‘The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon’ season 3 finale review: “Solaz de Mar”

With a bittersweet episode, we’ve made it to the season finale of the penultimate season of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. This season brought a beautiful new country to explore, a slew of new characters, and some truly memorable uses of the walking dead.

“Daryl sets a fire in the chaos.”

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 3 finale, titled “Solaz de Mar,” starts with a familiar location and an even more familiar character. After we last saw him run off in the tunnel after attacking Daryl (Norman Reedus) in last season’s finale, Codron reappears at the statue near the lighthouse and notices the Rubik’s Cube that Daryl placed at the base (we’ll circle back to this moment later).

The episode then follows Daryl and Carol Melissa McBride) on their respective missions. Daryl and Paz (Alexandra Masangkay) arrive at the city and plan to get inside and rescue Justina and Elena after their failed attempt at the end of last week’s episode. Simultaneously, Carol and two of Valentina’s men sneak back into the village to rescue Antonio from his torture at the hands of Fede and his men.

Daryl and Paz find a group of workers being carted into the city walls and join them, which ends up working out perfectly as this group is working as servers for the royals. Once inside, they are given masks and are able to hide in plain sight and formulate a plan. Daryl decides to use the walkers that were strung up like marionette dolls and dressed in goofy costumes and let them loose on the room full of Spain’s elite. Daryl sets a fire in the chaos and sets off to rescue Justina as Paz locates Elena.

Sweet revenge.

In a somewhat shocking twist, Paz learns that Elena wouldn’t stay with her in the village because she has a son she needed to get back to. Both Elena and Paz get their revenge on Elena’s husband and kill him in the process. Meanwhile, Daryl tracks down Justina and frees her and several other girls who were taken from the village.

Carol arrives at the village and finds Antonio being strung up in the town square to torture the location of Daryl and Carol out of him. She waits until dark and she and Valentina’s men free Antonio but are immediately attacked by Fede’s men. They just barely escape and, after a short rest, the two attempt to sneak out of the village. As they get cornered by walkers, a villager saves them and leads them to safety…or so they thought.

A final escape.

As Daryl and Justina arrive back at the lighthouse, they find two of Fede’s men and take them out with the help of an injured Valentina. Daryl quickly realizes that something has gone wrong and rushes to the village. Carol and Antonio are in Fede’s custody, but he lets them go and tells them they can leave the village but that he doesn’t think they will. They discover a chained-up Roberto in the town square with a horde of walkers being pushed towards him.

Just as it seemed that Carol, Antonio, and Roberto were out of time, Daryl and Justina arrive just in time to take out the walkers and reveal the truth about Fede to the entire village. He is taken into custody, and everything seems to be going okay for the first time all season. But, as they prepare to depart on the boat back home the next day, Fede arrives at the beach having been freed by his mother and attempts to take out Daryl.

He fails, and accidentally sets the boat on fire. And in a truly sad and devastating ending scene set to a Spanish rendition of Johnny Cash’s song “Hurt,” the group is forced to watch as the boat burns, with Codron watching in the distance.

Unsatisfying endings.

Very much like the second season’s finale, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 3 finale both tied up a lot of loose ends from the season and addressed the big conflicts. We see the reunion of Justina and Roberto, Carol saves Antonio, the village learns the truth about their leader, and the royals are taken out, and the cycle of young girls being taken from the village is ended.

This would be a happy ending, but then the boat blows up. All the struggles and pain and conflict of the season may have been solved or addressed, but this one moment deflates all of it. I get that there’s still one more season so this couldn’t be a true happy ending, but this ending was a slap in the face.

Solid performances and creative use of walkers.

The rest of the episode was overall solid and well made. The scenes inside the royal’s palace and the use of walkers as marionette dolls felt very plausible and like it fit with the stereotype of what a royal person would do. Norman Reedus gave one of his better performances as Daryl and his monologue near the end of the episode about being afraid of leaving again once they get back home felt raw and real and was very well acted.

My absolute favorite part of the episode was the use of Johnny Cash’s song performed in Spanish as the boat burns. That song has such a haunting and defeated vibe to it and even in Spanish, you could just feel deep down in your stomach what Daryl and the group felt watching the boat burn after all they had been through.

Overall.

This season had its ups and downs just as the previous seasons did. But the introduction of Spain and the Spanish culture was an infusion that this show needed after wrapping up the France storyline.

As this season comes to a close with a traumatic cliffhanger, we have one season left to wrap up the story and see if Daryl and Carol can finally make it back home. And the appearance of Codron may be just what they need to help them through what I’m sure is going to be a wild and big final season.