I’m having a tough time getting through Daryl Dixon: The Book Of Carol without laughing at all the stupid, absurd, goofy things they make our heroes do, and all the little ridiculous plot holes that the writers are too lazy to patch up. It’s too bad, because there are moments of an actually decent television show trying to get through.
Daryl’s big fight scene—choreographed and filmed as one, long extended shot—was one such moment. It was genuinely fun despite feeling a bit like a ballet version of a fight scene. Daryl has so much plot armor at this point that he easily takes out a dozen or more enemies in hand-to-hand combat (largely because they keep coming at him one-by-one; very polite for the French!) and isn’t stopped until he’s surrounded by riflemen, trapped in a narrow alleyway.
But aside from this scene and a nice moment between Daryl and Isabelle, the rest of the episode was just littered with absurdities. For instance:
- Genet, the vicious leader of the French paramilitary group that’s experimenting with zombies, was just a janitor at the Louvre museum before the outbreak. I guess I’m just bored of this “rags to riches” story at this point. Negan was a school teacher! Genet was a janitor! You can be anything you want to be in the apocalypse! Gosh gee wiz! That sounds swell! Or maybe people don’t always have radical changes in their middle age like this very often, and the natural leader in an apocalypse would have been a natural leader in the world before the zombies also. It’s just so predictable and on-the-nose at this point. Also, her man is killed just outside the Louvre pyramid. When he sees zombies coming, instead of reacting like a normal human being and trying to get away or fight back, he just gives Genet a confused look and then dies. Give me a break. I’m so, so very tired of people in The Walking Dead acting like zombies before they’re bitten.
- The soldier telling the servant that his stew was disgusting and then pushing it obviously to the floor right in front of Genet was so absolutely stupid I laughed out loud. Of course, she makes him eat it off the ground, which he meekly does, all just so Carol can learn something about Genet. Carol is always immediately at the center of everyone’s attention!
- But wait, she’s also able to move freely about the compound undetected and without any suspicion! She and Remy observe prisoners being taken to a different area in the compound and—unmolested by guards of any kind!—are able to watch as these prisoners are shot and killed, injected with some mysterious serum, and turn into Very Angry French Zombies™ seconds later. Mind you, the soldiers shoot them with machine guns from about four feet away and the scientists just stand around as the zombies turn. The prisoners aren’t cordoned off in a safe space and are free to just go on the attack the moment they turn. Didn’t they show these experiments taking place in labs before? Have they just given up entirely on anything like a security protocol?
- Fortunately, when it comes to stopping Carol from leaving, the security lady is ready, and she’s sneaky about it! (She’s also BFFs with Genet, since she also used to be a janitor, so it totally makes sense that now she’s the head of security!) Carol goes to find a car to get away from the compound when she discovers Daryl’s location (because naturally, she discovers his location within two days of landing in France even though all these French people couldn’t figure out where he was for weeks) and she knocks out a guard and can’t find keys in any of the vehicles. As luck would have it, someone left a few horses in the street instead of, I dunno, taking them to the stables, so she horse-jacks one. She seems pretty bad at riding for someone who lived in Alexandria and rode horses for years, but okay. She charges out of the compound . . . directly into the security lady’s trap! Remy betrayed her! If only she had . . . snuck quietly out instead of charging the main entry / exit point she might have made it! But a hard gallop straight out the gate is what the plot demands, so that she can lie to Genet and tell her she’s here to kill Daryl. Oh sneaky Carol! If only you had been sneaky before getting caught. What a rookie amateur.
- Genet double-crosses Carol, shockingly, when they go to the Union hideout. I guess they cross part way to the monastery—Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy—because Genet says it’s close enough but not too close to be discovered. I guess nobody in the monastery has the ability to look out in the dark and see the dozens of lights down there or something. Genet’s plan is to kill a couple dozen “volunteers” including Carol (though she saves her surprise double-cross for the last minute, because drama) and have them turned into super zombies, which she’ll use to, uh, to take the monastery or something. This is a good plan! They won’t have to deal with people, just a bunch of zombies. She thinks she can create easily controllable super soldiers, you see, because um...because zombies are easily controlled? Why are French people so stupid?
- Seriously, I have two questions about the French and the way they’re portrayed in this show. First, why are they so stupid? One crazy evil lady thinks she can make a zombie army despite having lived in the zombie apocalypse for over a decade with not a single shred of evidence that the creatures can be controlled outside of maybe how the Whisperers did it, which was still pretty weird. This makes no sense. Breeding even stronger zombies makes Genet the dumbest TWD villain of all time. Second, why do all French people in this show dress like they walked off the set of a WWII movie? Do French people not wear modern clothing? It’s not a bad look, don’t get me wrong, but why? I’ve been to France. I don’t recall anyone being dressed the way these people are. Maybe they’re all filming a war movie and just go back and forth between sets and this makes costuming so much easier and more convenient.
