Summary
The Walking Dead: Dead City really does have some good ideas in Season 2, but Episode 2 is littered with so much stupidity that it detracts from the potential.
I’ve never been on board with the idea of hate-watching something. It seems like a waste of time to me. Unfortunately, my official capacity as a professional critic means that I often have to sit through shows that I would have abandoned under normal circumstances, and The Walking Dead: Dead City is becoming one of them. Season 2 has a few good ideas, and you could see some of them in the premiere. You can even see a couple in Episode 2, “Another S… Lesson”, but the stupidity has already become so overwhelming that it’s difficult to concentrate on anything else.
This follow-up hour is divided in half, more or less, with Maggie and Negan both getting their own point-of-view sequences. Neither is especially good, but everything involving Maggie and New Babylon is significantly worse, so we might as well start with that just to get it out of the way.
The general idea is that the New Babylon leadership has decided to take its newly conscripted militia to Manhattan via a ferry, which, needless to say, is a hilariously ostentatious mode of transport for a secret raid. When Maggie raises to Perlie that the Croat has likely been preparing for an incursion since they left and will undoubtedly see a boat full of raiders coming, Perlie tells her that she needs to provide some evidence of this claim in order for Governor Byrd and Major Narvaez to take it seriously and change their plans.
Luckily, evidence presents itself in the form of a giant tyre fire that is being used as a smoke signal. Maggie also runs into Hershel right next to this thing, and he reveals he has stupidly followed her from the Bricks. At no point does it occur to Maggie that Hershel started the fire. Even more bizarrely, none of New Babylon’s leadership thinks it’s a big deal that someone is explicitly sending the Croat signals. Their bright idea is to simply set off earlier to sustain the element of surprise. When Maggie points out that this is an aggressively stupid idea, Major Narvaez gets lippy again, so she and Hershel are detained for treason.
You don’t need me to tell you that Maggie is right. The ferry sails right into a bunch of methane mines and is subsequently bombarded by ordnance from the Manhattan rooftops, killing most of the crew and leaving only a small group of main characters alive. Let’s switch tracks briefly.
So, yes, the Croat knew New Babylon was coming and had been preparing an explosive solution to the planned incursion using — and this is one of the few good ideas in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2, Episode 2 — walkers pumped up with methane as explosive projectiles. He and Negan launch them from cannons to sink the ferry, which pulls double-duty as such a fiery and performative move that it’ll hopefully sway the other gangs who weren’t compelled by Negan’s speech in the previous episode to join the Dama’s cause.
Lisa Emery in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 | Image via AMC
During the bombardment, though, Negan catches a glimpse of Maggie, Hershel, and Ginny escaping on the lifeboats and deliberately delays the attack to give them time to escape. This is witnessed by Negan’s violinist friend, Victor, who camps outside Negan’s cell and plays him contemplative Bach compositions to pass the time.
The Bach stuff isn’t the only allusion to classical art that “Another S… Lesson” makes. The Dama also has a scene in which she explains Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, one of the artist’s “Black Paintings” that depicts the Roman Titan Saturn eating his children so they can’t overthrow him. It’s a striking piece with some thematic significance, but it’s also a bit embarrassing when Dead City gets full of itself like this. We’re using zombies as projectile weapons ten minutes later.
Anyway, word of Negan’s uncharacteristic mercy somehow gets back to the Dama, and she makes an example of him by forcing Victor to play some Bach and then violently opening his throat to establish her villain credentials. Given that the entire point of Negan’s presence in her inner circle is to rally everyone around him, it seems a little weird that she’d make a public point of keeping him in check. It’s as if the show wants to reassure the audience that he’s not becoming a bad guy again after all, despite him cosplaying the classic Negan and the Croat taking every opportunity to regale everyone with stories of how awful he used to be.
The real bad guy might be Hershel. The interesting climax of The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2, Episode 2 finds Maggie watching Hershel patch up some of the survivors, noticing that one of his bandages was clearly used to ignite the smoke signal. She recognises immediately what the implications of this development are, and Lauren Cohan actually does a really good job of showcasing the emotional conflict on her face. Hershel is annoying me at this point, though, so I’m hoping that she’s on her way to realizing that we’re going to need to kill him off by season’s end. That, if nothing else, would probably be worth waiting for.
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