‘The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon’ Episode 1 Recap & Review: Dead in the Water

There is a saying: Three is a charm. Here’s another one: Three’s Company.

AMC has three (Three!) the show is set the walking dead universe this year, despite the main series ending last November.

The first part of the first of these was fear the walking dead The final season, which, miraculously, is also the worst season ever. I didn’t know it could get any worse after the disappointing 7th season, but they managed to get ahead of themselves. I’m still convinced that listeners harbor a secret grudge against AMC.

then came dead City, In which best friends Maggie and Negan head to Manhattan for some R&R. That show started off really bad, but ended up being the best the walking dead has given us over the years, thanks primarily to Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance, though I find myself liking Lauren Cohan’s Maggie more than I have in a while.

So this is where I am with episode 1 Daryl Dixon, Or as I like to call it, The Daryl Dixon Show! I’ve only seen the first episode of the spinoff starring Norman Reedus, and I didn’t like it at all. I was sent screeners for all six episodes of the season, but I’ve taken a new approach to my weekly recaps/reviews. i did this with dead City Too.

I only watch one episode in advance so I can write the review on time, but I don’t look ahead. This is so that I can keep each episode fresh and specific when I write about it, but also so that I can see along with the audience what’s going to happen. It’s fun to speculate and have my honest opinion change (or not change, if that’s the case) as each episode ends.

This means I’ve only seen the first episode Daryl Dixon And can’t speak to the quality of the season as a whole. I don’t know what will happen next. I don’t know if this series premiere is a bad episode or if it hurts the show in a big way. we will see.

(My colleague Paul Tassie has seen all six episodes and overall he didn’t like it, though he told me that the worst and best parts of the season are still to come, for what it’s worth). Okay, enough introduction. Let’s talk about this episode, “Lamé Purdue” which translates to “Lost Soul”.

darryl dixon went to france

As I watched this episode, I kept thinking about movies I’ve seen in the past. That is, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves And Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail. And so I spent some time (er, Ruined some time) to create these side-by-side visual recaps:

you are welcome.

In any case, we follow Daryl washing up on the shore, which we soon learn is the coast of France. He wanders around looking for supplies and bumps into some corpses, one of which grabs him and burns his skin as if his hands were covered in acid. We later find out it’s a ‘burner’ and perhaps the most interesting thing about this episode is the introduction of this new type of zombie. the walking dead Wisely introducing the various mutant varieties of his Choppers that we’ve seen in both the main show and dead City This time. (and in Fear If you count Morgan as a different type of zombie).

Daryl meets two Frenchmen. One is a young lady with a good command of the English language. The other is an old blind man, who surprisingly does not eventually become blind. After two bandits try to capture the woman and take their belongings, Daryl leaps in and saves her. He and his blind companion repay this kindness by knocking her unconscious and stealing her belongings. It turns out much worse for them later, when one of the robber’s brothers and his goons find them and demand answers. In the process they kill the old man.

Daryl is rescued by the nuns who take them to their fortified convent where they are training with knives and bows. All I could think was “Oh, Wicked, BadNaughty, wicked zoot, oh she’s the one Bad person, and he will have to pay a fine! And not at all because Galahad from the scene Holy Chalice She has stuck with me since childhood, and not in the least because of the vicious beatings.

In any case . , , Daryl is taken into care and meets a French boy who is being raised by nuns, later we learn that he is being raised as a future messiah to unite people to create a new world or something. Being prepared in (not like that). That whole bit made me shake my head. What a foolish notion this really is. The only thing that’s more silly is the premise of the show. Why shouldn’t Daryl go to Montana or Maine or California or something?

I mean, sure, we’re given an explanation about how and why he’s here. He was “taken to the boat by bad guys” and he “didn’t turn out so well.”

Ok.

We meet some bad guys, turned out to be goons who are now looking for Daryl. They come to the convent and demand the nuns to hand him over. Things go horribly wrong and soon the nuns are attacking the goons all out, in one of the weirdest, stupidest skirmishes I’ve ever seen. Nuns would not react this way, nor should they react this way. They should hand it over to Daryl. Catholic nuns are not warriors. Their faith does not teach them that violence is the answer. (Again, it doesn’t teach them to be the new Messiah either).

Then again, the chances of a convent of nuns surviving a zombie apocalypse in France are close to zero. In fact, even finding a nunnery in France is tantamount to zero, considering how little religion the French do these days. A South or Central American setting could have worked better and made more sense.

