I keep coming back to The Walking Dead. After an especially long run and multiple side stories, it’s easy to feel as though the story has run its course. So I was hesitant about The Walking Dead: Dead City, but after one episode of the spinoff, it feels like the best of what TWD has to offer with character-based trauma and tension to spare. Dead City is in a long line of Walking Dead spinoffs. The first was Fear the Walking Dead, a Southwest companion piece. Then there was the YA-focused The Walking Dead: The World Beyond and an anthology series, Tales of the Walking Dead. Unlike other cinematic universes, fans don’t feel any urgency to watch every story. You can easily pick and choose which characters and settings interest you. Dead City is, however, the first of several to spin off from the series finale. The show has new groups and old alliances to worry about, balanced on one of the most delicate relationships between two characters in TWD history: Negan and Maggie.
Why them? Why now? In short: Maggie’s son has been kidnapped by a former member of Negan’s crew. She finds Negan on the run from the “law,†and they team up. It’s a clear, simple, western-y premise. I respect that. It allows the show space to do what I think it will do best: Showcase Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan’s acting talents and let them cook. After so many years and hundreds of episodes apiece on The Walking Dead, they have a familiarity and ease with their characters, which is rare to see on television these days. It’s also — can I just say — wonderful to see a male-female partnership where the woman is the strong and silent cowboy and the man is chatty and annoying. I really dig the dynamic, though I wouldn’t dare ’ship it.
The episode opens with Maggie scoping out the city from across the Hudson River, where we later learn she has been camped out for days. While killing a walker, she gets uncharacteristically aggressive and begins to bash his undead head in a way that can only be described as Negan-esque. Already I’m intrigued. Are we implying that Maggie will become as dark as her nemesis? I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s gotten close before. I might not even fault her. As TWD argues over and over, the world is now ruthless. Trying to hold yourself to the societal standards of a society that no longer exists gets you nowhere. You just have to decide for yourself where the line is between ruthlessness for the sake of survivor and cruelty to feed inner darkness.
Let me take this moment to catch you up on what happened in the later seasons of The Walking Dead. I suspect that the chilled-out nature of this show might attract viewers who got bored with or tired of the anchor series. Maggie has come a long way since she was forced to watch while Negan, the then-leader of a postapocalyptic cult called the Saviors, beat her husband, Glenn (Steven Yeun), to death with a barbed baseball bat in season seven. She gave birth to a son and named him Hershel, after her father. She became a leader of the Hilltop community. She left for an extended period to work with a woman named Georgie, who traded knowledge — schematics instructing how to build things like windmills and watermills — for food and protection.
Negan, meanwhile, spent many years locked up after Rick and his allies defeated him. The Saviors scattered, some joining the survivors, others going their own way. Eventually, he escaped, returned, escaped again, killed a Big Bad, was exiled for a bit, and then begrudgingly accepted by the survivors. By the series finale, he had a new wife named Annie and a child. However, a lot of his assimilation happened while Maggie was off with Georgie, so they didn’t get much chance to work through their shit. There is a bit in the final season and a formal apology in the series finale, but this series aims to really poke and prod at their connection.
Do we want them to be friends? I don’t. In the Walking Dead series finale, Negan apologizes for killing Glenn and leaving her son without a father. Maggie receives the apology but says she’s unable to forgive him. But whether or not you can work with someone you can’t forgive is an interesting question. When stories go on as long as The Walking Dead, the MCU, and the Fast saga, for example, the villain to anti-hero to snarky-hero pipeline is not uncommon. Dead City seems earnest in exploring the implications of Maggie having to ask the man who murdered the love of her life for help.
Back to Dead City. Maggie hits up a local bar and starts asking questions. The owner, played by Star Trek: Picard’s Michelle Hurd, interrogates her. She fights her off and escapes just as Negan, the guy she was looking for, arrives at the bar. Maggie tells him that he is wanted by the “New Babylon Marshalls.†This is a new group/location. Later, we hear one of its guys named Perlie Armstrong describe it as a nice, safe couple of blocks. It’s not clear whether or not Negan lived there, but he is wanted for a crime he allegedly committed there. He’s been on the run from the Marshalls for some time. In that time, he worked on a farm and acquired a young mute companion named Ginny (which sounds a bit like “Jenny†from Negan’s drawl).
