The Walking Dead: Dead City Is About As Subtle As A Baseball Bat To A Glenn
This post contains spoilers for the series premiere of "The Walking Dead: Dead City."
"The Walking Dead: Dead City" knows it has some explaining to do. When news first broke about a spinoff of the long-running AMC zombie series that would co-star Lauren Cohan's world-weary survivor Maggie and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan — the man who beat Maggie's husband (Steven Yeun) to death with a bat in front of her eyes — fans were understandably apprehensive.
Bad blood is at the heart of this story, and it's not just the bad blood between Maggie and Negan, who reunite in the season premiere (set a few years after the conclusion of "The Walking Dead") to try to save Maggie's kidnapped son Hershel (Logan Kim). There's also the bad blood among fans who, like Maggie, never recovered from the relentlessly brutal moment when Negan took a baseball bat to the series' most-loved character's skull. The season after Glenn's death, "The Walking Dead" took a ratings nosedive from which it never recovered.
Given a long enough timeline, any story can become a redemption story, but even four post-Glenn seasons of "The Walking Dead" didn't stop fans from yelling at Morgan on the street about his character's despicable actions. This is something the team behind "The Walking Dead: Dead City" seems acutely aware of, and in the premiere, their fix seems to be to try every move under the sun to make Negan seem more sympathetic. If the new series contained some of the artistry that the original did in its heyday, it's a tactic that could have worked, but the visually non-descript premiere instantly drops us into the same tired narrative dynamics that made "The Walking Dead" feel rote in later seasons. By now, more walker attacks and new enemies do not a compelling storyline make.
Image rehab for Negan is the name of the game
The actual plot of "The Walking Dead: Dead City," in which Maggie and Negan travel to Manhattan to save her son from some weirdo named The Croat (character actor Željko Ivanek, with a funky accent), is not bad. What is bad is the way the premiere episode does everything in its power to convince audiences that Maggie and Negan aren't that different — and comes away feeling like it's trying far too hard. There's no genuine bonding or gap-bridging here (yet), but instead a series of inciting incidents and details that seem to exist solely to hype Negan up as, if not heroic, at least less monstrous than we think.
The show starts with a scene in which Maggie kills a walker. She really goes to town on that thing, beating it to a pulp with a handheld weapon until all we can see are its brain— oh, okay, it's like Glenn, get it? If the initial false comparison gives you pause (how is Maggie's violent rage towards a dead thing anything like Negan's towards her once very-alive husband?), it should. "The Walking Dead: Dead City" is so firmly entrenched in its campaign to make us reconsider Negan that it barely lets Maggie do anything at all. When she's not beating walkers, she's having vivid, haphazardly edited nightmares about Glenn's death. And if that first scene wasn't clear enough, Negan makes it apparent later, when Maggie side-eyes him for trying to throw a random man overboard on the trip to Manhattan. "How many fathers and husbands have you killed?!" he asks her.
He likes kids, remember?
The "we're not so different, you and I" strategy seems like a thin one, and the show's writers know it too, as it's one of several pro-Negan PR strategies employed in the premiere. When we meet him, he's with a young girl named Ginny (Mahina Napoleon) who he promptly leaves in the care of Maggie's crew at the new Hilltop location. Giving Negan a young traveling companion makes sense, given that his most surprising character trait in the original series' run was his soft spot for kids. He not only served Carl (Chandler Riggs) dinner when he came to kill him but also saved Judith's life at one point.
Still, Ginny so far seems only to exist to soften our and Maggie's opinion on Negan. We're told she stopped speaking when her dad turned, and that she asked to travel with Negan about a year ago. He's extremely kind to her — albeit in a vocal, almost show-offy way — in every scene they share, giving her rations, compliments, and his jacket. It's also obvious he's taught her basic survival skills. If "The Walking Dead: Dead City" can't convince us that Maggie is as bad as Negan, it can at least work overtime to show us he has a kind side, too. A scene in which he tells a short story about his own disappointing dad seems to serve the same purpose — Maggie's plot, so far, seems to just consist of actively listening to Negan while looking like she'd rather be somewhere else.
The Walking Dead always loves a new villain
There's one more ingredient in the new show's formula, and it capitalizes on what the old show did best, at least for a while: introducing some cartoonish new villains against which we can easily contrast our heroes. Chief among them is The Croat, a disturbed, powerful man who seems to make a habit of capturing, torturing, and eventually killing seemingly random people. In the final scene of episode one, he rather hilariously cuts down a zip line a half-flayed captive is using to escape him, letting the man plunge to his death amidst the walker-filled streets of the city. Get a load of this guy, the show seems to be saying. He's not helping random orphans, now, is he?
The introduction of another new character does hint at what could be a compelling season-long arc for Maggie and Negan. Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) is a Marshal for a place called New Babylon, and he positions himself as a straight and narrow lawman despite his willingness to commit violence not unlike the kind committed by the people he's chasing. When we meet Perlie, he's on the hunt for Negan and describes the story of Glenn's death (just in case we forgot!) as an example of the man's monstrous capabilities. Perlie, on the other hand, describes himself as someone who doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and loves "a good hog stew." Yet he also throws a woman into a crowd of zombies with zero hesitation, citing a particular legal code related to aiding and abetting a criminal.
There's a slight chance the show is headed somewhere interesting
"What I did back there?" Perlie says afterward, "It wasn't because I wanted to, it had to be done." Perlie is the type of corny comic book-style villain that could only exist in "The Walking Dead" world, but his presence points to the idea that "The Walking Dead: Dead City" might actually be preoccupied with the concept of justice on more than a surface level. More specifically, his by-the-book approach, which we instantly clock as cruel and unnecessary, falls under the umbrella of "retributive justice."
Abolitionists, activists, and others working on criminal justice reform often point out the shortcomings of this traditional type of justice that's all about hurting people who are considered "bad." Among the alternative models presented by these activists is the idea of "restorative justice," which asks criminals to not just be punished for their crimes, but to actively atone and understand them, often by engaging with the person they've wronged – as Negan is with Maggie.
If "The Walking Dead: Dead City" is willing to put the "Negan's Blatant Image Rehabilitation Tour" to rest long enough to actually get introspective, the show could follow this thought experiment and do something genuinely interesting, whether it ultimately buys into one model of justice over another or not. Until then, it's a spin-off that, in its desperate attempts to make us see an old character in a new light, so far ends up feeling like more of the same.