The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 3 Is Blowing Past Every Expectation

Nobody expected The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon to come roaring back this strong — but Season 3 just proved it might be the best the franchise has been in years.

Daryl Dixon changed countries again, because of course he did. The third season of this Walking Dead spinoff throws Daryl and Carol into a new corner of the apocalypse and lets the scenery do some heavy lifting. Same basic nightmare, different accents.

Where we pick up

Quick refresher: this series started with Daryl (Norman Reedus) washing up in France by boat and struggling through a language he did not speak. Season 3 picks up with him and Carol (Melissa McBride) finally trying to get home. First stop: England. Then nature does its thing, and they end up shipwrecked in Spain, where most of the season unfolds. The premiere is titled 'Costa da Morte' — Portuguese for 'Coast of Death' — which is a fun inside-baseball choice given they wind up in Spain.

Episode 1: Costa da Morte

The show is still finding weird new tricks this deep into the franchise. Case in point: a walker spooks Carol, so she jams a fire extinguisher into its mouth and blasts foam straight down the hatch. That is a new one.

England also gives us Julian, played by Stephen Merchant, who basically steals the hour. He is presented as a lone survivor clambering across London on a DIY zipline, timing his runs using Big Ben; when the bells toll, the walkers get distracted and he bolts. He even has his own slang for the dead — 'squids' — spun out of a Cockney rhyming game. Daryl and Carol warm to him fast and, yes, they do the gentle nudge-parent thing to pump his confidence. They also very much need his boat and his sailing skills to point them toward America.

The Daryl–Carol bond is the anchor here. Watching Daryl take care of an injured Carol lands in a way that reminds you how much softer he has gotten over the years, and how much more himself he is around her.

As Julian puts it about how England fell: things were handled... until they weren't. Then everyone split into tribes and started looking for someone to blame.

Welcome to Spain

Bad weather wrecks the plan and the boat. Julian does not make it, and when Daryl and Carol stagger ashore, they realize they are in Spain. They did not get far. A crew literally wearing bullhorns raids their stranded boat, which is your reminder that geography changes but the human equation does not. Good people, bad people, and plenty stuck in the middle — all just trying to survive.

From here, they have to start over and come up with a new way out, which turns into helping locals fight battles that look very familiar if you have watched any flavor of Walking Dead. Familiarity is kind of the point, and the show leans on it without feeling stale.

New faces, new places

• Language shift: after two seasons of mostly French (Daryl even picked up a few phrases), Season 3 is heavy on Spanish, so expect a lot of subtitles.
• Spain is the canvas: filming spans Madrid, Galicia, Catalonia, Valencia, Belchite, and Seville, which means actual texture — history, architecture, costumes, customs — baked into the story.
• New cast: a fresh lineup of Spanish actors joins Reedus and McBride, including Eduardo Noriega (Open Your Eyes), Oscar Jaenada (2025's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), Alexandra Masangkay (Stags), and Greta Fernandez (Cuckoo), among others.
• What AMC is promising: Daryl and Carol keep trying to get home, but the path keeps pulling them farther off course through distant lands, with conditions changing under their feet and new flavors of apocalypse everywhere they go.
• What to expect: they stumble into a community, get pulled into helping people under the boot, and run up against enemies that echo American threats — with a Spanish twist.

Does it still work?

Fourteen seasons deep if you count the mothership (and that is before tallying the other spinoffs), this should feel played out. It does not. The show keeps itself alive by changing the map and the music — new languages, new landscapes, same two leads getting tighter by the mile. Early reviews are into it: Paste basically says Reedus was built for this role, IGN calls it a strong, action-forward season, and Show Snob points to the Daryl–Carol dynamic as the heart of the whole thing.

Is it the same story again? Kind of. And that is okay. The sameness feels intentional — the apocalypse does not respect borders — while the scenery, culture, and performances make it feel new enough to matter.

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 3 is now streaming on AMC+.