All spoilers for The Walking Dead will be unmarked.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon is a Zombie Apocalypse series that premiered in 2023. It is the sixth installment in The Walking Dead Television Universe and the fifth spin-off of The Walking Dead. Like its immediate predecessor, The Walking Dead: Dead City (which premiered less than three months earlier), the series is a wholly original storyline not based on any of the source material by Robert Kirkman.
After setting out for places unknown in The Walking Dead's conclusion, the journey of Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) hits a giant roadblock. It's one that results in him washing up on the shores of Paris, with few memories of how and why he ended up in this situation. His search for answers eventually lands him in a religious group that assigns him a mission: escort a young boy, Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi), who could be a possible cure to the global infestation. Now, Daryl must traverse Paris' new horrors and evade hunters to complete his mission and find a way home.
Clémence Poésy, Adam Nagaitis, Anne Charrier, Romain Levi and Paloma co-star as new characters Isabelle, Quinn, Genet, Codron, and Coco respectively.
Daryl Dixon premiered on September 10, 2023 on AMC. It has been picked up for a second season, which will see a re-titling of the series as The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon - The Book of Carol and will feature the return of Melissa McBride's Carol Peletier as a regular. The first official trailer can be seen here
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The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon contains examples of:
- The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In: Daryl ends his fight with the Burner walkers by perfectly throwing a knife at the last one's head, killing it.
- The Bus Came Back: Carol returns in the flesh in the Season 1 finale.
- Call-Back:
- One scene in the trailer has Daryl wielding a military knife with four finger holes, which resembles Carol Peletier's version in the parent series.
- Another scene from that trailer has him hitting a walker's head with a morning star, just like the time he used one during the Whisperer's invasion on the Hilltop.
- And last but not least from the same trailer, the religious group provides Daryl a crossbow, his Iconic Item.
- Colon Cancer: The new title of the series as of season two includes both a colon and a dash.
- Continuity Nod:
- The trailers show that the spin-off takes place in France. In the first season finale of The Walking Dead, Dr. Edwin Jenner mentioned that the last counterpart to the CDC he was in contact with were based in France; and the Grand Finale of The Walking Dead: World Beyond also took place in France, introducing variant walkers to the franchise and a potential ground zero for the walker plague.
- Daryl states in his message heard in the trailers that he comes from a place called the Commonwealth. The Grand Finale of The Walking Dead saw the Coalition, the primary network of heroic communities formed by the Alexandria Safe-Zone, the Hilltop Colony, Oceanside, and other groups that had integrated into their ranks rebuilt thanks to the reformed Commonwealth; Daryl's message could indicate that he's either simply referring to the Commonwealth as a shorthand, or that the Coalition has since accepted being referred to as under the banner of the now genuinely heroic Commonwealth.
- Determinator: In the trailer, Codron tells Genet that he won't stop in his mission to kill Daryl.
- Just Before the End: The second episode opens with a flashback showing Isabelle's life as a party girl pre-Fall coming to a screeching halt as the dead rise and start to overrun the city. Several more flashbacks throughout the episode show how French society started to collapse into anarchy over the following days as the walkers spread and people begin panicking.
- Live-Action Escort Mission: The show presents Daryl with this trope, as he needs to escort Laurent across France to a place where he can evidently be raised to be the new messiah.
- No Escape but Down: The trailer has a scene where Daryl jumps off a balcony to escape a walker running towards him.
- Nothing Is Scarier: In the second episode that shows the Fall of France, once Isabelle takes a break from partying, there's a woman in the club with a distinct pained scream, and just before Isabelle leaves, a crowd starts screaming.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The first episode introduces a new walker variant, known as Burners due to having blood that for some reason is so acidic that they can burn people just by touching them.
- Protagonist Title: The series is titled "The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon", named after its protagonist. From the second season onward, the subtitle The Book of Carol is added, reflecting how she's the other protagonist (which was how the series was conceptualized from the outset).
