-shit trips mean that they manage to put long running emotional issues to bed? Of course, but sneaking in a Clémence Poésy cameo for Daryl and a major reference to Carol’s daughter Sofia are examples of The Walking Dead’s more blunt writing techniques that actually work for the story.
So, after a shit show of a second season, Daryl Dixon somehow manges to emerge on the other side with a final episode that is easily the best of the six. But as a third season is already greenlit and the series seems to be moving away from France entirely, hopefully the union between Daryl and Carol now proves to be the foundation the show needs to move forward instead of being the one that weakened it for the near-entirety of a season in the first place.
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