The following contains spoilers for the episode. Please watch it before reading.

Doctor Who returns to television screens today for the first of the long-awaited 60^th anniversary specials, “The Star Beast,” directed by Who alum Rachel Talalay. Newly regenerated with an old face, David Tennant reprises the title role, along with Catherine Tate as Donna Noble. Russel T. Davies also returns as showrunner.

When we last left Donna back in 2008, she accidentally took in a blast of regeneration energy that had been stored in the Doctor’s hand that overloaded her human brain with Time Lord knowledge. The Doctor was able to section off that part of her and keep her alive, at the cost of having to wipe all of her memories of the two of them. The special, which picks up fifteen years later, does a decent job of recapping what you might have missed, although in a somewhat stilted way having the two characters literally explaining it to the viewer. However, after the new opening credits, it jumps right into the fun. 

The beam of a flashlight shines through a stone doorway. Footsteps approach. It is Daryl (Norman Reedus), and as he reaches us, the camera pulls back and we hear the rattle of a chain. He is locked behind an iron gate. Growling draws his attention, and he shines the flashlight through the bars, revealing a group of walkers. Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) wanders into view, and Daryl clutches the gate, knife in hand, calling the boy’s name. As the walkers overtake Laurent, he bows his head and puts his hands together, praying, and then he is hidden from view by the staggering figures. Daryl screams his name, but Laurent doesn’t move. Eventually, losing hope, Daryl falls silent. The walkers move back the way they came, and lo, Laurent is standing there, still praying, unharmed. Hallelujah amen.

The episode begins as Daryl (Norman Reedus) drives the cart into a town, and Isabelle (Clémence Poésy) says, helpfully, “This is the town of Angers.” They stop in a square outside a rundown theatre, and Daryl gives Sylvie (Laïka Blanc-Francard) his gun with an instruction to protect the horse. Maybe he regrets sending Asteríx the mule to certain death last week.

Daryl and Isabelle go inside. Isabelle’s contact is a musician who has been living here for years. A door behind a rack of theatrical costumes opens, and a wild-eyed man with eccentric Beethoven hair emerges, addressing them in French. The subtitles are also in French, so I can’t tell you what he’s saying. As he approaches, Daryl holds up a hand to stop him, and tells Isabelle to ask about the radio, without so much as a “my-name-is-Daryl-Dixon-I-come-from-a-place-called-the-Commonwealth.” Crazy Beethoven realizes Daryl is “Anglais.” “I speak,” he says. “Sky blue, grass green. Where is Brian? He is in the kitchen?” I’m hazarding a guess that this man is not of entirely sound mind.

Beethoven takes them downstairs into a cluttered office where there is a radio. Daryl rattles its bits ineffectively, reminding me of the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Isabelle says something in French about a place called Le Nid, and Beethoven replies “Yes, of course. The radio could call to there.” Daryl stops pretending he knows anything about technology and asks the man to fire up the radio. “Oh no,” says the man in dismay, and asks if they would like a show. “What the fuck?” says Daryl, and Beethoven tells Isabelle that he used some of the radio parts for “amplification.” “Do you like Ravel?” he asks and starts playing Boléro through a makeshift sound system. He goes upstairs, telling Isabelle and Daryl to follow him into the auditorium.

The episode opens with a flashback. Isabelle (Cleménce Poésy), dressed in eveningwear, stands on a rooftop looking out over pre-apocalypse Paris. Behind her is a brightly lit nightclub, electronic music blasting. She goes inside, weaving her way between dancers, eyeing people and being eyed by men. She chooses a man with whom to dance, and they break it down in slow motion until she walks away. She lets two other men buy her drinks as the evening passes, and she snorts some cocaine. We see the scars on her wrist from her suicide attempt. Guess we’re not flashing back far enough to find out about those.

Eventually, she puts her coat on and leaves, stopping in the lobby while she waits for the elevator. In her purse are men’s watches, which she has spent the night stealing. She stares at herself in the mirror doors of the elevator. She doesn’t like herself. Her hair looks great though, 10/10 for that. Screaming comes from inside the club, and she walks into a quiet corridor, taking pills out her bag and swallowing some. We get it: the nun was once a drug-snorting, pill-popping thief. Everything slows down again as her high hits. 