But that’s not why Maggie is looking for him. As mentioned above, Hershel has been kidnapped by a former member of the Saviors called the Croat, who is set up in Manhattan. Not only was he one of Negan’s followers, he knew who Maggie was and greeted her with Negan’s signature whistle. So they make a deal. Negan will help Maggie get her son back from his former acolyte. In return, Maggie will get the girl set up at Hilltop and protect him from the Marshalls. She drops Ginny off at a Hilltop-adjacent community, and they get going. Maggie is visibly uncomfortable whenever Negan behaves in a paternal or caring way.
Representatives from the New Babylon Marshalls show up at the bar. They torture the employees for information about Negan and then kill them for aiding and abetting a fugitive. Bye, Michelle Hurd! Meanwhile, Maggie and Negan observe smoke that is regularly admitted from a building and determine that it might be the Croat’s location.
On a boat crossing the river, Negan gets fed up with Maggie’s vengeful jabs and refusal to kill or at least ditch the Junior Marshall they have just taken hostage. He picks a fight with her. Stop treating him like the bad guy when they’re all the bad guy. “Ask yourself one question,†he says. “How many husbands and fathers have you killed?â€
Negan and Maggie creep through the empty city streets and are met not by the Croat’s men but by Perlie Armstong. He tries to humanize himself to Maggie so she won’t kill him. There’s that question of whether or not Maggie is a villain again.
At the end of the episode, we meet the Croat, played by Željko Ivanek. He has Hershel — now played by Logan Kim (Ghostbusters Afterlife) with a sassy Glenn energy that genuinely surprised me — held hostage. The Croat waxes lyrical about New York City making you stronger because of the struggle. “I think you’re gonna like it here,†he says to Hershel. This dude thinks he’s Daddy Warbucks.
In the final scene, the Croat is called away to the roof of his lair. There, a bloody hostage is trying to escape. He scrambles like a carnival geek over the rooftops to a zipline, which the Croat cuts while the hostage is in midair. It seems like an awful way to die and an awful way to run a community. You let part of your infrastructure collapse just to watch one dude drop? Come on. I’m intrigued and I’m scared, but I’m not exactly impressed by him yet. I’m far more impressed by our morally opposed foes and who else they find in the Greatest City in the World.
Bridges & Tunnels
• You might have noticed that Maggie calls zombies “groaners†instead of “walkers†on this show. That’s probably a realistic but endlessly annoying thing about The Walking Dead universe and its spinoffs. Different groups have decided to call the undead different things. Since mass communication got cut off at the beginning of the apocalypse, there is no agreed-upon term. One group calls them “biters,†“chompers,†“infected,†“the dead,†and another “empties.†Since the terms are regional, it’s likely that Maggie uses an alternative to disguise her origin.
• The Croat reminds me so much of Niska on Firefly. Remember him, nerds? I think it’s just the Slavic accent and the cool, calm, and collected villain vibe. Heck, they both even talk about pain revealing who you are. I looked up who was playing the Croat at least three times to confirm it wasn’t the same guy, even though Ivanek is over 20 years younger.
• In dialogue, we learned what happened to Manhattan. Let me tell you, I’ve never been happier to be a borough girlie in my little life. The military cut off access in and out of the city to contain the infected, turning the Big Apple into one giant horde.
• Maggie and Negan pass graffiti that says, “Dawn. Lincoln Center. Come kill with us,†and that REALLY got my brain spinning. Trust New Yorkers to organize zombie slaying like a flash mob, silent rave, or snowball fight. If I had been safe across the river, I definitely would have commuted and died while trying to sneak around backstage at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.
• Based on Ginny’s mysterious backstory, I assume we’ll see this girl again even though Negan doesn’t think that he himself will. It seems like she could be connected to the Marshalls and expose their organization somehow.