It’s hard to take The Walking Dead seriously anymore, and frankly it’s been that way for years. The real tragedy about this sorry state of affairs is that it didn’t have to be this way. There was a time when this franchise was king of the world, with a large and passionate following. Those of us who still consider ourselves fans of this franchise—despite everything—often feel like we’re in a toxic relationship with the show’s creators, hoping for change despite all evidence to the contrary. The dumpster fire that was The Ones Who Live, meant to be the triumphant return of Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his reunion with Michonne (Danai Gurira) was in many ways the final nail in the coffin.
But like the undead who sometimes shamble into frame, The Walking Dead keeps coming back for more. Nails in coffins aren’t much good when the dead rise.
No better example of The Walking Dead’s shambling mediocrity can be found than in the latest season of Daryl Dixon—awkwardly titled ‘The Book Of Carol’—though it’s not as glaringly bad as Fear The Walking Dead in its final, hilariously terrible seasons. Unfortunately, I’ve begun to see far too many parallels between the two spinoffs. Like Fear, Daryl Dixon had so much promise, and all of that promise has been squandered.
A spinoff about two of the main show’s fan-favorite characters should have been a no-brainer, but Daryl Dixon proves that no matter how much we like Daryl and Carol, and how pretty the cinematography is in this cool new setting, TV shows suffer when you’re working with a sloppy script. A lot of diehard fans get mad at me when I say this kind of thing, but I sincerely believe that our heroes deserve better. And maybe, just maybe, they deserve to die.
Allow me to explain. There are several Very Big Problems with this show. I’ll go through each one briefly.
The Biggest Problems With ‘Daryl Dixon’
1 - The Premise Is Absurd
There’s a funny exchange between our two heroes in the most recent episode of the show. Carol says it’s “crazy” that they’re in France. Daryl replies, “It’s stupid.” Yes, yes it is.
I just have a really hard time buying that Daryl is in France, and instead of convincing me, the show’s explanation is beyond implausible (we’ll get to more implausible stuff in a minute). Daryl was taken captive in Maine by a crew of French sailors and shipped back to France on a freighter ship.
This would require—and I’m using a rough estimate here—somewhere in the ballpark of 100,000 gallons of fuel. One way. In other words, Genet’s people used at least 200,000 gallons of precious gasoline to cross the Atlantic in order to bring some US zombies back to France. This is, to put it mildly, totally and utterly absurd. This is the apocalypse. Even assuming they have begun oil drilling and gasoline refinement in earnest, there is no way Genet’s band of soldiers and thugs could produce this much gasoline. And without the concept of scarcity in a post-apocalyptic show, what’s the point? The entire premise of Dead City is that the group in Manhattan has found a way to produce fuel, but even they haven’t produced enough to commission freighter ship voyages across the ocean. Nowhere in Daryl Dixon do we see the kind of operation required to fuel such an endeavor.
Everything that follows is built on this flimsy foundation. If they absolutely needed to get Daryl to France, why not have something at least mildly plausible introduced as the explanation? Even a jet plane would make more sense, however unlikely. I suggested last season that he was taken in a sailboat of some kind, which is insane for a lot of reasons, but still makes more sense. They could have introduced pirates! I could definitely see people restoring old sailing vessels in the apocalypse. It’s still pretty far-fetched, but it makes more sense than 200,000 gallons.
2 - Everything Is Too Easy / Plot Armor
Carol’s trip to France is equally preposterous. She finds a plane and a pilot within hours of learning about Daryl’s crossing and within days has made the flight (via Greenland, where she and the pilot, Ash, had to fight off insane environmentalists) to France. France is a big country. Not as big as the US, which makes her stumbling on the outpost in Maine equally absurd, if not more so, but still a big country. You’d think finding Daryl after all this time in such a big country with such a huge population (of living and dead) would be incredibly hard! Actually, it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience!
Carol walks directly from the plane to the exact spot in the city where Genet’s people are gathering up “volunteers” to go work for her and be part of her very stupid experiments (more on that in a minute). She learns Daryl’s location from one of the prisoners within hours of arriving. When she’s taken out to be shot with a group of French people so that Genet can turn them into super zombies to attack Losang’s group, somehow the bullets hit everyone but her (not because she finds a clever way to escape, but because she has so much plot armor!). So Carol avoids death, again, and then easily steals a vehicle and drives it to Mont Saint-Michel, where a mortar conveniently blasts open the gates so she can drive right in.
