The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 3 Fuses Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name and The Revenant Into Its Grittiest Chapter Yet

Fifteen years into this universe, Daryl Dixon is suddenly channeling Clint Eastwood and Spanish history. Not joking. Season 3 leans hard into spaghetti western energy, with Carol and Daryl wandering into a powder keg of a city in Spain just as the show lands in the UK.

The vibe this time

Showrunner David Zabel says the western DNA is deliberate. He grew up on Sergio Leone's Man With No Name films, and once production took them to the same kinds of locations, he decided to really go for it. The writers also pulled from Spain's actual past - the monarchy, the Civil War, the Basque separatist movement - to figure out how old power structures might still warp a community after the world ends. It is an unlikely cocktail on paper, but it makes sense once you see the setup.

"Once I knew we were going to be in the places where they filmed a lot of those, I thought, 'Let's lean into that even more.'"

- showrunner David Zabel

The setup

When the season kicks off, Carol (Melissa McBride) and Daryl (Norman Reedus) are in Spain after a blown attempt to sail back to the US from England. They run into two young survivors on the run from their home, a community called Solaz del Mar. Why the escape? The place keeps couples apart with throwback, archaic rules that do not care who loves who.

Carol is badly hurt, so the duo persuades the reluctant pair to take them back inside Solaz del Mar, promising to help them bolt again once she can stand and punch walkers properly. Predictably, rolling into a fortified, medieval-style city uninvited goes over great. Their arrival kicks up exactly the kind of internal drama you would expect behind guarded walls with a rigid rulebook.

How it looks

Director Daniel Percival says every department got mood boards for the season, and westerns were top of the stack. The visual playbook nods to Leone, yes, but also to John Ford and David Lean - filmmakers who knew how to drop a tiny human into a huge, hostile landscape and make you feel it. Modern touchstones like The Revenant factor in too, along with Mexican-made westerns known for intimate tension against wide-open backdrops. The goal: intimacy and menace, even when the horizon goes on forever.

• Where it goes: Spain, after a failed attempt to sail from England back to the US.
• The new community: Solaz del Mar, built on old-school customs that split couples apart.
• The leads: Carol (Melissa McBride) and Daryl (Norman Reedus).
• Tonal and visual influences: Sergio Leone's Man With No Name era and other Clint Eastwood-led spaghetti westerns, plus John Ford, David Lean, The Revenant, and Mexican-made westerns.
• Story influences: Spain's history - the monarchy, the Civil War, and the Basque separatist movement - refracted through a post-apocalyptic lens.
• US rollout: Premiered in September; new episodes air Sundays on AMC and AMC+.
• UK launch: October 24 on Sky/NOW.