Jimmy Smits joins the final season of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon as Captain Alejandro Perkins, a former U.S. Navy officer and medical doctor who has found a way to thrive during the apocalypse, TVLine reports. The season is due to debut next year. In the teaser, Daryl lies in a hospital bed as walkers attack the Spanish countryside; when he wakes, Perkins says, “Welcome home, son.”
That greeting makes the casting news a neat final-season hook. Daryl and Carol ended Season 3 in Spain after their boat to America went up in flames during a confrontation with local warlord Fede. “Home” now sounds like both a destination and a relationship. The teaser does not explain where Daryl is or what Perkins means by “son,” and that ambiguity is doing useful work.
Perkins’s medical skills give the story an obvious practical angle. The more interesting possibility is a personal history with Daryl, which cannot be resolved with a quick patch-up. A final season has room to make the greeting matter, but it will need to give Perkins more weight than a mysterious line and a bedside entrance.
The shots of Spain complicate the apparent promise of a homecoming. They may belong to scenes before or after the hospital, so the teaser offers no firm answer about Daryl’s destination. That leaves a sharper question than “Will he get home?”: what would home mean to him by the time he gets there?
