AMC
The embargo has lifted on The Walking Dead’s second major spin-off, Daryl Dixon, following uh, Daryl Dixon as he wakes up, inexplicably, in France, and tries to find his way back home. But while I really did quite like Dead City, the Negan and Maggie spin-off set in Manhattan, I did not especially like Daryl Dixon at all, which goes in some deeply weird directions.
The problem isn’t Daryl himself. Normal Reedus is still very cool and I like Daryl as a character. But this scenario they’ve concocted for him is just bizarre.
Daryl wakes up drifting onto the French coast. I swear this show was originally pitched as Daryl trying to figure out how he got there, one of the central mysteries of the series, but it turns out that just…isn’t true. Without spoiling the answer, Daryl absolutely knows how he got there, it’s not a mystery to him at all. Eventually, the audience is told a few episodes in so we catch up with him. It’s very strange.
Daryl finds himself pulled into a convent of post-apocalyptic nuns who are armed enough to protect themselves (just don’t call them “Warrior Nuns,” I suppose). Daryl is being hunted by a paramilitary group after killing a few of them defending some locals, but the nuns have a request of Daryl once he arrives.
They believe Daryl is someone who was “prophesied’ to escort a specific kid named Laurent, who lives at the convent, to a safer location somewhere in France called The Nest. The nuns believe that Laurent is the “chosen one” who will lead humanity into a new age of recovery following the collapse. A new messiah for the dark age.
Daryl Dixon
Laurent is also one of the most annoying characters in Walking Dead history, no exaggeration. I suppose the idea was that if Daryl doesn’t talk much, this kid would talk all the time. But they make him some sort of prodigy, who talks like he’s a middle-aged college professor, who speaks a bunch of language and is always spouting off facts about history and sociology. He’s exceptionally annoying, and if he’s supposed to be the future leader of humanity, I think we’re doomed.
Daryl Dixon tries to implement this weird, religious aspect into the whole thing, pushing the bounds of whether The Walking Dead is actually going to tread into the truly supernatural, other than the physics of zombies themselves. But outside of this, I could not believe just how much the central storyline ends up ripping off HBO’s The Last of Us. Like my jaw dropped when I understood what was happening. Without going into details, it kind of ruined the entire thing for me, even if it’s possible to believe, given the development times of both series, it could just be a coincidence.
The coolest bit of the show focuses on experimentation with “super zombies,” which we got hints about at the end of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, and continues the show trying to do new thing with zombies, like how at the end of the main show, they started doing things like climbing, opening doors and wielding knives. Here, they are not “smart” zombies, but they are strong, and a bigger threat than we’ve seen. We needed more strong zombies here and less Laurent.
I will say the show ends on a good note, a tease for the already-greenlit second season that I now have hope should be better than the first. But man, what a deeply odd season 1 this was, and I’m not sure I can recommended it to anyone but Walking Dead superfans who are going to watch all these spin-offs anyway.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
