La Dame de Fer

Genet begins a search for Laurent, seeking to eliminate him as he is a symbol of hope to people. As part of this, Genet makes a deal with Quinn who seeks Laurent in order to get Isabelle back. After escaping from a flooded building, and having a dream that a praying Laurent is ignored by a mob of walkers, Daryl encounters Antoine who is killed by guerriers, but he helps the dying man to free his pigeons. Reuniting with Isabelle, Daryl tracks Laurent to the ruins of the Eiffel Tower where the boy nearly falls victim to a herd. During the rescue, Laurent is kidnapped by Quinn's men and taken to Demimonde. With the help of a captive, whom he tortures and later abandons to walkers, Daryl sneaks into the nightclub and rescues Laurent while Fallou and his people create a distraction. Daryl overpowers Quinn while Anna, disgruntled by Quinn's obsession with Isabelle, lets them go. Having fallen in love with Emile, Sylvie decides to stay in Paris with him while Isabelle decides to stay in order to get Quinn to help secure Daryl and Laurent passage out as Genet locks the city down. Daryl and Laurent leave Paris on a boat heading to the Nest, the Union's main base.

The first three episodes presented us with a France devastated by the apocalypse, and the hope that everything can change. The next three episodes (including this one) are moving towards concluding the plot and leaving doors open for the next season. Here, the series' narrative has completely stagnated, and nothing relevant is presented to us, except for a few uninteresting action sequences. The script's standstill is evident, as at the end of the previous episode Daryl falls, giving the idea that we would have a minimally interesting episode start, which in fact does not happen. This shows that the episode moves in a lost and anticlimactic way throughout, with completely disposable scenes without any dramatic effect.

The initial sequence of the episode was somewhat intriguing because, even though it was a hallucination, seeing the boy in a risky situation may have made Daryl more protective of the child. In addition, all this belief around Laurent about him being the hope is being very well developed in various aspects, both in dialogues, actions, flashbacks, and now hallucinations. Here we also have the focus of Genet's group discovering that there really is a boy that people believe is the hope of everything, and she seems to mock because with the existence of this boy, the people of the Union of Hope would be blinded and would not follow what she wants to preach. As shown in one of the previous trailers, it seems that the series will still show this authoritarian and ultranationalist side of the character, drawing parallels with other real figures who are seen as villains of humanity.

Finally, Laurent manages to reach the Eiffel Tower, a symbolic place for him, as it is where his mother's photo is located. The scene suggests that those walkers have been trapped there for a long time, and when Laurent arrives and they manage to break down the barrier, it seemed a bit too forced. But anyway, Daryl and Isabelle arrive to save the boy, until he is kidnapped, and the series creates a new subplot. The protagonists manage to capture a member of the group that took Laurent and try to extract some information. Daryl's coldness in stabbing the enemy's abdomen with a sharp object is agonizing to watch, but it is satisfying from the perspective of the character's evolution in this spin-off, which in this particular scene reminded me of Negan, being sarcastic in a brutal moment.

It's unbelievable that at this point, the writers have created such an unnecessary subplot that leads nowhere. The boy is taken to Quinn's nightclub, and everything indicates that he only kidnaps the boy to get to Isabelle. Daryl manages to invade the nightclub, and the two characters fight, with the protagonist winning and Quinn being knocked unconscious. It seems that there is no more room for the character in the plot, so I believe that in the final two episodes, the series will not focus on him again. The characters meet near a river, and Isabelle decides to stay and send Daryl and Laurent by boat. This point was a bit confusing for many people, but since Genet has surrounded the entire city, Isabelle believes that if the group separates, it becomes more difficult to be caught, and Daryl to protect Laurent seems like the best option. However, with only the two of them alone, they become more vulnerable to Genet and Codron's attacks.

Speaking of the boy, it is still difficult to delineate what exactly the series wants to represent with his character. Obviously, the messianic traits exist, but it is noticeable that both the direction and the script cannot bring a necessarily believable or curious approach to the theme. There is nothing truly symbolic, except perhaps for that scene where Daryl dreams of the boy praying and warding off zombies (which leads nowhere, by the way), nor is there anything critical or minimally provocative/reflective about the insinuations of religion and faith in most of the dialogues. Is this boy supposed to be a symbol of hope? Why exactly? And where is the dramatic substance or any kind of thematic, narrative, or symbolic representation around it? It seems that the story wants us to buy into this idea with a few lines of dialogue about innocence and childlike purity as justification.

