by Rich Cross
There’s been a feverish sense of anticipation amongst dedicated fans of The Walking Dead about the launch of the new six-part spin-off based on the adventures of the series’ gruffly heroic Daryl Dixon. What’s fueled that excitement is not just the fact that this new series would feature one of the show’s best-loved characters but the recognition that it would open up a previously unseen view of the undead world far beyond US shores. Just as intriguing was the news that The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon would reveal new and alarming variants in walker kind.
AMC’s pre-release promotional campaign teased the show’s fascinating and unexpected premise. Last seen in the closing Walking Dead episode Rest in Peace, heading off into the great unknown in search of answers, Daryl’s life has taken an abrupt off-screen turn. He’s discovered here, barely conscious and all alone in a boat at sea. Washed up on a beach on the French coast, Dixon soon realises he’s now an accidental refugee in a post-apocalyptic Europe. Immediately determined to find a way back across the Atlantic Ocean to his American homeland, he quickly discovers that his quest will be more complicated than he hoped. Worse than that, as an alien abroad, both his freedom and his very survival are soon in doubt.
The story of how Daryl found himself lashed to the underside of an upturned lifeboat is something certain to be revealed in future flashbacks. But there’s enough of a hint in the taciturn Daryl’s explanation, and an end-of-episode reveal to keep eager viewers intrigued. And while Daryl calls on enough memories and shares enough snippets of his life story with those who help him and locate him in his Walking Dead narrative, knowledge of this backstory is not a pre-requisite. It’s possible for Daryl Dixon to serve as an entry point for someone new to the universe, were that to be a realistic prospect at this stage of the franchise’s life.
On the evidence of this first episode, the show’s production design promises to be as arresting as it is distinctive. Daryl Dixon has an aesthetic and a sense of place like none other in The Walking Dead universe. The show’s visuals are sumptuous, and the countryside and small-town landscapes of rural France are saturated with just the right desolate and melancholic look.
Picking his way through the bleak, abandoned French ports and villages, Daryl battles the undead and comes into conflict with different groups of French survivors, each of whom have their own agendas to pursue. Along the way, there are some tense and well-choreographed hand-to-hand combat sequences. But just as important is the cumulative implication of these clashes that politics and power in France is a more complex multi-party affair than Daryl is used to Stateside.
All of this reveals the bold confidence of the franchise’s showrunners. It’s one thing to commission Dead City, a spin-off show (and a captivating one at that) set on the island of Manhattan in New York. It’s quite another for American TV commissioning editors to approve a spin-off set in continental Europe, including characters speaking in a language other than English and which requires intermittent subtitles. US TV audiences (even genre TV audiences) have a perhaps undeserved reputation for being quite culturally conservative (with a small ‘c’) and inward-looking in their tastes.
As well as the hurdle of home audience buy-in, the new show’s writers face two further challenges. The first is that this spin-off, uniquely amongst its peers, is based (at least for now) on the travails of a single character from the parent show. That means that there’s no established dynamic (like that between Maggie and Negan) to import, so all interactions between Daryl and those around him have to be built from scratch.
The second challenge is writing for Daryl. One of the attractions of his character is his brooding, less-than-communicative nature. While Rick Grimes will happily deliver a rousing speech at the drop of his sheriff’s hat, Daryl is a man of far fewer words. That means that, unless Dixon was reinvented as a chatterbox, other characters have to take on more of the dialogue. Scriptwriter David Zabel tackles both demands head-on in this opening story, managing to uphold Daryl’s reticence (partly by incapacitating him briefly), and even giving him a couple of gag lines without any of this feeling unnatural. He’s helped in this endeavour by the fact that Daryl speaks no French and so is left as a mute bystander in many conversations.
Of the new characters, Clémence Poésy stands out as the suitably mysterious and enigmatic warrior-nun Isabelle, while Louis Puech Scigliuzzi just about manages to avoid being too irritating as the precocious and learned young Laurent. The quid pro quo mission that Daryl signs on for, involving these two Gallic misfits, inevitably invites comparison with themes from other post-apocalyptic properties, including Children of Men and even The Last of Us. But there’s already enough that’s enticing and different about Daryl Dixon for those echoes not to be too much of a concern.
L’âme perdue (French for ‘the lost soul’) delivers exactly the sort of opening salvo that you want from a breakaway show: confident, impressive and instantly confirming that there’s originality and new life still to be found in this rapidly expanding world of the undead. It’s not yet parfait, but it’s already très bien.
New episodes of THE WALKING DEAD: DARYL DIXON premiere on Sundays on AMC and AMC+ in the US
