Dead City’ Season 2 Finale Review — A Crushing Disappointment

The season finale of The Walking Dead: Dead City was, in some ways, a fitting conclusion to the second season. It was just as lackluster, dreary and pointless as the seven episodes that came before. It’s impossible for me to care about these characters or the haphazard villains that come and go or the story of Negan and Maggie at this point. Every time Maggie’s son Hershel is onscreen, I just grit my teeth. Ho hum a derry oh. I’m bored. Negan and Maggie’s story should have wrapped up in the main show. This all feels like fan-fic, though I’d hope for spicier, more transgressive material from fans. (You know what it is).

Spoilers ahead.

Dead City’s entire setup is problematic for so many reasons, none of which involve Maggie and Negan doing the deed. The truth is, this pair being forced together for a spinoff feels gimmicky. We already spent so much time in the main show wondering if Maggie would finally snap and kill Negan, to drag that out into a spinoff is just beating a dead CGI horse at this point. It’s a weird combination of Walking Dead nostalgia (oh look, he has Lucille again!) and AMC’s inability to come up with any genuinely new ideas. I mean, they have ideas, sure, but they’re all some version of “Let’s take this main character from The Walking Dead and put them in a different location.” Daryl is in France. Negan and Maggie are in Manhattan. What next, an Alaskan spinoff with Eugene?

Just picture it: Eugene leaves the Commonwealth because he’s received a radio transmission from a science outpost in Alaska – or heck, let’s say the South Pole (go big or go home!) He ventures south, traveling by truck, by donkey, by sailboat, by aircraft and at last by submarine all the way to Antarctica where he heads off in search of the scientists who may, in fact, have found the cure to the zombie plague! This is no more outlandish than Carol’s flight to France by way of Greenland, or Daryl’s voyage on a massive freighter.

But to make The Walking Dead spinoff – let’s call it The Walking Dead: Cold Freeze and not The Walking Dead: Eugene – to make it truly fit the mold, we’d have to sprinkle in a few more elements. Eugene would find two communities here in a state of ongoing conflict. The leaders would both be ruthless women with tragic, if jumbled, backstories. The American leader would be a scientist who never got enough credit in the “old world” and showed those silly male scientists who the real boss was once it all collapsed. The Russian leader would be the cleaning lady who was overlooked and mistreated by the scientists in the good old days but who, uh, showed those silly male scientists who the real boss was when the zombies showed up.

Each group would have distinct “uniforms” letting us know which side was which. The Russian scientists would wear classic Soviet winter gear, the poofy hats and all that, and they’d drink lots and lots of vodka; the American/European scientists would look like Star Trek characters. Eugene’s arrival would lead to escalation and chaos. Unable or unwilling to settle on just who exactly the actual bad guys are supposed to be, the show would kill off one villain after another, though some would miraculously survive only to be killed off again an episode or two later. A minor male character would emerge as the true villain, only to be supplanted by one of the female leader’s untimely return. The only likable new character would be killed off in the second episode. In the end, everyone dies except Eugene.

Daryl Dixon’s second season shares a lot in common with Dead City’s second season. Both shows just burn through villains in the most haphazard and jarring way, never really allowing for any of them to build up into something truly threatening, let alone interesting enough to carry the mantle of Big Bad.

In Dead City, our late-stage villain ended up being Bruegel, who bucked the recent Walking Dead trend of all-female leaders by being a man. He wanted methane and was willing to kill and betray his rivals to get it, but Negan burned him to death in the Season 2 finale. In Daryl Dixon, the late-game bad guy is almost beat-for-beat the same concept. In a show where every leader is a woman, Losang popped up in Season 2 to become another short-lived male antagonist, though he was driven by his twisted faith rather than a need for energy sources. Daryl made short work of him. None of these villains provide any kind of real threat. Our heroes can’t die. They’re practically ensconced in plot armor at this point.

At least in Daryl Dixon, Genet didn’t come back from the dead. Here, somehow the Dama survives being burned to death and manages to worm her way back into Hershel’s life. But she’s one of the worst bad guys in The Walking Dead history – and there have been a lot of terrible villains. She has no real power other than her inexplicable influence over Maggie’s son, and frankly at this point she can have him. Hershel has turned out to be a pretty horrendous character. The apple fell very far from the tree when it comes to him and his father, Glenn, who must be rolling in his grave at this point.

The Season 2 finale essentially wraps up the conflict between the Burazi and other New York factions. By the end, Bruegel is dead, the Croat is AWOL and the Dama and Hershel are on their own. Negan, Maggie and Perlie are off on their next adventure. The New Babylon forces – goofily marching like actual army troops through the streets of NYC – have taken control now that everyone else is dead. Who is their leader? Nobody knows.

The whole “will Maggie kill Negan” gimmick reached fever pitch this episode, with Maggie hunting down Negan only to find him doing the very same “eenie-meeni-miney -mo” speech he did before killing Glenn. He kills Bruegel and when it looks like he’s about to kill Perlie, Maggie stabs him in the back. Just like when Rick cut Negan’s throat, it’s all just a headfake. Tis merely a scratch! When he crawls over to Ginny’s cell and finds her dead, Maggie sees just how much pain he’s in, just how much he genuinely cared for the girl, and shows mercy. Again.

It’s actually more than mercy: She does a threeway with him. Not like that, you perverts, it’s a threeway voiceover with Negan, Maggie and Perlie, saying cringey stuff about sticking together and facing the odds. I was half-expecting them to say “We’re the ones who live!” It’s Gimple-speak at its absolute worst and most blatant, and I have no idea how anyone making TV in this day and age would think it’s a good idea. Just when you think you can’t cringe any harder, TWD throws you a bone.

Beyond this, the episode had one big action set-piece when Bruegel brings a Trojan Horse into Negan’s banquet hall. The statue they gift to him is filled with swords and sabers, so when Negan double-crosses him by hiding zombies under the table (yes, that’s the plan) Bruegel’s people spring to action, immediately tipping over the statue to get the weapons and – wait, no, actually they stand around like mopes while the zombies pick them off. We get lots of the signature “zombie shove” that’s become so common in these shows. Just give those shambling undead a good push or two and they’ll back right off.

They stand around dying until Bruegel remembers the statue and Perlie knocks it over and they all rush to grab swords and Bruegel even gets a flamethrower off one of Negan’s guys and sprays it around the room some. It’s not quite as bad as the genuinely bizarre scene a couple episodes back when New Babylon tries to hang Maggie, but it’s pretty close.

The worst news is that Dead City is very clearly being setup for a third season, and if this one is anything to go by, it’s just going to be even more ridiculous and lame than the last two. Pointless, boring, gimmicky claptrap. This also means that AMC will probably not greenlight my Eugene spinoff, which is pretty damn tragic if you ask me. Cold Freeze sounds so very, very Walking Dead! The Deadest!

Scattered Thoughts:

• That flamethrower guy just standing there was really something. Did he not know how to turn his head left and right?
• Why did Negan and his people not come prepared with weapons at hand? They had this whole plan to unleash zombies on the enemy, and had a couple flamethrower guys ready (obviously not ready enough) and they still had to run away to get weapons? And then it just all sort of devolves into chaos? What kind of plan is this?
• What is the point of this story? What actually changed between the start and now? Why did we spend two seasons getting to this point?
• People have compared the Ginny scene to the Sophia barn scene, but if you watch that scene again you’ll see just how great this show used to be compared to what it is now. That was an emotional gut-punch. This? Did anyone really care about Ginny?

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