Daryl (Norman Reedus) washes up on a beach, tied to a capsized boat. Exhausted, he collapses on the sand. He is parched, but half-buried in the sand further up the beach is a child’s plastic bucket. It could be full of saltwater or dog urine, but he gulps its contents without doing so much as a finger test.

Leaving the beach, Daryl figures out he is in France when he sees a French sign. He is unmoved by this discovery, or perhaps so shaken by it that his face is briefly paralyzed. He plods onwards, and likely realizes around the same time as we do that France, like the cast of The Walking Dead, looks hot even in the apocalypse. 

He finds a boat, which helpfully contains some bottled water, a map, and a dictaphone with working batteries, twelve years into the apocalypse. Oh la la! The British owner of the boat voice-journaled, and we see a montage of Daryl cooking fish and looking at the map as he listens. Tragically, the Brit’s wife died, and he speaks mournfully on the tape of how his daughter wants to go home. Daryl does too. He picks up a stuffed penguin as he contemplates home. Is this a sniggering gesture towards the fact that he will shortly meet a different kind of “penguin,” in the form of a nun? I very much fear it is. 

***The following contains slight spoilers***

Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) is a man in crisis in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon: a physical crisis, a spiritual crisis, and, apparently, an identity crisis. The six-episode series, a second season of which is currently in production, has a fresh aesthetic, an accomplished supporting cast, and a title which is occasionally necessary as a reminder of who the man on screen is intended to be.

Beautifully filmed, with a soundtrack of wistful French songs and haunting orchestral numbers, the latest offering from The Walking Dead universe features an excellent, mostly French cast alongside Reedus, including Clémence Poésy, Adam Nagaitis, Anne Charrier, Eriq Ebouaney, Laїka Blanc-Francard, Romain Levi, and Louis Puech Scigliuzzi. France offers exquisite backdrops for the story.

But the shiny new setting only emphasizes how unfamiliar Reedus’s character has become. One wonders how much the lack of narrative coherence has to do with the “pretty late in the game” transition away from the Angela Kang–led spinoff featuring Daryl alongside Melissa McBride’s Carol Peletier. In the wake of that tumultuous change, we’re left with an often shaky premise centered on themes of fatherhood, fate, and finding one’s purpose.

“Doma Smo,” the title of The Walking Dead: Dead City’s final episode, means “We are home” in Croatian, and the episode finds all the characters back home, either literally or figuratively. Hershel (Logan Kim) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) return to the Bricks, Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) goes back to New Babylon, and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) becomes, for the second time in his life, the leader of a group of survivors. The Croat (Željko Ivanek), introducing the Dama (Lisa Emery) and Negan to each other, says it is like “mommy and daddy coming together,” and thus he, too, finds himself “home.”

At San Diego Comic Con on July 21, a second season of Dead City was announced, and when I watched the finale some weeks ago, there was no mistaking the creator’s intention that the series continue. The episode is a collection of open ends, the season itself revealed as a kind of prologue to a show in which Negan becomes the swaggering, sarcastic king of New York, giving Morgan the opportunity to do what he does best in the role. But the character’s redemption, systematically and at times clumsily reinforced during Dead City’s first season, remains intact. Negan is visibly repelled by the Croat’s recollections of their days together in the Saviors, and he responds uncooperatively to the Dama when they meet…until she gives him the keys to a box containing one of Hershel’s toes, sliced off by the Croat on her command. The boy grew close to her during his captivity, it seems, and he told her about Negan killing his father. “I could sense in the rest of this story,” she informs Negan, “what he himself couldn’t: that his father’s killer might feel remorseful, responsible, for the boy whose family he destroyed.” If Negan will not work for her running New York, she indicates, she will further harm the boy. She has read him correctly: unable to tolerate that idea, he appears to concede to her demand.

“Let’s face it, the ending is all that matters.” Taken at face value, this line from the penultimate episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City, “Stories We Tell Ourselves,” might suggest a certain cynicism on the part of creator Eli Jorné for his own genre. And indeed, given the pacing of this episode, and the lack of narrative energy in the show thus far, one hopes that the finale next week might go some way to salvaging an otherwise frustratingly stodgy series.

