‘The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon’ Season 3, Episode 1 Recap – A Change Of Scenery

For two seasons, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon was inseparable from its French setting. It was all Gothic architecture and medieval weapons and nuns, a particularly alien environment for someone like Daryl, an American country boy who had improbably graduated from a supporting character who wasn’t even in the comics to the most beloved figure in the entire franchise. The Frenchness wasn’t just aesthetic; it was baked into the show’s firmament. Now, in Episode 1 of Season 3, Daryl and Carol move from London to Spain in record time, with the help of a sailboat and the last Englishman in England, and I have no idea how to feel about any of it.

I never thought I’d miss France or the French in any capacity, but I’m not sure what Daryl Dixon is without them. The Walking Dead is about zombies, fundamentally, and you can have zombies anywhere, but the returns diminish after a while. The flagship show ran for eleven seasons. This spin-off – one of many – is on its third. There is nothing a zombie can do anymore that might surprise Daryl and Carol, even though this franchise is still intent on hardened survivors sometimes looking at a zombie as if they’re seeing one for the very first time, and falling over and letting it clamber over them as if they’ve forgotten how to deal with it. This is why the first two seasons of Daryl Dixon were about France. Zombies aren’t enough.

“Costa Da Morte”, picking up from that fraught psychedelic journey through the Chunnel in the Season 2 finale, introduces a new setting, London, and a new character, Julian, played very charmingly and eccentrically by Stephen Merchant. I liked Julian immediately, which means I also knew that he was going to die before the end of the episode. Again, this franchise is about zombies, and if you want to do the whole “eerily deserted urban centre” thing, you have to source them from somewhere. Julian is a plot device on long legs; he leads Daryl and Carol to a sailboat they intend to use to get to America, and which then, thanks to inclement weather, washes up on the shores of Spain.

I’m not a mariner, so maybe I’m off base here, but I wouldn’t put much faith in three people who can’t sail being able to effectively cross the Atlantic. This is perhaps why the storm washes them up in Spain, which I’m fairly sure is literally in the opposite direction. Maybe that was the joke – that they were never heading home in the first place. AMC needs to keep these spin-offs going indefinitely to milk the franchise’s enduring popularity for all its worth, so it wouldn’t do to have Carol and Daryl enjoy any kind of success. There are lots of countries in Europe. At this rate, we could conceivably visit all of them.

I found myself wondering in this episode how either of these two, though especially Carol, had survived so long. There’s a conversation about tinned hot dogs that spans the entire premiere. They get caught in the midst of a Walker ambush in London – they’re called “Squids” in the local parlance – and then, after the boat crash, Carol has a bump on her head and a piece of metal lodged in her back that makes her vision woozy enough to walk straight into Zombie Julian. It’s like we’re trying to introduce peril for the sake of it. Carol has been surviving in the apocalypse for years. She knows what a fever is. She knows when she needs medical attention.

I’d ask what we’re doing here in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 3, Episode 1, but it’s obvious. We’re setting things up. Daryl and Carol needed to be somewhere else, so they met a character who could make it so, but had no use beyond that. The first two seasons at least had the decency to pretend that Isabelle and Laurent were proper characters – both get name-checked here, but nothing more – but they nonetheless vanished when their usefulness expired. Daryl and Carol remain the only constant, the only people the show is interested in, even if they’re the least interesting thing about the show they’re in.

The question now becomes whether Spain can be as interesting as France to make up for all this. We only get glimpses of how things operate here, but the suggestion is that, similarly to France, everyone has kind of reverted to a themed snatch of local history. They’ll surely have their own names for zombies, and their own political squabbles and dangerous agendas. And Daryl and Carol will become embroiled in this against their will, probably while looking for a mode of transport that might, one day, get them to America. It all sounds a bit too familiar if you ask me.

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