Daryl, Carol and Laurent are working on the plane with Ash, ready to make their escape out of France, but the plane won’t carry all of them, so someone will have to be left behind. Both Daryl and Carol believe they should be the one to stay. However, Fallou and Codron bring news – the combined remnants of Genet and Losang’s forces are about to attack and our heroes are vastly out-numbered.
Whomever gets on the plane might be able to get away, but where will the others go and who can they trust when conditions – natural and seemingly unnatural – take a turn for the worse? Maybe you can’t get what you want, but you get what you need…
*le spoilers*
Au revoir les Enfants, taking its title from the 1987 film by Louis Malle, leads us into the endgame of the current series of Daryl Dixon and its current Book of Carol.
The second season of arguably the most atmospheric The Walking Dead spin-off to date, built on the potential of the first season and with the added factor of Melissa McBride’s much-missed Carol, it was always going to be an enjoyable experience. There’s no doubt that France’s rich and visually-striking history has imbued the series from day one. There would really be no reason to take the franchise beyond American shores if the production didn’t take advantage of the fundamental differences in look and texture and over the various episodes we’ve seen the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Mont St. Michel and the suitably eerie catacombs. But sojourns abroad, so often marked by merely dropping in convenient landmarks, have been bolstered by the more suburban Parisian street shots and loving views of French countryside, all enhanced with believable apocalyptic post-production fare.
The finale feels like a game of two, distinct halfs. The first deals with a lot of the season’s loose-ends: escaping the combined might of matriarch Genet and religious zealot Losang’s mish-mashed militia and apparently rounding out the story-arcs of both Louis Puech Scigliuzzi’s Laurent Carrière and Manish Dayal’s Ash Patel… and then we’re on to what our left-behind heroes should do next, which in the immediate time is locating the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. It’s been confirmed that the show will shoot in Spain for the next run, though it feels like something of a misdirect given that Daryl and Carol are firmly en route to the UK at season’s end. (As the trailer below shows, they’ll end up in Spain eventually).
There have been times when the series has been on its back-heel and has followed the familiar template of introducing interesting supporting characters only to quickly kill them off and the news that the third season of the show will leave France behind only bolstered the likelihood of streamlining the cast before the credits roll. Laurent and Ash make it out alive, flying off to, apparently, the US, though there’s enough left open to bring them back if the franchise wanted to extend their contracts and story-arcs. I’m quite thankful that the writers didn’t lean too far into Laurent’s possible ‘immune child messiah’ angle given the similarities to that other dystopian success story The Last of Us. Wisely, the show has kept the emphasis on the belief-systems of other characters with regards to Laurent rather than the boy himself and it might well have proved a mistake to confirm whether or not there’s anything different about him. (However, the pre-titles appearance of a guitar and the emotional bonding that continues between Daryl and Laurent feels very reminiscent of the Joel/Ellie narrative in TLOU).
That being said, there are casualties this time, but mainly among the bad-guys who have been shot, strangled or bitten over the latter half of the season. After Clémence Poésy’s Isabelle, Anne Charrier’s Marion Genet and Joel de la Fuente’s Losang were killed off last week, there’s more fatalities here. Farewell then to Lukerya Ilyashenko’s underground hostess Anna Valery who accepts her fate after delaying those pursuing Laurent and Nassima Benchicou’s religious zealot Jacinta who is munched on thereafter (and who takes her own life). Eriq Ebouaney’s Fallou Boukar and newcomer Akila (played by Soraya Hachoumi) – and whom I’d have guessed would be collateral damage – also make it out in one piece, giving us a romantic light at the start of the Chunnel. (The fate of Romain Levi’s Stéphane Codron and Tatiana Gousseff’s hench-woman Sabine is left more nebulous).
Location, human drama and quests are important because there’s only so far you can go with the risk of basic mortality after the apocalypse. Unlike the ‘mothership’ and its large, but revolving cast, there’s no real danger of the two main characters, Daryl or Carol, turning into zombies (because…. well, there goes the entire fanbase) so there’s only so much faux-peril you can put them in. There’s been some pseudo-close-calls over this season, but also some convenient get-out clauses. Arguably, the production missed a beat in their promotion of the S2 finale. During their journey through what remains of the Chunnel, the atmosphere, made worse by the toxic bat-waste, makes our travellers hallucinate. Carol sees a zombified version of herself and one can only wonder the effect on fandom if there had been even a glimpse of that image (and delightfully out of context) in the episode teaser ahead of time.
Also on the visual side, the luminescent corpses in the French end of the dark, claustrophobic Chunnel are fun to watch – the show has tried with middling success to enhance the novelty value of different kinds of walkers, but the reason some suddenly have burning touches and explode are left to the vagaries of ‘illicit experiments’ rather than given anything more plot-wise. But, again, the production design department handles it well. It helps that the presence of the toxic bat-droppings (guano) create hallucinations that give an opportunity for weird camera-angles and stylistic lighting and some convenient book-ending soul searching through PTSD. (The show exaggerates the effect of guano for story-purposes, but it is a real-life health-hazard).
Asexpected, both Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride do themselves proud in the finale, having key scenes as they address what they’ve won and the longer list of what they’ve lost along the way. We had seen Daryl and Isabelle express feelings for each other (and that’s always the sign of a death-knell) but the relationship between Daryl and Carol is clearly the deepest on the show, going somewhat beyond pigeon-holing, but created by their shared experience and trust of each other. Despite astral ‘appearances’ from Isabelle (complete with fireflies) helping Daryl get his head straight and Carol’s late lamented Sophia (played by an excellent double for the young character originally played by Madison Lintz – who has long since grown up and is now Maddie Bosch in the Amazon adaptations of Michael Connelly’s Bosch novels). we’re back to an almost clean-slate as the credits roll.
The next leg of The Walking Dead‘s worldwide tribute tour continues next year with filming already underway…
- Story8
- Acting9
- Direction9
- Production Design / VFX9
