New Walking Dead clip teases the central love story of Daryl Dixon season 3

While both current Walking Dead universe spinoffs are on hiatus, the official Walking Dead social media accounts are keeping fans engaged with behind-the-scenes insight into the recent second season of Dead City and the upcoming third season of Daryl Dixon. The clips, titled "Behind the Dead," drop every Monday with exclusive content on the production of the zombie-centered dramas. 

The video, which dropped on Aug. 11, showcased the drama when The Dama burned in Dead City, but the Daryl Dixon material has a much more optimistic lean as it reveals the love story between young couple Justina and Roberto, which will be at the heart of the third season, releasing next month.

New Behind the Dead episode

Candela Saitta plays Justina and Huge Arbues plays Roberto, the young star-crossed lovers who catch the attention of Carol and Daryl when they find themselves stuck in a small Spanish town. The pair of seasoned fighters is desperately trying to get back to the USA when, it appears, a storm blows their boat off course and they end up recuperating from the rough journey in a town in southern Spain.

The main trailer for the season—which dropped at San Diego Comic-Con last month— revealed that whilst in Spain, Carol and Daryl encounter local traditions and culture, which includes the sacrifice of a young woman to the current king of Spain, in exchange for the town’s protection.

Now, thanks to Behind the Dead, we see a further complication to this story as it seems the girl destined for sacrifice, Justina, is in love with local boy Roberto, and the pair are already being kept apart by their families.

In a scene from the show, we see Daryl ask Roberto why the town is so bad, and Roberto informs Daryl that their families want to keep the young lovers apart. While this doesn’t appear to immediately move Daryl, a further scene reveals Carol is captivated by the pair and thinks she and Daryl should help them, though Daryl just wants them to focus on returning to the US. Inevitably, Carol will win this battle, a fact confirmed by showrunner David Zabel.

Zabel explains, “We wanted to explore this season the idea of love in the apocalypse. And that’s what Justina and Roberto represent, and [it] becomes motivating to Carol and to Daryl.” How exactly it motivates our heroes, we don’t know, though we do know that if anyone can help a struggling young couple out, it’s Carol and Daryl.

Whether the young lovers affect them on a more personal level is less clear, though the season trailer did appear to show Roberto’s father, Antonio, planting a kiss on Carol. And we know that Daryl had his own brush with romance last season with doomed nun Isabelle—something which may have affected Daryl’s view on love.

Later in the clip, Norman Reedus expands further on the romantic story, saying, “Carol gets involved and sort of…but look, there’s love and there’s love and there’s love. And I’m like pfft, whatever! Like, you know, they’re young, they’re gonna find other people.” So it seems, while Isabelle’s death may have been a shock at the time, it doesn’t appear the loss has hardened his heart to future romance.

Norman Reedus weighed in on Daryl’s relationships

Although, in an interview with Den of Geek at SDCC, Reedus seemed to suggest that he sees Daryl as only getting into a relationship in the future, when he feels it will be his one true love.

“There’s certain relationship type things—I won’t jump into a relationship on the show because I don’t think he’s the type of guy who would jump into a relationship," he stated. "I think he’s more like a penguin: if he goes there, he’ll be there forever.” 

It seems as though the Romeo and Juliet-inspired story with Justina and Roberto is a theme throughout the third season, and the idea of fighting for young love is something that connects back to the first season of the spinoff—when we saw Daryl’s final days on U.S. soil before he was kidnapped and taken to France.

In the fifth episode of the first season, titled “Deux Amours,” we saw flashbacks to Daryl in Maine working to catch walkers for some shady guys, in exchange for fuel to get home to the Commonwealth. Alongside Daryl was a young man who was doing the same, though less successfully, in order to run away with his girlfriend. When the young man asked Daryl for tips, Daryl replied, “Go home to your girl.” 

Daryl and Carol becoming the patron saints for young love is a development we may not have seen coming, but one that fits with the pair’s noble, brave, and hopeful hearts that we’ve seen play out in the 11 seasons of the flagship show. The only question is how exactly Carol and Daryl get tied up in this story, and how it will affect their own story as they try to return to their home in the USA.

The third season of the show, revealing all, begins on Sept. 7 and runs for seven episodes. A fourth season of Daryl Dixon was also confirmed at SDCC, running for eight episodes, although it was also announced that it would be the show’s final installment.

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