‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Season 2 Premiere Recap – A Man and His Bat

Conceptually, The Walking Dead: Dead City was supposed to capitalize on the unresolved and oddly sexually charged relationship between Maggie and Negan, which has gone through some forcible ups and downs thanks in large part to the main show’s lack of direction and quality keeping them both alive and often in the same place for much longer than seems reasonable. Cynically, though, it’s designed to leverage fan enthusiasm for these two characters at the expense of everything else, including logic and emotional consistency, so now we’re into Season 2, the show has morphed into something very different from what it started as.

Is this a bad thing? I’m not sure, honestly. But in Episode 1, “Power Equals Power”, the signs are there that nobody had an especially coherent plan for how all this was going to work. It feels, at least to me, like it’s missing the point of what made these characters interesting in the first place, especially Negan. One of the big moments of this premiere finds him readopting his old persona as leader of the Saviors, complete with the leather jacket and a new Inspector Gadget version of Lucille. It’s almost as if the significance of Lucille and, crucially, the symbolism of Lucille breaking, has been totally forgotten about.

It’s very much a “mileage may vary” kind of predicament. Whether you’ll enjoy this show will depend entirely on what you’re looking for. If it’s a complex examination of how loss and trauma continue to define a complex relationship, one often forged in the fires of necessity, then sorry, but it doesn’t look like you’re going to get that. But if it’s Negan doing Negan stuff and a range of almost ridiculously colorful and eccentric villains and factions, then you’re in luck.

Anyway, the gist of things this time around is that we’re a year removed from the Season 1 finale. Maggie, Hershel, and Ginny are living in the Bricks, though not exactly happily. Ginny is still in a bad mood about having left Negan behind, and Hershel is in a permanent sulk that is gradually implied to be a kind of Stockholm Syndrome-style pining for the Dama and the city of New York (honestly, is there any media with the Big Apple as a setting that doesn’t try and endlessly push the “greatest city in the world” shtick? Give it a rest.)

Jeffrey Dean Morgan in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 | Image via AMC

Unfortunately for these guys, the Bricks is a territory of New Babylon, and New Babylon is hilariously evil. Perlie is now being used by the leadership as a kind of poster boy thanks to his made-up story about apprehending Negan in order to forcibly recruit people from the territories into a fighting force that can storm Manhattan and acquire all of the Dama’s methane (which is harvested by the Croat from the dead themselves.) Conscription is mandatory, and the punishment for refusal is public execution.

Negan has spent this entire time imprisoned. We find him stuck in a cell being served a plate of cockroaches, since he never accepted the Dama’s offer of becoming the charismatic figure around whom the disparate tribes of New York can all unite against New Babylon. If you recall, the Dama’s play here was that she had Hershel’s toe in a box, and the implication was that her physical and psychological connection to him would allow her to continue using his well-being to force Negan to do her bidding. But Negan rightly pointed out that Maggie would never let her near him and spent the intervening years in a cell instead. The Dama eventually gets him to play ball by threatening his own family, but this is a really weird quirk in the writing since we’re still doing the whole “Hershel secretly loves the Dama and wants to go back” angle back at the Bricks.

I’m sure you can see where this is going. Maggie and Negan are about to end up on opposing sides of the brewing conflict. Maggie proves her worth to New Babylon by fighting twenty walkers in a little corral – based on Perlie making an offhanded remark that she alone was worth the twenty conscripts they would have taken otherwise – and Negan scares New York’s themed gangs into compliance by shocking one of the recalcitrant ones with the new and improved Lucille. It’s dumb, on the one hand, but on the other, it’s always fun to see Jeffrey Dean Morgan really lean into this mode.

I’ll be the first to say that I’m not sure what The Walking Dead needs as a franchise is another protracted faction battle, but I will say that Dead City Season 2 seems to have enough going on in Episode 1 – the stuff with Hershel and the Dama is interesting, Ginny complete’s refusal to do anything Maggie says makes their relationship tenuous, I can’t wait to see the Croat get killed, and so on, and so forth – to layer that conflict with meaningful-ish stuff in the middle. It’s just a question of whether it will commit to that or just rely on cheap nostalgia to fill another batch of episodes. At this point, it’s basically impossible to tell.

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