‘The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book Of Carol’ Review – Walking Back To The Basics

Daryl Dixon’s second season reflects the soul of The Walking Dead’s prime in the murky international waters of a world gone by.

“Home is wherever the people you love are.”

No wasted time — you simply can’t afford it. The show picks up without warning or worry. Within a franchise that has been criticized as of late for meandering, Daryl Dixon sets off to correct that course.

And in that, there’s a lot of blunt appreciation for the titular character. Dialogue concerns questions of empathy, and how long it takes one to lose it in a post-apocalyptic world like this one. Do you make time to stop and smell the roses, or do you keep pushing, because the dead ones don’t smell the same? It’s about a sort of subjective beauty that not everyone believes in.

Dixon as a character could not be more suited to such queries. The main Walking Dead series had very little for him to do towards the end of its run. Slowly, yet quite surely, his own show is paving a new path. It’s necessitating itself by giving the character real room to grow and change, as opposed to filling a hole in a bloated cast of characters.

But as the title suggests, this second season is concerned with more than the main character. This is The Book of Carol, and it doesn’t take long for that to come to light.

In her first scene, fitted with Daryl’s crossbow and the indomitable spirit that accompanies it, Carol takes a group of snarky mechanics to task as she sets off to find Daryl. Despite their cross-continental distance, she casts a line across the world in her very first scene. It sets the tone for the rest of the season; what to expect and what to hope for.

Daryl Dixon’s second season still isn’t as good as The Walking Dead was at its best, but to be fair, that show had one of the best stretches in modern television.

What it does well in is following up a killer first season from The Ones Who Live earlier this year, as well as improving on a fair first season of its own. The Walking Dead is slowly seeping back into relevancy, and this is yet another progressive step in that direction.

Spin-off shows like this one cut ties with the incessant fluff that made the core show feel overlong as time went on. There’s still a magic about the characters that have been in it since the beginning (Rick, Michonne, Daryl, Carol, Maggie), and that’s why these series have life. It’s a basic property of success, and perhaps a bit derivative at times, but it works. Even at its worst, Daryl Dixon works.

The biggest drawback of this season is in the middling nature of its movements. AMC has already confirmed a third season, which is actively filming in Spain. That fact alone definitely takes some air out of the season’s stakes as they stand; plainly, it’s difficult to get fully invested when you know for sure that there’s more yet to come, and even more so when you know they aren’t taking either of the main characters out of the equation.

Still, season two delivers on the premise. Without spoilers, you’re gonna see all the stuff you came for. It helps that the show looks expensive, impassioned, and well-planned, too. To that point, fans should gladly welcome another season of rock-solid undead content revolving around some of the most reliable classic characters. Nobody is saying no to more Daryl-Carol. Darol? Caryl?

Whatever you want to call them, this friendship is more than enough to support a series, and Daryl Dixon’s second season is proof of that. Besides, even the prospect of seeing a greater reunion of characters beyond the one this season posits is worth a thousand side-shows. It’s just the icing on the cake that this one is very good in its own right.

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book Of Carol will premiere Sunday, September 29 at 9:00 pm ET/PT on AMC and AMC+.