The enemies she encounters—just like the bad guys Daryl encounters—are always incompetent and easy to kill. When she runs into two of them, both armed with guns, she kills the first with a knife. The second, despite having a gun, chooses not to shoot her but to charge instead.
There are many, many examples of this kind of thing throughout the show, but basically it all boils down to things being far, far too easy for our heroes in ways that rob viewers of tension and excitement. Carol getting to France should have been an ordeal. Finding Daryl should have been incredibly challenging! But at every turn, the show makes it as easy and convenient as possible for her. Meanwhile, Daryl—who I enjoy as a tough fighter—has become more of a comic book superhero than a believable human being. In one episode alone he takes out over a dozen thugs, as weapon after makeshift weapon presents itself to him, all of which he wields perfectly while his attackers line up one-by-one to get killed.
Everything is too easy and it makes the show feel incredibly dull. Watching characters struggle is more entertaining. Having them overcome impossible odds with clever thinking and quick wits is more exciting than making them superhuman. And so long as these characters are encased in plot armor, we’ll never really worry that they might die. That’s one thing that made early seasons of The Walking Dead so engaging. We never knew who might die at any given moment, whether at the hands of a human or the undead.
In Daryl Dixon, there is next to no tension and nothing feels earned. The big emotional moment when Daryl and Carol reunite should be so much more powerful.
3 - The Bad Guys Are Boring
I suppose this issue ties directly to the plot armor issue, but it goes beyond that. It’s a problem the wider Walking Dead universe has had for a long time now. All the bad guys are just really, really boring and predictable. Genet is a mustache-twirling villain who rose from museum janitor to nefarious warlord . . . somehow . . . and whose grand plan isn’t finding a cure, but making the zombies even more deadly and ferocious. She thinks she can control them somehow, despite zero evidence that this is possible, and everyone just follows her . . . for reasons.
Then we have Losang, who I guess is now the new Big Bad. He’s a bit more interesting since his villainy stems from his absolute faith in Laurent being a “chosen one” but after the latest episode and Genet’s sudden (and lackluster) demise, it seems the two groups are joining forces and Losang will now just be another evil villain, barely indistinguishable from all the other villains we’ve seen come and go. Both Losang and Genet could easily fill in as villains on Fear The Walking Dead, where every Big Bad had some outlandish nonsense that defined them, as though each was an attempt to one-up Alpha and the Whisperers.
Gimmicky. That’s the word I’m looking for. All these villains are gimmicky and lifeless. We always know what’s going to happen to them in the end. They’ll lose. The heroes will win. Whatever civilization the bad guys have created will fall. Rinse and repeat. A bold series would give us villains who win sometimes and heroes who die sometimes. More on that in a minute.
Instead, Genet is killed and . . . it just doesn’t matter at all. Literally nothing meaningful changes for our heroes. What was the point of her in the first place?
4 - Glaring Lack Of Attention To Detail And Plausibility
I’ve already discussed plausibility above in the premise section, but it extends beyond the broad strokes and into the finer details. I’ll just list a few:
- When Carol stays with Ash in his fortified compound, she doesn’t actually do anything specific to make everything go horribly wrong. Instead, the compound’s main gate simply opens when the generator stops working. Somehow, Ash has survived most of the zombie apocalypse in this place with a gate that just swings open when the power goes down. This is not how security gates work, and even if he had a faulty one, by now he would surely have found a way to keep it from swinging open. A chain, perhaps. Otherwise—and not to put too fine a point on it—he’d be dead. Couldn’t the writers have come up with a more sensible way to have the zombies get in? A downed fence, perhaps? The fact that neither Carol nor Ash does something to prevent this happening a second time beggars belief.
- When the pair land in Greenland, a massive island with a tiny population, they are immediately attacked by zombies and then rescued by two women who just happened to be nearby. These women then turn out to be psychopaths who want to kill Carol and breed with Ash in order to, uh, rebuild society or something? Why they didn’t try a softer approach—seducing a guy who hasn’t had sex in a decade can’t be that hard—is beyond me. The whole thing was enormously silly.
