One of the first voices heard in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (Sky Max) belongs to an Irish survivor of the zombie apocalypse. We don’t see them – this fugitive from undead Armageddon has instead left behind a recording of his journey from Dublin to the south of France, where he and his family have fled in the vain hope of escaping an Ireland overwhelmed by shambling, mumbling horrors (setting aside the 2 Johnnies – they’re quite keen on slipping free of the zombies, too).
The tape is discovered by Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus), a fan favourite in the original Walking Dead before that series – once a rival to Game of Thrones in ratings and cultural imprint – fell into a death spiral of moribund plots and patchy writing. But even as the show went to bits, fans could never bring themselves to ditch Daryl, the anti-hero’s anti-hero, who rarely left home without his bike, leather jacket and trusty crossbow.
When The Walking Dead (TWD) ended, the plan was for Daryl to share his spin-off with his hard-bitten soul-mate Carol, with whom he forged a bond on TWD. They are due to reunite next year – in the meantime, this new adventure packs him off to France on his own, for reasons less than entirely clear, especially to Daryl. He washes up on shore, confused about how he got there but determined to get back to America and be reunited with his nearest and dearest (ie, his crossbow and his bike).
Yet if set on returning home, he is also eager to discover how he ended up in Paris – the starting point of the zombie apocalypse years previously. Perhaps channelling the Irishman he encountered on that tape, he finds himself on the road to Lourdes, where he meets a nun named Isabelle (Clémence Poésy) who has in her care a young boy, Laurent, whom she believes has the potential to save the world, if Daryl can bring him to America.
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The kids who-can-save-us-all-plot has shades of The Last of Us and the French-set video game A Plague Tale: Requiem – a rich irony given that The Last of Us, in its original PlayStation incarnation, owed a few things to the original Walking Dead comics. But then, the zombie genre has never let a lack of originality get in the way of the fun. By episode three, Daryl, Isabelle and Laurent have reached Paris where, among other scrapes, they encounter a weirdo who has corralled a group of zombies and turned them into “musicians” in his orchestra.
They also track down Laurent’s father, who agrees to help Daryl return home, but only if Isabelle and Laurent are left in his care. Daryl demurs and sets off on his own, prompting an upset to Laurent flee (again echoing a Last of Us plot point).
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon does not try to reinvent the post-apocalyptic zombie thriller. Instead, it harks back to the early years of its parent show, before the excitement was blunted by too many C-list characters and not walking corpses.
It also gives us lots of Daryl mooching about and slitting the throat of the occasional walker – which is what fans wanted all along. It is proof resurrection is possible – even for an ailing zombie franchise that looked dead and buried years ago.
