One of the best things about The Walking Dead as a franchise is that the folks behind the scenes are willing to take a creative risk and play with genre. That extends to the TWDU‘s many spin-offs as well. At a press conference and panel held at New York Comic-Con 2025, Daryl Dixon‘s star/executive producer Norman Reedus and showrunner David Zabel talked about making the standout episode.
“People ask me ‘what do you wanna do on the show that you’ve never done,'” Reedus said during the panel. “And it’s always ‘I wanna do a Western.'” Season 2, Episode 5 “Limbo,” is basically a Spaghetti Western–a subgenre of cowboy movies made primarily in the 1960s by Italian directors (hence “spaghetti”) and shot in Spain, where The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 3 is set, in addition to Italy. Reedus said the episode was “a blast” to make and his favorite this season.
The whole episode has Western feel, down to the color palette that came with the location. “It’s a very orange and yellow and Sienna sort of vibe,” Reedus explained. Plus, “Limbo” has this quintessential Spaghetti Western plot: “‘this stranger comes down and finds this group of people and helps them and then moves on,'” Zabel summarized. In the episode, Daryl gets separated from Carol and their group and is taken in by a leper colony. He leads them to fight back against their oppressors, an evil biker gang stealing their water. It’s a tale as old as time, just like The Magnificent Seven or High Noon. Daryl has always been kind of a cowboy, and this allowed him to live that dream. There’s even a thrilling action sequence on a train dragged by walkers! How friggin’ cool and Once Upon A Time in the West is that?
Clearly, the folks at TWDU are proud of this episode. It set the tone for how they marketed the entire season. You may have noticed that the tagline for Season 3 is a reference to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. “Even if you look at the poster art [for this season] it feels like the Once Upon A Time in the West poster,” Zabel told the NYCC audience. “We really wanted it to be evocative.”
“We knew we were filming in Spain where all these Spaghetti Westerns were made,” Zabel said to a group of reporters at a press conference before the panel. Along with his Episode 5 co-writer Jason Richman, they got to brainstorming. “We just thought it was a cool idea to say what would happen if Sergio Leone made an episode of The Walking Dead with Daryl Dixon?”
So they just leaned into it. Further inspiration for the episode, Zabel said at the press conference, came from “thinking about what diseases might get out of control that aren’t necessarily out of control now, but could get out of control 12-13 years into the apocalypse.” It’s a fair point! After a decade without ample supplies of modern medicine and vaccines, some old diseases besides the walker virus might make a resurgence. They landed on leprosy. That disease in particular, since it’s usually dealt with via strict quarantine, also allows for a community.
The history of Belchite, a town in the Zaragoza province with gorgeous ruins that became the location for their leper colony, fascinated everyone involved with Daryl Dixon as well. Thus, this very special episode came to be! The Walking Dead will always, always, have more tricks up its sleeve.
(featured image: Jason Mendez/Getty Images for ReedPop)
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