In any case, the bad guys don’t get Daryl and they don’t get the boy who the Mother Superior of the convent calls “the cure for the sick world” for some baffling reason. Daryl takes two nuns – Isabelle (Clémence Poésy who you may recognize Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) and Sylvie (Lyca Blanch Francard) – along with the convent boy Laurent (Louis Pouch Scigliuzzi), on a quest to deliver the boy to some people who can help him become the savior of the world, or something.

The main thug—Codron (Romain Levy)—escapes.

We then travel to Le Havre in northern France, where we meet a mysterious woman who sternly questions the sea captain about what happened on board. We learned that there had been a mutiny, but the man who had started it had gone too far and was “presumed dead” according to the Captain. The woman is not impressed. “estimated? By whom, by you?”

The Captain says, “His name was Dixon.” The woman, the boss lady, tells her goons to find him if he’s not dead. And so we have our new Big Bad who now has a individual bone to choose from With our hero.

This is another thing that seemed very stupid to me. the walking dead In almost every show the formula goes like this: Our heroes arrive somewhere. They meet some decent people. But soon a new group of bad guys emerge. Violent conflict is going on between the groups. The heroes win and the bad guys lose. Rinse, repeat. And here we are setting the same stage that we have set many times before.

I’m hoping things will be okay now that we’re out of the convent and on the road. More Daryl is always a good thing, although I can’t help but think Daryl + Carol + Doug would be better. But I think I’d prefer a story where Daryl was somewhere in America with his bike and a crossbow, not taking a stupid kid to some stupid “nest”.

Re: We’ll see.

side note:

I pointed in dead City Also, this is happening little by little. , , Strange that every villain TWDU Now a woman. I’m not at all against forcing female bad guys. alpha in the walking dead Was a frightening opponent and a great change of pace compared to Negan. But almost every villain since then has been a woman, including:

• Pamela Milton the walking dead Season 11. Sure, Lance Hornsby and Pope were bad guys too, but they were like mini-bosses. She was the main antagonist. (Hornsby was, by far, the best villain that season, but they went nowhere with his character).
• In fear the walking dead The main villains in Season 4B, Seasons 5 and 6, and Season 8 were women. (It was Strand in Season 7, who was extremely stupid, not because conflict between the main characters would be bad, but because they made him a mustache-twirling villain instead of making him someone with a different point of view than Morgan).
• In dead City We were thrown a red herring, we were made to think that Croatia was the big bad, but in the end we found out that its boss was Dama (lady in Croatian).
• In beyond the world, Elizabeth Kubalek was the primary antagonist.

And now, in Daryl Dixon, We have another female villain. That means out of season 9. the walking dead Almost every villain in TV’s 9 seasons has been a woman.

Like I said, I like female villains, I think some balance is needed. It’s almost like AMC is telling us that women are more evil and worse than men at this point. I think it was wise to move on to Alpha and other female adversaries after The Governor and Negan, but it’s a great thing. (And I forgot that the leader of New Babylon is also a woman, and Maggie is the leader of her group, etc.). Well, if we had two female villains and then only male villains, I’d say the same thing. This is absolutely strange.

so. Yes. No fans at this point, but we’ll see.

Scattered Thoughts:

• I’m a little confused by Daryl telling Isabelle that he met a nun, and asking her if she could take him back to “that place…at the port” – was she talking about another nun? Is he talking about me, or is he talking about her? Is he talking about bringing her back to where we saw her at the beginning of the episode?
• I liked the intro of the show. It is very dramatic and colorful.
• It’s ridiculous that all these French people are using black powder guns that probably wouldn’t actually work at this point. French There are really modern guns, By the way. Not as much as the Americans. But they have army, police and hunting rifles etc. There will be guns in circulation during the apocalypse that were not those of the 1890s.
• I really enjoy Daryl. Norman Reedus is great. The potential for a great Norman Reedus show is there, but I’m not feeling it here – not on this basis. The idea is not that he is a “prophesied” hero who has come to save the chosen one. People have complained that this show is very bad The last of us, And I can see how it’s already started in the first episode. The comparison would not be flattering. And sure, that show/game is also using an old trope (take a MacGuffin from point A to point B) but still. It’s fresh in our collective minds.
• Attention Reddit: I don’t hate The Walking Dead. If I hate it I’ll stop writing about it. I have, for many years, been trying to encourage it to be better, to be more than what it is. I believe that AMC has become complacent and complicit in its decline more than ever before, and my criticism is designed to point out flaws so that they can be improved. The stubbornness in refusing to make significant changes—especially in leadership—means we are becoming mediocre (or downright terrible in that case). Fear) content when we deserve much better.

Watch my video review below:

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