The Daryl Dixon spinoff for the Walking Dead universe is actually pretty good.

I'm not exactly sure why I keep coming back to the world of The Walking Dead. I left the original series in season nine when they got rid of Rick. Soon after that Michonne left the show. But they are going to be coming back, so I may end up watching the new Rick and Michonne show, which looks a lot like what The Walking Dead looked like. I keep thinking that either through attrition or a cure, there needs to be some hope of the zombie plague ending. But now, at the time of the Daryl Dixon spinoff, it feels a lot like maybe that's not what I want. Maybe it's just more time with these characters. Or maybe it was just to see other parts of the world that were impacted by the zombie plague. France seemed so different from the commercials. So yeah...I got sucked in yet again. But it wasn't a "I've got to watch this week's episode" kinda sucked in. Rather, it was one that I just recorded and eventually got around to watching several months after they aired. I also liked them enough to want to continue to season two, especially now that Carol (also from the original series) has found her way to France. Honestly, I never would have thought people could travel the world in the post-apocalypse but here we are.

Daryl Dixon sees the title character (Daryl) end up in France having washed up on shore. That's pretty much the premise of this show. French people, lots of subtitles, nuns in old nunneries, castles with thick walls to keep out the undead, people using medieval weapons which have really come in handy in the zombie apocalypse, and a world where Europeans are experimenting on zombies. These experiments sometimes turn the zombies into other things like zombies with acidic blood! It's very "Auschwitz-esque" but a French version and not German (we've no idea at this time what horror show a post-apocalyptic Germany or for that matter, Russia, has managed to brew up. When The Walking Dead first started many, many years ago, one of the things that made the story so compelling was the group constantly scraping to survive. Now, most of these spinoffs (especially the Dead City spinoff that I also watched starring Maggie and Negan) have become good vs. evil on a zombie apocalypse backdrop. So kinda like Stephen King's The Stand but with zombies.

As far as the setting goes, it's extraordinarily pretty (I think they may be using different filters on their lenses whilst shooting the show). They've also introduced a character which does appear to bring up questions in me. I wonder if it's a red herring. But there's this boy named Laurent who was born from a mother that died and became a zombie and he was pulled out of the zombie. But Laurent is not a zombie, even though he was connected biologically to his zombie mother. I don't know what this means, or if it actually means anything. But he's special as far as anything in this world goes. A lot of the people in this world (in France) seem to be heaping a tons of hope on the shoulders of this kid because they need something to believe in. But does he actually have powers? Does his blood hold some kind of secret that might stop the zombie apocalypse? I have no idea. It is enough of a hook though that I'd kinda like to see where it is all going. I get the impression that the kid is invisible to walkers. There's a scene where he's on the Normandy Beach and walkers are all around him, and he doesn't appear concerned at all, even though he's standing on an elevated ruin of a bunker. Are the zombies just not able to reach him or is it something else?

Other questions I had by the time I reached the end of the first season of Daryl Dixon include: 1) Why are people mutating zombies? 2) Why did Quinn (a character in this season) act like he knew the outbreak was going to happen? 3) How did the boy Laurent get to the beach by himself unless he is in fact invisible to zombies? 4) How did Carol get to France? Hopefully the next season of Daryl Dixon will shed some light on these things. 

On Wednesday, we'll do our Insecure Writer's Support Group post, and on Friday, I'll put up my analysis of Percy Jackson and how the Greek Gods in that show all seem to have embraced the baby boomer way of raising children. So yeah, the demigods are all "latchkey" kids, and it's just funny to me that this is largely what makes the series entertaining for modern kids to watch.