Daryl Dixon- I can only blame myself for watching this.
I'll start with the only positives:
1.) It's Daryl being Daryl.
2.) France is an interesting setting and they make good use of it.
3.) It's fairly well paced compared to other TWD stuff. He travels further in 6 episodes than they did in multiple seasons of TWD.
That's it, everything else ranges from bad to straight up terrible. I watched about half of TWD when it was airing and gave up on that after the Neagan arc, so I have no real interest in the universe. But for some reason I decided against my better judgement to check this out just based off wait... WTF? Why is Daryl in France? Turns out it's so they could blatantly copy Last Of Us and The Road. Except they forgot all the stuff that made those actual good stories but remembered all the stuff that made TWD an infuriating muddled slog.
Daryl somehow ended up on some sort of prison ship in Maine and ends up washed ashore on the southeastern coast of France with partial amnesia? Fuck off. Then he meets a nun who convinces him to escort a little gay autistic boy to the west coast. The nun and apparently a ton of other people are somehow convinced that this kid is the literal messiah who is going to somehow rebuild the world. Except the kid is even more useless than Carl ever was. Fuck off. Also some of the zombies now have acid for blood just like Xenomorphs. Fuck you. There's a mid level bad guy that turns into an ally, then a second mid level badder bad guy that turns into an ally. There's also a comically evil fascist woman that runs a revolutionary military organization that's trying to kill the boy so that he can't bring hope to a new world. Fuck off.
Oh yeah and literally everyone Daryl meets speaks english. Everyone. He even meets a group of kids that all speak english because they learned it from watching fucking Mork and Mindy on VHS that is powered by a bicycle generator like some shit out of Beyond Thunderdome or Fallout. Fucks sake.
Daryl, the nun and the kid stupidly meander their way across France in a donkey cart to a magical sanctuary castle on the west coast. It ends with Daryl having to make a decision wether to stay in France or go back to 'merica in what I can only describe as one of if no the dumbest cliffhanger endings ever. Obviously you know there was going to be a cliffhanger but not that the show was literally going to laugh in your face for having sat through all 6 episodes. Seriously, it's just insultingly bad. Almost like something out of a parody.
They had to have known people would see through all this half-baked nonsense so they intentionally stretch out how Daryl got there to trick you into watching. But when you finally get what little explanation they bother to provide you're already in too deep to quit. What really amazes me is that after I finished it I read some reviews to see if anyone else felt duped and to my surprise most of them were really positive. I suspect that says a lot about how low the bar is these days in regards to both the core audience and the content, also just how bad TWD seems to have gotten by the end and in it's other spinoffs.
The worst thing is a lot of the basic premise could have worked, Daryl doesn't feel to out of place in France and he's legitimately a good character. But there's so much stupidity and unoriginality it just goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing.
