Summary
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 3 delivers a lot of surprisingly cool spectacle in Episode 4, even if Daryl’s new persona is a bit trying.
Daryl Dixon is a walking marketing exercise. The hair, the long Blade-style trench coat – dude, you’re in Spain, unbutton that thing – and the shifting signature weapon. For a long time, it was the crossbow, until it became implausible he’d keep finding arrows for it, then he took to French medieval weaponry, and now, in Season 3 of his namesake show, he’s rocking a rifle and a bandolier like some kind of Old West outlaw. The Walking Dead needs Daryl, a character who wasn’t in the original comics and attained a life of his own through the main show and this spin-off, to look cool. Episode 4, perhaps more so than any other Daryl-centric instalment in any series, exists to reinforce this idea of his essential gun-slinging aptitude.
I wasn’t expecting “La Justicia Fronteriza”. At the very least I wasn’t expecting it to be what it is, which turns out to be an almost hour-long spectacle of violence that introduces a new threat and delays all the existing missions, from Daryl’s eagerness to repair a boat to get him and Carol back to America to Roberto’s determination to rescue Justina after learning that she sacrificed herself to El Alcazar. Daryl’s pretty cool in it, even if his traumatised loved-and-lost persona still feels a bit forced to me.
In this way, Roberto serves as a useful counterpoint. “La Justicia Fronteriza” begins with Roberto reeling from the absence of Justina, blaming Fede and his subservience to Guillermo for it, while serving as a very obvious metaphor for the passion that Daryl has felt in the past, which has consistently backfired on him. Carol is quite taken with the idea of young love, so she resists his impulse to just up sticks and leave without Roberto. This would be more compelling, I think, if the show weren’t so clearly on Carol’s side, and if anyone really thought that Daryl would stick to his new theory of staying out of other people’s problems. Where would we be if he did that?
This is reinforced in some pretty obvious ways. With Roberto all lovesick, Valentina suggests that Daryl and Carol instead take this nice guy named Cooper with them, since he’s from America and wants to check on his mother, plus he’s a half-decent sailor and would be useful. Daryl refuses immediately but eventually starts to soften on Cooper, just in time for him to be killed by an arrow. Of course, it’s Daryl who has to put him out of his misery when he turns. This guy can’t catch a break.
That arrow comes from a group teased earlier, but only properly introduced in Daryl Dixon Season 3, Episode 4. The Primitivos are vicious, feral-like barbarian types who wear animal pelts and trinkets. They attack Daryl and Cooper on the beach for seemingly no reason at all, and then conduct a large-scale raid on Solaz that takes up half the episode. Even as a determined stone-cold hater, I struggle to find much fault with how all this plays out. It’s genuinely exciting, visceral, and intense, staged with appropriate clarity and featuring stand-out beats for multiple characters, including Fede, Antonio, and Roberto. There are burning walkers launched as missiles, Daryl and his rifle, and a Gatling gun. It’s proper large-scale carnage of a type you can scarcely believe this franchise is still popular enough to have the budget for.
As far as I can tell, the Primitivos don’t have much of a motive beyond resenting the established order. Solaz, as a kind of satellite state of El Alcazar, is fair game. They’re symbolic of an oppressive status quo that is anathema to their worldview. And the attack raises some interesting, relevant questions about Solaz’s relationship with El Alcazar that tip Roberto over the edge. Where was the promised protection? Fede argues that the event was unprecedented and that they were only able to survive it on account of the weapons El Alcazar provided. Roberto has had enough of the bootlicking and steals a truck to drive straight to El Alcaraz to rescue Justina. Fede’s so adamant about not compromising their arrangement that his right-hand man, Sergio, seems perfectly happy to shoot Roberto during his escape until Daryl stops him. Sergio later claims he was aiming at the truck’s tires, but it’s unclear whether he was only saying that to obscure the fact that he was working on Fede’s orders.
Either way, Fede isn’t willing to send any of the survivors, who must all rally to protect the town in the event of another attack, to retrieve Roberto. Antonio volunteers, and Carol insists on going with him, which means Daryl insists on tagging along, despite relentlessly claiming that he’d rather leave Spain behind and return to America. You see what I mean about his reticence to intervene not really ringing true? He keeps intervening regardless.
Something tells me Roberto and Justina are going to need him either way. But I do wish he’d make his mind up.
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