The Walking Dead Goes Full Spaghetti Western

I’ve always blown hot and cold on The Walking Dead (TWD). I devoured the first seven or eight seasons, until the constant ad breaks and sluggish acting exhausted my enthusiasm. I tried the spin-off Fear the Walking Dead but found the characters so unlikeable that I hoped they would be bitten just to put them out of their thespian misery. Other spin-offs followed, focusing on specific characters and new situations. Tired of them all and lacking access to AMC+, I put them out of my mind. The whole original series is on Netflix but I just didn’t care.

Then I heard about The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, featuring the rough and surly but chivalric biker-type character who’d been around TWD forever. I gave it a try on Netflix and liked it, especially because it moved TWD out of the United States. Parts of Fear the Walking Dead were set in Mexico, if I recall, but that couldn’t overcome the problems with the characters. The TWD U.S. settings, mostly in Georgia, Virginia and other parts of the South, were getting stale. I’ve always appreciated sci-fi and apocalyptic shows set out in the wide world, like World War Z (South Korea, Israel and Nova Scotia, among others), District 9 (South Africa) Sleep Dealer (Mexico) and the morally gripping Godzilla Minus One (Japan). The world doesn't always end in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, after all

But the Daryl Dixon cycle went in a refreshing new direction: East. I like calling it The Walking Dead’s European Vacation! The first and second seasons are in France, and end with an ill-starred move by Daryl, his fellow traveler Carol Peletier and some Brits through the Chunnel to reach London. Season 3, which I just watched, starts in London and through unfortunate circumstances winds up in coastal Spain.

And that’s where my attention really perked up. From the start I picked up vibes from one of my favorite movie genres, the Spaghetti Westerns filmed in Spain in the 1960s. The color tones, the Spanish guitar music, the sweeping vistas all looked and sound straight out of the Sergio Leone playbook. And then there’s Daryl Dixon, as an updated version of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. The delightful similarities couldn’t be a coincidence and, I learned, that was all deliberate. A promotional poster even has the headline “The Good. The Bad. The Undead.” One scene even shows the poster for a spaghetti western.

Some other points of similarity that fascinated me:

• The gated town ruled over by the local caudillo
• Ringing church bells and quasi-religious processions
• The Spanish “king” arriving with his thuggish entourage to bestow gifts on the peasants in exchange for a comely young virgin chosen in a terrifying ceremony called La Ofrenda.
• A band of lepers pleading for support against another vile, foppish character who steals their water and rides around in a walker-pulled train (Daryl of course knows what to do).
• A young woman fighter in a hat and bandolero straight out of a scene from the Mexican Revolution.
• An epic gunfight in the town square at the finale

The Spain season also inspired political thoughts. The Spanish village that Daryl and Carol enter, Solaz del Mar, seems workable enough on the surface, other than La Ofrenda. But, step by step, the two Americans shake the place up, similar to their noble troublemaking in the French setting in the first two seasons. They just can’t help getting involved and creating chaos. Is this a subtle indicator of the durability of American imperialism surviving the Apocalypse? The series needs plots, so conflict is required, and taking TWD out of what was the United States to Europe does assure culture clashes (although somebody’s always around who speaks English).

Season three of Dixon raises the bar on spectacular set pieces with the walkers. Besides the usual surprise encounters with herds of walkers (cue the knives, swords and arrows), the characters take part in scenes that are amazing in their choreography, editing and sheer mayhem. One involves the train, another with walkers used as marionettes in a stage performance for the heartless aristocrats during La Ofrenda, until they’re cut loose to attack the audience. The inventiveness will be hard to top but I’m sure producers will come up with wild scenarios as The Walking Dead’s European Vacation moves on. Maybe next time in Ukraine's Chernobyl, for nuke-enhanced (or cured!) walkers?

Finally, this season offered some surprisingly saucy dialogue. That’s refreshing since “saucy” is the last word I’d associate with the grim world of the TWD universe. Some sensuality may be hiding in the spinoffs, but here you get Carol, in the realm of attraction to a villager, telling a Spanish woman, “But has anybody ever told you that you are a horny old lady?”

The smiling reply: “Usually they don’t call me a lady.”

A little bit of that goes a long way to lightening the mood of TWD.