The Walking Dead spin-off Daryl Dixon begins in a rather unexpected way: Daryl, who was very much in America the last time we saw him on TWD proper, washing ashore on the coast of France without any idea of how he got there. It’s a bananas premise, but it’s also an incredibly intriguing one — how on Earth could he get there and not remember? Who transported him, and why? Unfortunately, I would be shocked if Daryl Dixon had answers to either question.
It’s a problem other shows have had before: they want to shock and surprise the audience by giving them something so mysterious they’re compelled to keep watching to find out the answers. Many times, however, these shows come up with the audacious result first, hoping they’ll eventually figure out a backstory that can retroactively make that result make sense. However, working backward is much more difficult than the other way around. The wilder the idea, the harder it gets. Call it the Lost conundrum. (Remember the Frozen Donkey Wheel?)
And Daryl somehow arriving in France, without any idea how he got there, with zero recollection of being abducted or sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, during the zombie apocalypse, is a wild premise. I would be absolutely delighted to be wrong and discover that the show’s writers have a perfect answer, one that will make total sense, explain everything, and be utterly satisfying. But that is not a level of skill that the Walking Dead has ever really achieved, and certainly not to such an extreme degree as this.
Seriously, think of the massive amount of suspension of belief you’re going to need to maintain until the show reveals this mystery. I’ll buy that someone snuck up behind the very competent Daryl and rendered him unconscious, sure. But who would possibly spend the resources to send Daryl — or anyone — to France? And how? It simply cannot be by plane, because Daryl somehow ends up in the ocean. He must have been transported by a ship, which feels almost as unreasonable. The amount of gas necessary to send a ship across the Atlantic Ocean is immense, and that fuel would surely be in short supply during, you know, the zombie friggin’ apocalypse. And even that would take days; if the mysterious entity/organisation used a sailboat, it could take more than a week — a week where Daryl would need to somehow be kept unconscious, which would surely require and consume a great deal of medical supplies that could also be immensely better used. Either way, I think Daryl has to have been loaded up with some kind of drugs, because he’d need to be groggy enough to completely forget how he somehow escapes the ship by jumping into the ocean, and only regain awareness once he’s washed ashore.
Whatever the answers end up being, it’s going to take a great deal to explain how Daryl wakes up on a French beach with absolutely zero memory of how he arrived there, and it’s going to take even more to have a satisfying explanation. Again, I simply do not believe the makers of The Walking Dead can pull this off. It was a show where a zombie could fall down a flight of stairs in a room where multiple people were sleeping, yet none of them woke up. It was a show where a house full of adults could turn into feral animals who also lost the ability to speak in little more than a decade. It was a show where people acted like idiots all the time.
Again, I would love to be proven wrong. But in the very first scene, Daryl Dixon will have immediately set a very, very high hurdle for itself to, uh, hurdle. I suspect it’s far more likely the show will run directly into it, trip, and then try to pretend everything’s fine.