'Daryl Dixon's Latest Episode Is a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western, and It's What the Spin-Off Needs

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By Jasneet Singh

10/7/2025

Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 3, Episode 5

Going into the third season of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, series creator David Zabel teased that the season would be inspired by the Western genre. It's not necessarily too much of a jump between the post-apocalyptic genre and Westerns, since the idea of survival is very prominent in both, but it is still the first time the franchise would heavily lean into Western influences. However, the beginning of Season 3 only really had hints of a Western, as the season progressed in a fairly familiar way, where Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride) try to get home but keep stumbling onto detours. But Season 3, Episode 5, "Limbo," finally delivers the western sucker-punch that Zabel teased, and it makes us wonder why the spin-off's season wasn't doing this all along.

'The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon' Season 3 Was Inspired by Clint Eastwood Westerns

In his interview with Collider's Steve Weintraub, Zabel explains that the season was mainly inspired by Spaghetti Westerns, a sub-genre that boomed in Europe during the 1960s-70s, which involved themes and visuals that were generally much darker and grittier than American westerns. In particular, Zabel pinpoints that Episode 5 plays out like a Sergio Leone movie, one of the prominent filmmakers in the sub-genre who frequently worked with Clint Eastwood, churning out classics like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or A Fistful of Dollars. Even though we definitely know Daryl's name on the show, this episode has him take on the Man with No Name kind of role and jump into a hectic situation to help strangers in a town.

Even though it is disappointing that Daryl and Carol split in Episode 5, the ache of their separation is easily fulfilled by Daryl plunging into Western mayhem as he heads towards El Alcazar to rescue Justine (Candela Saitta). He has a brief but bloody confrontation with some bandits in the arid landscape, giving us an epic and absurd showdown of jousting on motorbikes in a Mad Max fashion. But when he has to abandon his bike, he comes across a community of people with leprosy whose water had been stolen by those same bandits. Here, we get the essentially nameless cowboy (Daryl) who helps these strangers with basic survival in return for a truck, tying in the anti-hero style of Spaghetti Westerns, that is all topped off with a ruthless one-man-against-an-entire-group battle and a post-apocalyptic cowboy aesthetic.

'The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon' Is Best When It Embraces Its European Location

Daryl Dixon Season 3, Episode 5, is reminiscent of the spin-off's first season, which wholly embraced all the idiosyncrasies that came with the new European location. It didn't just let Parisian architecture become a backdrop to the story, but allowed the city to become a character, indulging in the post-apocalyptic surrealism of French art, landmarks, and culture. As such, we got bizarre yet beautiful sequences of the Paris catacombs being transformed into a speakeasy, where death and debauchery were hidden away from the debris above, and the Louvre being destroyed, where the Mona Lisa still holds a strange, hopeful yet nostalgic significance in this post-apocalyptic setting. So, if France and surrealism were the alluring blend that defined Season 1 (and somewhat Season 2), then Spain and the Western genre should be the concoction that remains prominent in Season 3, and Episode 5 proves that.

The episode embraces the Western atmosphere of its location more strongly and intentionally than the previous four episodes did, and results in a gripping joyride that leans into fun cowboy tropes and Spanish culture. It's most prominent in the communities Daryl meets during his travels, kicking off with the bloody-eyed lone man, careening through the desert and cackling ominous warnings, reminiscent of a figure in Spanish folklore who was a blind beggar masquerading as a prophet.

The community with leprosy is both a nod to the historical Spanish endemic that lasted centuries and the Western trope of a lone cowboy helping a down-on-their-luck town, while the train bandits with the walker-pulled carriage is a post-apocalyptic take on the Western trope of outlaws targeting a train. These admittedly bizarre ideas make the Western and cultural texture of the episode richer and more dynamic, and are exactly what Daryl Dixon needed to be embracing all season.

'The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon' Season 3 Needs To Keep This Fast-Paced, Western Chaos

By leaning into the truly absurd side of the Western and post-apocalyptic genres, Episode 5 also operates at a pace that the season sorely needed. The previous episode may have felt promising with the introduction of the brutal new enemy, Los Primivitos, but this episode pumps our adrenaline in a way the meandering main storyline simply isn't. With ridiculous moments of Daryl holding his weapon while a Western trill chimes in the background, ready to face the incoming outlaw, or the creepy voice of the little girl listing off the kill count, the episode's absurdity mixed with the torrential pace is why it works so well.

With only two episodes left in the season, we can only hope that Daryl Dixon keeps up this full-blown Western and post-apocalyptic fusion. After getting such a successful dose of it in Episode 5, we can certainly imagine the same principles being applied to the central arc, which would likely boost its appeal. Throughout its three seasons, Daryl Dixon has always been at its most exhilarating when it dares to jump into extreme ideas or visuals, so if it really wants to stick with the Western atmosphere, it should dive headfirst into it.