For much of “Stories We Tell Ourselves,” nothing really happens. People walk around - limping, tiptoeing, lurching - and they also run. Two characters we’ve had no reason to care about are lost. Another character we don’t care about tells, unprompted, a personal story to Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), because, one assumes, Jorné couldn’t be bothered to find a more organic way to make the character sympathetic. Regrettably, this unexpected overshare still fails to make us care about him.

The episode deals, at a thematic level, with the “stories we tell ourselves to sleep easier,” as Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) describes them. Those stories, he implies, are essentially falsehoods, and we are prompted to consider the ways in which each character lies to themselves. The Croat (Željko Ivanek)’s lie - to us and to himself - is that he is a villainous mastermind, when in fact he is a fawning, subservient lackey to the Dama (Lisa Emery). Maggie (Lauren Cohan)’s lie appears to be that Negan is a monster who deserves to have his life traded to the Croat for Hershel (Logan Kim)’s, as her real plan is revealed in the closing moments of the episode. Armstrong’s lie is that his work for the Babylon Federation is noble and just: “tranquility and order” are worth achieving at any cost. Tommaso (Jonathan Higginbotham) deceives himself with the belief that betraying his people to the Croat was for their own good. And the lie Negan tells himself? There doesn’t seem to be one, because Negan 2.0 is intended to be a self-aware and emotionally intelligent man who is unafraid to confront his weaknesses. Dead City should try to emulate those qualities if it gets a second season.

Nobody wins anything in this week’s episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City. Maggie (Lauren Cohan) tries and fails to locate Hershel (Logan Kim), Amaia (Karina Ortiz) and Tommaso (Jonathan Higginbotham) lose a number of their people to walkers because they don’t use an obvious means of escape, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) saves Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) only to be arrested by him moments later, and the Croat (Željko Ivanek) - like the viewers - finds his old mentor a bewilderingly changed man. The episode positions everyone for how the season will ultimately play out, and there is a lot of movement, including a dramatic fight scene in an arena filling rapidly with walkers. There are explosions and haunting choral numbers, lots of jaw clenching and many charged stares. Children, and parenthood, are central to the episode’s themes.

“Kids,” Simon (Steven Ogg) barks at the Croat during the opening flashback, “is a line we do not cross. We all know that.” I sighed, while also wincing at his grammar. Kids are a line the Saviors crossed at Hillside when they beat a sixteen-year-old to death, a line Simon himself crossed, slaughtering the boys at Oceanside without repercussion, and a line Negan crossed when he tried to crush Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs)’ skull like an eggshell in the season 7 finale of The Walking Dead. The opening scene of “Everybody Wins a Prize” is vigorously, determinedly revisionist. To be fair, the franchise has worked hard at Negan’s redemption for years and thrown unfortunates such as his now-abandoned wife Annie (Medhina Senghore) into the mix, purely in the interests of softening his character. Annie’s brutal beating and gang rape were written to allow Negan a sorrowful sigh, a flicker of the lashes that might imply tears as he told Maggie the fate of his wife. If nothing else, The Walking Dead’s sheer doggedness in their quest for his redemption should be acknowledged.

In the Dead City premiere, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) tells Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) that, for her, there is no moving on from Glenn (Steven Yeun)’s death - the horror, one gathers, as well as the loss. The psychological realism of this is, on the one hand, self-evident. Grief and bereavement are not transient states, but permanent ones. There is no “getting over it” for anyone who has lost someone close to them. Neither, however, is grief static: it evolves, becomes familiar and more manageable. The Walking Dead gave one of Dead City’s main characters a remarkable redemption arc, a development from one of the flagship show’s worst villains to a repentant family man. But it trapped Dead City’s other protagonist in a state of unchanging rage and trauma - as difficult to watch as it is, in some moments, to believe - of which her reaction to Hershel (Logan Kim)’s kidnapping is just the most recent iteration. 

For that reason, among others, Dead City is indubitably, by its halfway point, The Negan Show. Maggie, struggling to cope with misery and fear over her missing son, is so tightly wound as to be robotic at times, even during her most vulnerable moments. By contrast, Negan continues to be sentimental and self-aware - finding a gift for the kidnapped teenager, offering a listening ear to Maggie, and sharing a scene with Ginny (Mahina Napoleon) that will make your teeth ache with its sweetness.