I have come up with a working theory as to the quality of AMC’s current The Walking Dead series, Daryl Dixon: The Book Of Carol. It goes something like this:
- When Norman Reedus is the focus of the show, it’s pretty good. At times, it’s even really good. When he is not the focus of the show, it’s pretty bad. At times, even really bad.
This judgement is sweeping. When the focus of the series is on Carol (Melissa McBride) for instance, it’s been pretty bad. That’s not because I dislike Carol, though I’m not a Carol fan largely because of how she’s been written for so long and is once again written in this show, but because of the goofiness of the plot so far.
The Bad
Carol and Ash (Manish Dayal) flew out of the burning compound last week and this week land in Greenland. Here begins our adventures in absolute preposterous nonsense. As of right now, in the real world, about 56,000 people live in Greenland. It is an island over 836,000 square miles large. That’s roughly one quarter the size of the lower 48 states. The likelihood of our intrepid flyers running into humans or zombies when they landed on an island over three times the size of Texas, with less than a percentage point of the population of that state is, well, just about as close to zero as you can get.
But within moments of landing, Carol spots zombies approaching. And moments after that, she’s saved by a pair of scientists that happen to have a research station nearby. The zombies are as cool as ever, and I liked that they came out of the turf like snipers in the grass, but everything else around this subplot is just ridiculous—Fear The Walking Dead levels of absurdity. “But it’s a zombie show, Erik! Why do you expect it to be plausible?”
There are two words we must discuss in today’s review. The first is verisimilitude. This is an interesting word and one that I wish more people who consumed media understood, because I would get fewer complaints like the one above. What verisimilitude means, when it comes to storytelling, is that within a fictional world or story, the things that happen feel true to that fiction. We can accept, for example, dragons in Game Of Thrones. But if Jon Snow were to show up wearing a jetpack and blasting fools with a plasma rifle, that would be implausible—even within a fantasy setting (or perhaps especially within that setting).
Likewise, if a group of survivors who have never flown a plane before, decide to fly one to help another survivor because for some reason they can’t just drive across Texas and then they crash and have to fix the plane, despite not being engineers or knowing how to fix a plane, we might find this a bit ludicrous and unbelievable even though it takes place in a zombie apocalypse. I am describing one of the goofy plots in Fear The Walking Dead, by the way.
Every story is different, of course. And there are times when breaking verisimilitude can be an effective storytelling technique. For instance, in the excellent series Giri/Haji, toward the end we get a scene that completely changes the tone and approach of the entire show up to that point, when the characters suddenly begin dancing as if they’re in a musical. It’s almost dreamlike. Nothing up to that point in the series was at all like it, and I suspect some viewers were rather put off by it, though I found the segment quite beautiful and evocative.
But most of the time, there’s a good reason why writers should make certain not to break a show’s internal logic, and focus instead on presenting scenarios that feel plausible and true within the fictional world. The Walking Dead was always most effective when it was a gritty and plausible version of what a zombie apocalypse might be like. It eschewed the crazy over-the-top post-apocalyptic super-vehicles you might find in some zombie movies. Characters were flawed and vulnerable. Over time, efforts to maintain a sense of realism have fallen by the wayside.
Of course, Carol’s saviors turn out to be bad guys but in the most convoluted way possible. One of the women thinks the apocalypse is Mother Nature’s way of cleansing the earth and tells them this while making crazy eyes; I have no idea why Carol let’s her load the crossbow instead of stopping her. The other seems nice. She hugs Ash when he tells her of his dead son. But wait! She’s actually the crazy one. She tries to force the first woman to kill Carol so that they can . . . breed with Ash? Really? This is the best story they could come up with?
There’s no tension here, of course, because Carol wears plot armor so thick it could deflect a nuclear bomb, and Ash—while likeable—has to survive because he’s the pilot. I’m just not sure why they couldn’t have had the pair land at an outpost they saw from above, making their encounter with these women more believable. Then, instead of making them crazy, have the two try to steal the plane—a perfectly understandable motivation given their isolation and desperation. It’s okay to give characters human motivations that don’t involve some bizarre “repopulate the earth” via what can only be, eventually, incest.
Carol and Ash then fly to France (though logistically I believe they would need to refuel in Iceland and/or Scotland prior to making that far of a flight) and Carol makes Ash wait with the plane while she goes off to find “her daughter.” In France.
