In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines lived one little girl at the world’s decline. Isabelle takes Daryl back to her apartment in this week’s episode of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, where he learns she “wasn’t always a nun,” and she learns that young Aimee, whom she left the day the world ended, died and turned shortly after Quinn drove away. And speaking of Izzy’s English ex, Quinn returns in this episode with a new job as a post-apocalyptic proprietor and a big reveal for our survivors. The people chasing them finally catch up as well. Daryl hits the Big Bad and the club in this episode and is still no closer to getting home.
“WE’RE GOING TO PARIS,” Daryl announces gruffly after Isabelle’s plan to find a radio in a quieter provincial town fails spectacularly. Not only has the eccentric old Frenchman in charge of the radio broken it to build a stereo system, but he has rigged up zombies and made his own personal puppet orchestra. He conducts the dead as a record player blasts Ravel’s Bolero. I don’t even like The Country Bear Jamboree, so I’m on Daryl and Isabelle’s side when they high-tail it out of there. Now, it’s time to try Daryl’s plan.
Thankfully, they arrive in Paris and find members of Isabelle’s religious group easily. But first, some sight-seeing! The needle drop on a French cover of “People Are Strange” by The Doors, which feels strange until Daryl spots Jim Morrison’s grave in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Daryl also spots the motto of Genet’s military movement on the side of a car, and Isabelle gives him a little context. They control most of the area. Isabelle doesn’t seem particularly scared, though.
A man named Fallou (Eriq Ebouaney) takes them home with his group. Fallou’s community looks a lot like the ones Daryl comes from in the United States — the good ones, that is. They have a garden and people working together. There’s just one issue. Instead of a radio, they have a man who trains homing pigeons. He can send a message, but it might take up to a month for a response. Fallou says he can take them to a place that may be able to trade for passage on a ship.
So, as I mentioned before, Isabelle and Daryl go to her old place to stock up on drugs and luxury watches they may be able to trade. They leave Laurent, who sticks around to console widows — still not knowing he’s meant to be a messiah and unclear as to why the woman tells him he made her feel loved, BTW. At the apartment, the adults have an interesting conversation. Isabelle reminisces about a bar where the regulars, artists, and students spent the nights thinking about reinventing the world. “At least you thought about it,” Daryl says, adding that he didn’t used to do much thinking back then. Isabelle questions this, saying, “You seem like someone who’s always thinking,” which might be one of my favorite things anyone has said to Daryl Dixon, ever. It’s true! “Things happened,” he says. “Things that change you.” Isabelle suggests that they’re similar. They were broken until the world ended.
After a quick zombie scuffle involving the dead young Aimee, Isabelle and Daryl rejoin Fallou and his young associate Emile, Sylvie, and Laurent. (Shout out to Sylvie for getting herself a cute boyfriend in Emile, like, two days after leaving the convent.) Fallou pays a guard some hazelnuts and walks them through the catacombs, where the skeletons of those who died in the Black Plague are still stacked. “America is an infant,” he says. “Here, we have survived many apocalypses.” Fair point! I never thought about that as a reason why countries might react differently to a zombie outbreak.
They then arrive at a nightclub called the Demimonde. It’s not, as you may expect from these types of stories, a hotbed of sin or a hive of scum and villainy. It’s colorful and cool, with patrons as dangerous as anyone in the TWD world and a delightful combination of punk, cabaret, bohemian, and drag performers. I hope the series spends a little more time in the Demimonde because I was interested to see how Daryl would react in such an environment. This is the first time really that we’ve seen Daryl in an urban space (outside of a noisy apartment building at the Commonwealth that was still painfully local) or around a subculture that doesn’t involve skin suits or eating people. It’s definitely the first time we’ve seen him in a queer space. I thought I saw a smile twitch and his shoulders relax, but it was too brief to gather any kind of meaningful analysis.