Even worse than that is the absolute laziness in several scenes of the episode. Apparently, Daryl was bitten in the water and even appears limping afterward, but this is left hanging... in a mix of careless mystery with random insinuation. We also have the terribly directed sequence of Laurent being kidnapped - what was that shot of Daryl letting go of the boy's car? Or the completely emotionless farewell of Isabelle and that other former nun who is overflowing with libido. The season has gradually become a collage of arbitrary moments, something that makes me look less favorably at the concepts I praised in the pilot, like the medieval side or the religious aspects that haven't amounted to anything so far. Notice, for example, the torture scene and the almost trial-like indication of Isabelle, opening up space for a discussion of morality and violence that the franchise has already addressed, but that simply dissipates...

"La Dame de Fer" is a slow and weak episode that leads nowhere. The series, which came from an excellent sequence in the last three episodes, completely loses its way here. With the resumption of the main mission at the end of this episode and two episodes remaining, the series has everything to deliver great moments and make us forget about this fourth episode. The series started with some minimally curious and unusual ideas for the franchise, but as the episodes have progressed, it is noticeable that there is no cohesion or deepening in the concepts and themes presented or insinuated by the narrative. It's all up in the air, maintaining the same dramatic problems of the franchise (bad dialogues, melodrama) and also those of direction (lack of tension, zero visual creativity for staging or setting, no scope), in addition to this growing sense of randomness that I have felt in the last episodes.

The fourth episode of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon is written by Shannon Goss, whilst Tim Southam directed the episode, titled "La Dame de Fer". It continues where the previous episode left us, the group is in the heart of Paris and two parties are looking for Laurent. The protagonist and the antagonist with their respectives. There's a scene I really liked which involved Genet at the community whom we got introduced to in the previous episode, it made her more relatable and not as a comic book villain. I like her and Codron, two well written characters. I don't know about Quinn though, I just don't buy his backstory and character at all, it might change though. With the faster pacing, we didn't really get any dialogue heavy scenes, Norman Reedus was incredible though. Last review I wanted to stay positive and find something good with Laurent as a character and the actor portraying him, the chemistry being the sole thing, here the bad acting shows even more and the writing for him, unfortunate in how they made him so important. Something else about the writing, I still love how authentic the dialogue is and how much french is spoken, there are even some F bombs coming out of Daryl's lips which just comes out natural. Daryl is quite grim in this episode, this show and honestly he have always been quite grim. After what he endured in season 7, I'm sure anyone would be grim. He kills with ease, zombies as humans, nothing new but when Laurent is watching he gives it a second thought. As an audience I guess it can be easy to watch and think how stupid it was for Daryl to do so, this is human behavior though, would you want to show a pre-teen it's okay to murder anyone in cold blood? I think not, this is why I liked that writing decision.

Daryl and Isabelle negotiate with the owner of the Demimonde club.

Great establishing shots, the production and art design were fantastic. The mise-en-scene was also quite great, they set up each shot so perfectly and I think the steadicam and the lens choice is perfect for the show. The cinematography is truly amazing. I love how they've finally arrived in Paris, a city I visited back in August and seeing all the landmarks in this show and simply the way they shot it, made me smile. Everything around the filmmaking was great in my opinion. The pacing is good and I would say it's nicely edited. The set design, costume and makeup department, lightning, composition, and so on. Everything about the filmmaking is great, direction too.

In a previous review I wrote how nice it was to see the locations and memorable iconography which Paris has to offer, now they're deep in the city and are next to the Eiffel Tower in one important scene which contains a great action sequence. All the action sequences were good in this episode, and something I took notice of is how the zombie killing is a bit different here, you see how the characters really need to use force and go deep and not the quick and easy killing the original show used to be. This is more keen with the first season of The Walking Dead. The final set piece showed a realistic shootout; with bullets getting fired, Molotov cocktails and grenades getting thrown, whilst both parties are playing it safe. Both sides are firing at each other, both suppressive fire, thus the bombs being important here. I can understand if someone thinks this is a boring action sequence, but it's a nice change of pace, a realistic one. Honestly though, I didn't like the delivery that much in this episode, finding Quinn and him being the father to be a unnecessary addition to the story. I really like the paramilitary group, Pouvoir Du Vivant (Power of the Living), though.