How Daryl Dixon ended up in France among the “Walking Dead”?

When The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon first aired on AMC, my mom watched it before I did. At the time, I asked her how the crossbow-wielding fan favorite made it from the American East Coast to France while living in a zombie-infested apocalyptic wasteland. “Some bad guys got him,” she replied simply. On paper, it’s a funny explanation for a sudden, drastic change of scenery over the course of a decade in a franchise that usually only moves its characters around in ways that make sense. However, after I watched the show, it became clear that she was right: Daryl’s big move comes down to introducing new villains whose crimes take place in an area adjacent to one of the most beautiful cities in the world. the world

Behind the scenes, Reedus and all of the returning cast and crew members of the main series also relocated to France for filming — no doubt a big change after 12 years spent mostly in Atlanta, Georgia. The “bad guys” explanation is actually deceptively simple, as the show spends most of its first season dancing around the details of how Daryl ended up overseas before revealing the history (and strange motivations) of his captors in episode 5. “The Book of Carol” , as its second season subtitles, also reintroduces Carol Pelletier (Melissa McBride), who was Daryl’s survival partner. for most of The Walking Dead. At the end of Season 2, the couple reunited, but they also left France behind. It’s another long story from a show that likes to tell long stories.

The Walking Dead started dropping hints of what Daryl’s spin-off might entail long before it ended. In the flashback episode of season 10, Daryl goes out into nature, the place where he is most comfortable, to try to find out what happened to Rick (Andrew Lincoln) when he supposedly died. There he meets a woman named Leah (Lynn Collins) and her dog, er, Dog, with whom he falls in love. Of course, this being the darkest show in the world, Leah later revealed some dangerous tendencies and inappropriate attachments, and Daryl eventually had to kill her.

The last two seasons of The Walking Dead tell us everything we need to know about the Daryl Dixon series without actually introducing the plot or characters. Darryl from The Walking Dead of late is a loner, but he’s also capable of showing love and still has a strong bond with Carol. He’s also a hero through and through, even when he almost got killed. All of this sets the stage for his eventual exit from the main series when Daryl learns that Rick is still alive in the show’s finale. At the end of season 11, he decides to hit the road again to find his old friend.

Of course, Daryl isn’t in the Rick-centric The Walking Dead series, because by the time Michonne (Danai Gurira) and Rick reunite on screen in that show, we’ve already seen how Daryl got retired to a completely different continent in his own department. Fans are shown Daryl passed out on a small boat at the very beginning of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, but the full backstory to that moment isn’t explained until Episode 5.

While searching for Rick, Daryl runs out of fuel in Maine and decides to help some people capture walkers in exchange for gas to get home. The man who works at the gas station, Juno (John Ales), is a real piece of work, and after he kills a boy named TJ (Martin Martinez) in cold blood, Daryl confronts him. The group, later known as the Force of Life (or Pouvoir Du Vivant), capture Daryl and Juno after their fight and take them aboard a ship crewed by their Parisian squad. On board, Daryl discovers that the leader of the Pouvoir Du Vivant, Marion Genet (Anne Charrier), is conducting cool experiments with different versions of the walkers to better understand the mechanisms of the virus.

Later on, the whole thing gets a bit Victor Hugo (as well a bit Mad Max, for various reasons), when Genet’s own flashback reveals that she was a museum worker who went on strike before the virus hit, and is using the Pouvoir organization to gain the power that the upper classes amassed at the start of the apocalypse. However, the group is violent and sometimes ruthless, and when Daryl and Juno try to escape the ship, the latter is torn to pieces by a walker being kept for experiments. Ever the reluctant leader, Daryl led a mutiny on the ship and pretended to be dead on a small rescue craft after a run-in with Jeanette. For some reason, the Pouvoir crew conducts their experiments aboard a ship in international waters, so they spent most of the trip to France before he ditched the big boat and made the final leg of the journey on his own.

Although McBride was originally announced as co-host for this spinoff, but had to drop out from Season 1 due to scheduling issues. Her voice is first heard in the first season when she and Daryl talk briefly on the radio. In her first personal appearance on the show, she runs over a man driving Daryl’s motorcycle in Maine, feigning innocence, before hitting him with a wrench and trapping him in the trunk of her car. The first season of the series ends on a dramatic note, with Carol riding Daryl’s bike in his wake.

Still, she’s in Maine, and a few years after the end of the world, it’s not easy to drive her to France. Carol gets some information about Daryl’s location from the guys at the gas station, but her mode of transportation turns out to be a small plane piloted by a man named Ash Patel (Manish Dayal). Carol meets Ash at his home, and although the two bond, he’s reluctant to leave the place he’s clearly turned into a shrine to his late son. Carol has always been willing to do whatever it takes to get what she wants, and she does so here too, when she lies and tells Ash that her daughter Sophia (who definitely turned into a zombie and was the victim of a classic Rick Grimes headshot The Walking Dead season 2) lives in France.

The plan works and Ash sends Carol to Greenland. From there, she travels to France, where she eventually meets Darryl, despite the apparent lack of Google Maps available in this post-apocalyptic hellscape. However, the couple ends Season 2 with plans to go to England Variety reported that the third season of the show is being filmed in Spain.

“The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon” is now streaming on AMC+.