We need to move from the Carol stuff to the Daryl stuff now. Here, the stupidity is broken up by the fight scene I mentioned above, which is jolly good fun but underscores just how thick Daryl’s plot armor is. Carol’s plot armor is wicked thick as well, so we have zero tension when she’s placed with the “volunteers” because we know that even a machine gun fired directly into her little group will kill everyone else but not her. She’ll be fine, she’ll escape, she’ll find Daryl within a day or two. It’s taken her like ten days since she left Alexandria to find the dudes in Maine who knew he’d been taken to France, find a guy with a plane, manipulate him into flying said plane to Greenland (where she was almost murdered by insane environmentalists—the funniest line of dialogue in The Walking Dead in years) land in France and walk randomly in Daryl’s general direction, stumbling directly on the one group in the entire country who can lead her to him. Unreal.
Speaking of the big fight scene where Daryl takes out half of Losang’s fighting men (who show enormous restraint by not shooting him full of holes later) did none of the dead turn into walkers? This could have made for a good “second act” of the fight, but I guess they must have just stabbed their heads offscreen.
Earlier, in the monastery, Sylvie has a total meltdown out over Laurent and starts running around shouting his name and hollering at everyone that they’re going to kill him. It’s not much of a plan, but they need to kill her off this episode, so the writers have her suddenly act very out of character (recall earlier this season when she sneakily discovered Laurent’s true whereabouts, well so much for that Sylvie). She’s chased up onto a walkway bridge above the courtyard by some of the apparently dozens of armed men Losang has at his disposal and during their struggle she falls off and dies.
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It’s a very weird scene. She’s looking over a wall that goes up about to her waist while talking with Losang below. She and the guards struggle and she falls the other direction, where there is no wall, careening to her death below. Losang sees her body hit the ground and runs to it, but he doesn’t cross below the bridge. Which means she was talking to him on one side of the bridge, falls off the other and then he apparently has teleported to that side in order to run over to her body. It’s so weird and off-putting! Feel free to watch this scene again (I watched it three times) if you think I’m wrong.
Losang is going to go through with his plan to have Laurent bitten to prove he’s the chosen one and has a really great idea: Why not use his dear friend Sylvie as the zombie to bite him? That’s not totally psycho! At this point, Losang is genuinely crazier and more despicable than Genet in many ways, though they’re really peas in a pod. For my part, I’m just a little bored of this kind of villain. It’s just so predictable. Both groups will invariably be destroyed by our invincible heroes while more and more NPCs are killed off. The only real question is whether Isabelle survives or not. I don’t love her chances. Three’s a crowd, after all.
The scene between Daryl and Isabelle—locked up together by Losang’s goons—was nice. I’d probably have to say this was the one good character scene of the episode, though obviously Daryl’s fight scene was the highlight this week. Still, I was a little surprised when Isabelle blurted out an “I love you” to an even more shocked Daryl. They’ve kissed one time! Moving pretty fast there, Isabelle. You might chase this gruff loner dude away with that kind of talk. Losang has Isabelle taken away (not sure why he had her put there with Daryl in the first place, to be honest) and when Daryl hollers at him that he can take him to Laurent, Losang—who only moments earlier was trying to get this information out of him—tells him that he’s a lost cause.
As Daryl calls out for Isabelle, Losang nods ominously to his goon, who walks over and hits Daryl hard in the side of the head with the butt of his rifle. This . . . apparently doesn’t hurt Daryl at all, as he is not knocked to the ground, not knocked unconscious, and just keeps shouting. The goon doesn’t hit him again, so I guess Losang’s unspoken orders were to give him one good thwack with his rifle and if that doesn’t shut him up, just don’t bring him any more wine. Everyone in France drinks wine all the time, you see, even the prisoners.
I don’t remember Season 1 being even close to this stupid but maybe I’ve just blocked it out. And I’m frustrated that I can’t just enjoy the show, that the writers haven’t done the basic work necessary to allow us to suspend our disbelief, that the directors can’t be bothered to avoid janky scenes like Sylvie’s death. It would take very little effort to make this a far better season, but they just can’t be bothered, and so I spend half the episode rolling my eyes and by the time we do get to some good stuff with Daryl it’s too little too late. Quelle déception.
What am I missing? Any other silly moments I passed over? Anything you disagree with me about? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.