- The scientists at Genet’s base are experimenting on humans by lining them up and shooting them, then injecting them with the super zombie serum. The inability of a serum to travel through veins that aren’t pumping blood aside, they have absolutely no safety protocols in place. The scientists and guards just stand there a few feet away waiting for the super zombies to reanimate. Who carries out experiments this way? Why not do this in a contained lab or have some kind of barrier setup between the scientists and the undead subjects? (Carol is able to witness all of this because she’s given free reign inside Genet’s compound . . . for reasons).
- The scene where Carol tries to escape was hilarious. She steals a horse and then tries to ride straight out the gate. It’s almost like sometimes our heroes know they have plot armor, they behave with such stupid recklessness. She’s caught, of course, since they’d set a trap for her. But even if they hadn’t, galloping out the front gate seems like a pretty idiotic move when surely there are always armed guards there. Why not have her sneak out?
- Sylvie’s death (one of many characters from Season 1 killed off this season) is also a head-scratcher. The way it’s filmed, she’s standing next to a pretty high wall in one scene, and then falls off the bridge in the next, with no high wall in sight. But she falls on the same side as Losang, who she was looking down at over the wall. It’s very jarring, and another example of the small details the show gets wrong or simply ignores.
This list could go on and on, and if readers recall anything I’ve missed please don’t hesitate to add to it. The show’s writers seem to think that viewers won’t care (and many don’t, sure) or won’t notice (but we’re not that stupid) and can’t be bothered to patch up all these leaks. Every single example I’ve provided in this post could have been written in a way that made sense with minimal effort, whether that’s chaining the gate, or having Ash and Carol spot the lights from the Greenland outpost below, or simply staging the “experiments” in a less goofy way.
5 - The Kiss Of Death
And so we come to the big death of Season 2. Naturally, because Isabelle (Clémence Poésy) and Daryl kissed this season, she had to die—especially because she blurted out “I love you!” to him after they were both captured. We can’t have Isabelle getting in the way of Daryl and Carol’s friendship, now can we? Or Daryl finding some shred of happiness. Heaven forbid!
This, on its own, is hugely frustrating to me. As part of a larger symptom of The Walking Dead’s writing problems, it cuts much deeper. For years now, The Walking Dead has been allergic to actually killing off main cast members. When Lauren Cohan left the show, it was temporary. She came back (with a bunch of new disposable characters by her side). Same with Rick and Michonne. The only significant death since the Whisperer War (which did thin the herd considerably) was Rosita’s in The Walking Dead series finale. That was a great, emotional moment, but a lonesome one. In the three post-TWD spinoffs—Dead City, Daryl Dixon and The Ones Who Live—nobody of any significance has kicked the bucket.
Even in Fear The Walking Dead, characters we thought were dead and gone—like Alicia and Madison—came back. Morgan walked off into the sunset.
Instead, these shows keeps killing off newer characters, often before we have time to really get attached to them. With Isabelle, there was room for a really interesting story and a whole new dynamic to explore between Carol and Daryl that could have led to all sorts of compelling scenarios. It was just easier to have a little “shock value” and not bother with creating this kind of deeper drama. While this feels incredibly lazy to me, it’s also 100% on-brand for The Walking Dead at this point.
Obviously, characters shouldn’t be killed just to boost viewership numbers or to create shock. Carl’s death, for instance, felt cheap and antithetical to the entire point of this story. Death should move the story forward in ways that matter. Think Ned Stark in Game Of Thrones and how his fate set so many other events in motion. While certainly shocking, it wasn’t shocking for the sake of it.
But death is also important in this kind of perilous world to create friction and raise the stakes. Imagine if Carol had been killed off instead of Isabelle. Fans would have been enraged, but the impact and implications of that death would have been huge. Daryl basically had one sad moment for Isabelle and then pretty much shrugged it off.
Now, every main character has adamantium plot armor and we’re never left feeling the way we did in earlier seasons, when anybody could potentially die at any point in the story.
Every good story needs stakes, whether those are created from a dangerous and deadly world, or through character interactions that leave us questioning what will happen to relationships. At least in Dead City, we’re left wondering what path Negan will follow. Whether he’s truly turning back to the Dark Side, or if it’s all an elaborate ruse—or perhaps something a little more murky. In Daryl Dixon, I have no doubt that our heroes will survive each of the impossibly preposterous scenarios they face, and that their enemies will fall before them like wheat before the scythe.
Of course, newer characters like Isabelle and Sylvia will die. Ash is almost certainly a goner. I’m not sure about Laurent, but then I’m not sure I care about his fate one way or another.