France, I will just point out quickly, is a country roughly the size of Texas (about a quarter of the size of Greenland). In the real world nearly 68 million people live there. Finding Daryl in France would be enormously difficult, right?
No, it’s super easy. Barely an inconvenience.
Within this very same episode, in fact, Carol is captured by Genet’s soldiers and taken to her compound, and of course people there will know of Daryl. She hasn’t found him yet, but it took her all of five minutes when landing in France to make serious headway. What great fortune that she and Ash landed a short walk away from Daryl’s enemy! That might be bad news, if Carol didn’t have her plot armor on, but since she’s invulnerable from any real threats or harm, it’s just a stroke of good luck.
The writers of this show do not have the patience or the skill to craft believable scenarios. The only consideration here is getting from point A to point B, and the details are simply irrelevant. I find this incredibly frustrating, because it very badly ruins my ability to immerse myself in the story when I’m rolling my eyes this much.
The Good
Back in France, at the Nest, Daryl Dixon returns with the people he rescued. Laurent continues to receive his education, learning language and science and philosophy as Losang and his acolytes attempt to fulfil this silly prophecy and make him some kind of New Messiah.
But my favorite parts are the quiet moments. Daryl teaching Laurent how to play baseball was really nice, and I wish they’d lingered on that longer. While I enjoyed this section of the episode, I still find all of it too rushed.
Losang (Joel de la Fuente) and his collaborator, Jacinta (Nassima Benchicou) need to get Daryl out of the way so they can “test” Laurent. Losang’s plan is to make it appear as though Laurent has been kidnapped, sending Daryl off on a wild goose chase while they have Laurent bitten by a zombie to prove that he’s immune (**waves at The Last Of Us**).
Jacinta has other plans. Behind Losang’s back, she orders their men to kill Daryl, removing him from the equation permanently. What neither of them expected was for Isabelle (Clémence Poésy) and Fallou (Eriq Ebouaney) to accompany the expedition. This puts a bit of a wrinkle into the plan, and Daryl and the good guys manage to fight their way out of the trap. Unfortunately, Jacinta managed to turn their friend, Emile, against them and Isabelle is forced to kill him.
They return to the Nest, which is an island just off the coast that’s unreachable based on the tides, and there’s a very pretty shot of Daryl and Isabelle looking out at the setting sun. These are the best parts of the show, when it allows itself to slow down and give us some character moments and sweeping cinematography, giving us a richer sense of the world Daryl finds himself in.
It’s here, when Isabelle tells him that she and Laurent will come with him, that we get the kiss. The two look at one another and then lean in, tentatively at first, before they kiss. There’s a pause, but no words are spoken, and Daryl moves in for another. It’s quite tastefully done, actually. Moments like this stand in such stark contrast to earlier bits, I get a bit of whiplash watching. This isn’t a straight-to-bed type of kiss, but rather one of exploration and discovery. Daryl and Isabelle might become a thing, but they’re in no hurry.
I’m glad it happened. And I’m glad the show has taken its time to make it happen. Historically, The Walking Dead has handled its romances very poorly, but hope springs eternal, and I hope that Daryl and Isabelle find solace in one another, and that Carol doesn’t swoop in and ruin everything.
Yes, I worry more about Carol ruining things than our wine-slurping villainess, Marion Genet. While our heroes have plot armor, they also function a lot like ticking time bombs, ready to implode and take out everything around them, including innocent bystanders.
Speaking of innocents, it appears the vipers in the Nest—the religious zealot counterparts to The Last Of Us’s Fireflies—are really going to try to test Laurent, which makes me feel bad for the kid despite really not caring for him or the storyline at all. Of course, it seems wildly unlikely that their evil plan will go through, now that Daryl and Isabelle are coming to save the day, but I’m honestly hoping it does and that Laurent is actually immune, and that this could lead us to a story I’ve been hoping for ever since Eugene revealed that there was not, in fact, a cure. I still believe that at its foundation, The Walking Dead suffers the most because there is no end-game. We need something to work toward beyond this endless cycle of survive, find community, destroy community, rebuild community, fight enemies, survive, rebuild, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Overall, this was a much better episode than last week’s, though I remain completely disenchanted with the Carol storyline and its wild conveniences and implausible, well, everything. With only the barest effort, just about every scenario Carol has found herself in could have been tightened up and made more believable, and I remain at a loss why the writers hand-wave so much when it comes to creating a more immersive and realistic world.
You can read my review of the season premiere here. What did you think of the episode? 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.
