I watched the first episode of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book Of Carol (a terrible title that I will not repeat) last night and I could only think one thing: How do these people survive? How have they survived this apocalypse for fourteen years being this stupid?

Then I remember: It’s not the characters faults. The problem with this show, like so many others in The Walking Dead franchise, is the abysmal writing. The first episode of Daryl Dixon Season 2 is so poorly written, with so many contrivances, plot holes and rookie mistakes, I am left with zero faith in the rest of the season.

I’m just going to list off some of the ridiculous things that happen. We’ll focus mostly on Carol’s plotline since this episode largely revolved around her. The stuff with Daryl in France was far less glaringly bad, but it still had its moments. Alright, let’s dive right in:

• Carol makes her way to the outpost where Daryl ended up getting captured and taken onto the ship headed to France (itself one of the single most ridiculously implausible things in any TWD show). Here, she manages to grab the crossbow from one of the unsuspecting men and hold them all at bay with it. She even shoots one guy in the foot, but this large group of men decides to give her the time and space to reload—a very slow process, by the way. She only deals with three of the men. The rest of the group decides not to rush over and easily overwhelm and subdue her. They tell her that Daryl was taken to France (she scoffs at this at first, because yeah) and she steals one of their cars and escapes, telling them “Don’t follow me” which apparently they decide to honor. She does tell them about the dude, Mick, she left in the trunk a mile down the road. It’s the one decent thing Carol does this entire episode, which seems designed to make you despise her more than ever.
• There are no boats at the boatyard she comes to but she does spot a little Beechcraft plane fly overhead. How fortunate that just when she learns she needs to get to France—that very same day, no less!—she spots a plane. Granted, it’s not a very big plane and couldn’t make the flight to France unless it took a circuitous route through Greenland, Iceland and Scotland, so this might be tricky for her to figure out. But no, it’s actually super easy, barely an inconvenience!
• She follows the plane and somehow manages to find where its owner lives. He’s built himself an impressive fortress with a generator, sturdy gates, a greenhouse with plenty of food, and even a shed with hundreds of gallons of ethanol to fly his plane. There’s just one problem—one tiny little problem that apparently nobody in the writer’s room noticed. When his faulty generator goes down, which it does frequently, all the power shuts off and the gates just swing open. This leads, inevitably, to walkers flooding the compound not once, but twice in this episode. I just . . . I just can’t, folks.

This is Fear The Walking Dead levels of stupid. First of all, who would design a compound’s defenses this way? You’re telling me that every time this guy—Ash—has a power outage, all his defenses go down to the point where his front gate just opens up completely, and yet somehow he’s survived here for years and years? Are we to believe that his generator has only gone out this time? That he never considered to have some kind of failsafe—a latch or something that wouldn’t go down when the power goes out?

When the power goes out the second time—thanks to lightning, woohoo!—hundreds of zombies make it into the compound, though I’m not clear on exactly how this area is laid out because the gate looked really close to the rest of the buildings, but in the shots of the zombies they’re all coming from a distance through the forest. It’s all incredibly puzzling. In any case, somehow this guy survived the entire apocalypse here in his well-protected home, but couldn’t survive a single weekend once Carol arrived. I’m physically incapable of rolling my eyes hard enough for this nonsense.

I mean, if earlier that day zombies had gotten into my backyard because of the power going out, I might go chain the damn gate shut or something. Just saying. Of course, I’m not a hardened survivor of the apocalypse, so maybe just letting it happen again is the right move. Oy vey.

https://youtu.be/e4mYnY2j7-A?si=NOlch8jYBONw734e