Daryl Dixon returns for its third and penultimate season on muscular and energetic form, with Costa Da Morte (“Coast of Death”) setting up the season’s premise with commendable efficiency, while still making time for a diverting sojourn to UK shores. Knowing that Daryl and Carol were UK-bound, through the Channel Tunnel, at the end of last season, some viewers might be disappointed that the pair’s time in London (their destination on arrival) is so short-lived. Yet with the Spanish setting of the third season being trailed so prominently, it’s no real surprise that their British stop-over is little more than a city break, ahead of a detour to southern Europe.
When they arrive in the UK, Carol and Daryl are once again alone, shorn of their remaining French compatriots. They find the streets of London devoid of life, until their presence stirs the moribund walker hordes who force them to take refuge in a block of flats in an abandoned town house. With the cast based in Spain for the entirety of the season, it’s only the second unit drone team that visited London to record footage that was then augmented with post-apocalyptic decay using CGI. But even though it’s only a couple of Spanish streets dressed up with the familiar British icons (including the bright red phone box), it’s a workable, pragmatic conceit. Although writers Jason Richman and David Zabel may be unaware of the tradition, depicting London as depopulated after a calamity is a recurring feature of dystopian fiction as diverse as The Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later.
Under siege from a newly awakened walker multitude, Carol and Daryl hunker down to consider their options. The sequence affords time for the intimate connection between these two resilient survivors to again come to the fore. It’s a necessary emotional beat, even if Carol’s suggestion that the pair are sharing their last night alive before their inevitable demise in the street below rings hollow.
What truly invests Costa Da Morte with a sense of Britishness is the arrival of the socially clumsy loner Julian Chamberlain, played by Stephen Merchant. To many long-standing Walking Dead fans, the casting of Merchant in a humour-free zombie serial threatened to end in a cultural car-crash. But while Merchant tackles the role of Chamberlain in exactly the way those familiar with his work would expect, there’s an impressive sense of pathos and vulnerability in his performance alongside his trademark awkwardness. It’s Julian’s boat, and his skills as a sailor, that offer Daryl and Carol the chance to navigate a way back home across the vastness of the Atlantic. In a clear echo of her behaviour towards pilot Ash Patel in La Gentillesse Des Étrangers, the opening episode of Season Two, it’s Carol who takes the lead in manipulating Chamberlain into agreeing to transport them back to the US.
With no time for a sightseeing tour, it’s Julian’s poignant account of how the disaster unfolded around him and his friends that provides the clearest picture of Britain’s degeneration during the zombie outbreak. He’s evidently still traumatised by the lengthy enforced isolation he endured after the cumulative deaths of all of his associates at the hands of what he calls the “squids”.
The trio’s perilous journey on the high seas necessitates what is something of a rarity in the Walking Dead universe – a cinematic shoot in a huge water tank, complete with full-on wave machines – as director Daniel Percival digs deep into his budget to deliver some high-stakes spectacle. The sequences aboard the ship ratchet up the jeopardy, as the weather worsens and storms threaten to sink the vessel. Eventually, the craft makes landfall and Daryl and Carol immediately realise that they’ve been forced off-course. The scenes on the beach, as the pair struggle to orient themselves, are reminiscent of another opening episode – Season One’s L’âme Perdue, which began with Daryl’s arrival, unconscious and lashed to his craft, on the French coast.
Percival maximises the dramatic contrast between the infested urban desolation of London and the verdant quiet of the Spanish countryside, as Daryl and an injured Carol make their way inland after masked figures loot the wreckage of their boat. In doing so, he captures the sense of them being in an entirely different and alien place, as the pair are once again cast as foreigners in a strange land. The showrunners are keen to dial up the sense of mystery at this point, so refrain from revealing too much too soon. But Richman and Zabel’s script hints at enough unnerving folk-horror motifs to keep things intriguing as the episode builds towards an effective cliffhanger.
The third season of THE WALKING DEAD: DARYL DIXON premiers on Sundays on AMC and AMC+ in the US and will be available in the UK on Sky Max and NOW TV from 24 October
