The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 3 Premiere Review - “Costa da Morte”
“I have my dead, and I have let them go.”
The line from Rainer Maria Rilke that opens “Costa da Morte” is more than a flourish of poetry. It is a thesis statement for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon as it enters its second half. To survive in this world is to carry the dead, to mourn them, and – if one is fortunate – to move forward without being crushed under their weight. The premiere embodies this idea in a story that is as much about the hope of finding one’s way home as it is about the inevitability of loss along the journey.
The series picks up with Daryl and Carol adrift – geographically, emotionally, spiritually. Their trek out of England is brief but evocative, highlighted by their encounter with Julian, played with a disarming blend of wit and melancholy by Stephen Merchant. Julian, “the last Englishman in England,” is a figure almost out of folklore: lonely, eccentric, but clinging to decency in a world that has abandoned it. He offers Daryl and Carol the thing they’ve been seeking since this series began – a way home. That he does so with a boat only adds to the episode’s faintly mythic texture, as if Odysseus himself had stumbled across a guide promising safe passage across treacherous waters.
But in this universe, good fortune is never without its cruel rejoinder. The storm that strikes midway through their voyage is a reminder that nature itself is no less merciless than the undead. The boat wrecks, and what little hope the trio had of reaching America evaporates. The cruelest twist comes in the form of Julian’s death. In a matter of less than an episode, a character who had become instantly endearing – his humor, his need for companionship, his simple desire to be useful – is gone. The show lingers on the tragedy just long enough to make us feel the injustice of it.
Instead of America, Daryl and Carol wash up on the coast of Spain. Their arrival is not a soft landing, as their camp is set upon by masked scavengers on horseback. There is a surrealism in their appearance, as if the show wants to remind us that civilization has not merely collapsed but reshaped itself into something uncanny.
Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride continue to give this series its emotional anchor. Their chemistry, honed over fifteen years of shared history, is not simply familiarity but a kind of weary intimacy. They can communicate whole pages of subtext with a glance or a muttered aside. When Daryl removes shrapnel from Carol’s shoulder, the moment is both practical and deeply tender – a reminder that survival here is less about defeating walkers and more about preserving the fragile bonds of trust and love.
The premiere also plays with the tension between futility and resilience. Carol admits flatly, “I think I hate this place,” and who could blame her? Every mile forward seems to promise nothing but more loss. Yet, in the midst of their exhaustion, there are faint echoes of life: the sound of children laughing, the suggestion that some form of hope still exists, however elusive.
By the end of “Costa da Morte”, the journey feels less like an escape and more like an exile extended. Daryl and Carol are still wanderers, trapped in a cycle of temporary refuges and inevitable departures. Yet there is something beautiful in the persistence itself. The show has always understood that survival is not about victory – it is about endurance, about finding meaning in the smallest moments of connection.
The tragedy of Julian’s fate, the disorientation of washing up in Spain, the unease of strange new enemies – all of these are setbacks. But they also set the stage for a season that promises to be both haunting and humane. Like the best of The Walking Dead, this episode is not merely about death but about what it means to keep walking despite it.
“Costa da Morte” is a premiere that marries spectacle with sorrow, humor with despair, and hope with inevitability. If the Rilke quote is a challenge, Daryl and Carol embody its response: they have their dead, and they will let them go – but they will also keep moving forward, step by step, into whatever lies ahead.