The younger members of the group, Sylvie and Laurent, are more noticeably taken by the establishment. Daryl instead turns his attention to the paintings that the club has rescued from the Musée d’Orsay, remarking that Monet’s “Blue Water Lilies” reminds him of home. This prompts the strangest expression from Isabelle, but again, it’s too brief. They have business to attend to, so the art around them must wait. I want to know what Daryl’s thinking about! His whole thing is that he doesn’t talk much, and I’ve never been more frustrated.
Some mildly seedy men give Daryl and Isabelle a hard time about locating passage. Things start to get violent when they see Isabelle’s stash, and in comes Quinn. Daryl goes into expert observation mode. I laughed out loud when Quinn and Isabelle first reunited because I realized Daryl and I were giving the pair identical narrow-eyed glares and trying to figure out their deal. Quinn offers to help as a favor to an old friend. But then he meets Laurent and his whole demeanor changes. He ushers Izzy and Daryl into his office, where he asks about Lily and then reveals that he is Laurent’s father. Dun…dun dun?? He implies that he’ll only help Daryl if Isabelle and Laurent stay with him. He uses his son and alludes to a previous incident where he saved her from a suicide attempt. “I don’t need a boat that bad,” Daryl says.
Once they’re away from him, Isabelle calls him out for trying to cast her as a damsel in distress. I appreciated that even though we know that Daryl has dealt with men like this before and means well. From Isabelle’s perspective, a man playing the hero is just another man standing between her and her independence. Then, when they’re back at Fallou’s spot, Daryl seems lowkey mad at her for not telling Laurent that Quinn is his father. Dude, she clearly did not know until just now. I take back what I said about his observation skills. I think what he’s trying to say is that they shouldn’t put this religious burden on him and should just let him be an ordinary kid in an extraordinary (derogatory) world, but it came out mean.
But then Javert Codron’s men raid the happy little garden community. Throughout the episode, he has been tracking Daryl and gets to meet Genet. After promising to bring her Daryl as a sign of loyalty, Genet takes him to see her zombie experiments. It’s still not clear what her team is doing. It’s just that they’re not … doing it successfully. What’s the point? Americans gave up on messing with zombies years ago on The Walking Dead. Even Michonne and the Governor, who kept loved ones around longer than they should have, let that go.
The episode ends with Daryl and Codron engaged in combat, with a thunderstorm looming and zombies everywhere. It ends on, well, Daryl falling through a roof. You can’t really call that a cliffhanger, can you? While I still enjoyed the world-building in this episode, it was not my favorite. Daryl learned what we already knew about Isabelle. So that felt a bit repetitive. I’m unclear as to what Daryl can take away from this Parisian adventure in light of his ‘tude about Laurent and what they can, in turn, learn from him. And I’m a little worried that the show will become more about Genet and her weird experiments and less about Isabelle and her unconventional family. But the show is only halfway through, so we shall see!
Un Petit Plus
• The episode title translates to “Paris will always be Paris” (you could probably have figured that out from context clues, or if you’re familiar with the phrase “Que sera sera”) and is also the title of a popular song dating back to 1939.
• And the song that the cabaret performer at Demimonde sings is called “Le temps de l’amour,” by 1960s French singer-songwriter Françoise Hardy.
• When the Zombie Puppet Showman says, “Where is Brian? He’s in the kitchen” to demonstrate his English to Daryl, those aren’t random sentences. It’s an infamous example from a French textbook called Speak English that became a country-wide inside joke. Apparently, if you go to France and someone clocks that you speak English, they may laugh and ask you where Brian is. Now you know! Unfortunately, I don’t remember any specific phrases from my Discovering French textbooks. I do remember the Muzzy commercial, though. Je suis la jeune fille!
• Why were the zombies at Isabelle’s old apartment fizzling and burning? Does this have something to do with Genet’s experiments, or was it just creepy for the sake of creepy? Either way, I hated it.
• Codron’s hell-bent on finding Daryl because he killed his brother. Daryl had a brother. Could you imagine if Codron’s brother was called Merle, too? They could do a whole Martha thing.
• One thing I really like about this show, and maybe I’m just enamored by all things European, is how the most peripheral characters have profound things to say. Why did that pigeon man make me misty when he said, “we all have a person who waits for us somewhere.” That’s beautiful!
