The Walking Dead’s Daryl Dixon Fully Becomes Euro-John Wick in Over the Top Season 3

There’s an easy joke to be made about The Walking Dead universe simply refusing to die, but there’s also something to be said about a franchise that’s still chugging along 15 years later—and more than three years after the flagship series wrapped up its eleven season run. Yet here we are, with a 56-year-old Norman Reedus still roaming the apocalypse like a samurai on a motorcycle as Daryl Dixon, now three seasons into an inexplicable adventure on the other side of the globe, battling zombies and bad guys across the stunning vistas of Europe. He’s once again joined by fellow Walking Dead fan favorite Melissa McBride as Carol, who joined the Daryl Dixon spinoff series last season (the series was originally developed as a Daryl & Carol-focused project from the jump, though Carol’s introduction was essentially delayed to bring her in at the start of the show’s second season). 

This show has no reason to work as well as it does, but the first two seasons were a beautiful adventure, showing fans how the zombie apocalypse affected other parts of the world, as we see how Europe, France, and now Spain have survived and evolved since the end of the “old” world all those years ago. Ostensibly a story about Daryl’s attempts to return home to America after being tossed on a boat bound to Europe to start the series (before weaving in with Carol’s mission to track him down across the globe and rescue him), the series has truly been an avenue to give Daryl the character growth he often missed while being spread around the massive ensemble that was The Walking Dead.

This remains the role that Reedus was born to play, and, 15 years in, he seems to know it. The series’s third season fully continues his evolution into the type of quiet, brooding action star who wouldn’t be out of place in a John Wick movie (seriously, in some of these well-choreographed Season 3 fight scenes, you’ll see the uncanny resemblance). The action is top-notch throughout this season, though it reaches almost video game levels as Daryl mows through waves upon waves of attackers at various times. That said, there’s a reason the John Wick movies are hits, and it is fun and well-executed if you’re an action fan.

Though Season 2 largely wrapped up the larger storyline about a young boy with apparent zombie immunity from the show’s first two seasons, Season 3 finds Daryl and Carol suddenly shipwrecked in Spain and stumbling into the middle of the politics, alliances, and (of course) zombie action of the people who have carved out a life in that part of the world. Just like the prior two seasons, Season 3 was also shot on location in Europe—so, yes, it’s absolutely stunning and looks incredible. With Daryl and Carol in a different location this time around, the supporting cast also receives a full reboot, with Eduardo Noriega, Óscar Jaenada, and Alexandra Masangkay joining as series regulars alongside Reedus and McBride. With the way Daryl Dixon is structured, the cast turnover really does work well, and the new additions in Season 3 are great. No spoilers, but Daryl and Carol not surprisingly stumble into a dispute between some surviving factions in Spain, and soon find themselves right in the middle of it all as chaos erupts between them.

With the series already renewed for a fourth and final season that’s tentatively set to arrive in 2026, you can feel the structure of how these four relatively short seasons will bookend things to tee up a final run (the show’s third season is just a brief 7 episodes, while the first two seasons were even shorter at 6 episodes each). The shorter episode orders seem to be a staple of the post-Walking Dead run of shows, with the Negan and Maggie-centric Dead City also clocking in at that 6-8 episode range per season, while the long-awaited Rick and Michonne series The Ones Who Live aired one six-episode season.