Genet’s forces storm the Nest. Not everyone makes it. Daryl and Carol find some very unexpected help.

There’s a lot here so let’s talk about action first because this franchise has always done it very well. The assault on the Nest takes up most of the first half of the episode and is the exact sort of post-apocalyptic Mad Max door kicking fun that the franchise excels at. Genet’s initial plan to slaughter ‘excess’ staff to turn them into drug powered ‘Amper’ zombies is topped, in seconds, by Carol escaping in a dune buggy with Codron tied to the back of it. Later on we get Carol Polite Older Ladying her way through some soldiers (her ‘Excuse me’/KNIFE!/GUN! combo is enormously nasty fun), Daryl demolishing a corridor of humans and zombies alike with almost off hand grace and a brilliantly tight, nasty fight in a farmhouse to close the episode out. It all feels consequential, it all feels jeopardy-filled and for a pair of characters who are on their second TV show that’s quite an achievement.

There’s some nice character stuff in here and the biggest moment is surely the reunion. Using it as the hinge for the season makes a lot of sense and the actual moment itself is honestly brilliant. Surrounded by the recently dead, the pair hug and both break down in tears. They’re bloody-knuckled miracles in a world made of horror and pain and they cling to each other like what they are; home.

That reunion opens the door into the character studies  that lie at the core of this show. The least well served of those characters is Isabelle, whose death clock started the moment she and Daryl admitted they had feelings for one another. It’s a deeply frustrating beat that plays, honestly, as rather callous. Now Laurent is established as a figurehead, there’s no need for his mother to hang around anymore. Clémence Poésy deserved better. It is interesting though that the episode opens with Isabelle’s death and closes with Genet’s. The first is an injustice, the second, shot with her own serum by Carol, is a balancing of the scales. Even if it’s immediately offset by  the loss of one of the two new characters we meet this episode.

Theo and Didi, played by François-Éric Gendron and Marie-Christine Adam respectively are an older couple who Carol and Daryl meet and who helped Fallou and Laurent. They’re delightful and are an interesting mirror to the couple Carol and Daryl may be evolving into. Didi gently calls Carol on the fact they’re in love and she doesn’t deny it. Theo, all French bonhomie and charming roguishness, is a subtle mirror to Daryl’s quiet, insular grief and rage. They’re fundamentally nice, kind people and they give the characters, episode and season, the space they need to process recent events.

They also echo back to Genet’s scenes in the previous episode. Like Carol and Daryl, they’re lifelong friends (at least) who have been through relentless trauma. Theo’s walk through the village, introducing us to his ‘neighbours’, all dead and fenced in on their land is both a clever coping mechanism and a desperately sad one. Didi’s ‘You’ll get through it. I did’ when Carol reveals she’s still haunted by the loss of her daughter is subtle, quick kindness of a sort the franchise has always done well. None of the four of them are okay, or fully on the same page. But Carol and Daryl get there where the others don’t. Theo’s pragmatic choice to betray them, and the consequences of it, are signposted throughout the episode. Not picking a side is picking a side and that resonates in this part of 2024 a lot more than it has for some time.

It’s ambitious storytelling to be sure but it’s also, in a major way, nothing of the sort. This is an episode of a TV show in 2024 that kills not one but three of its female lead characters. At least one makes sense, but the other two just feel like housekeeping with a body count. The only reason to kill Isabelle is for Daryl to feel sad. The only reason to kill Didi is to punish Theo, a punishment we’ll never see as he’s a one shot character. This is trauma not as dramatic consequence but punctuation and it gets perilously close to misogynistic when the bodies are stacked up. I don’t believe it’s intentional, but I also can’t shake the very sour taste this choice leaves. Some of that is the times in which I’m watching the show. But not all of it.

Verdict: This is an episode that tries to do everything and manages some of it. The tie off and evolution of the Nest plot is good, the reunion is great and the set up for what’s to come looks fun. But did we really need to build this episode off the dead bodies of three women? 7/10

Alasdair Stuart