Summary
The Walking Dead: Dead City has a good idea brewing in Season 2, which comes to the forefront in Episode 4, but it also seems unlikely that the show will commit to it.
There’s a kernel of a good idea in Season 2 of The Walking Dead: Dead City, but the chances of the show committing to it are so slim as to be virtually non-existent. And you can see why. The thing we’re toying with, especially in Episode 4, is “Hershel is a bad guy”, which, if franchise history is to be believed, means there’s only one fate for him. There’s no way that we’re going to see Maggie put down her own son, or reformed Negan send him the same way as his father, is there? I would strongly take leave to doubt it.
But this is what should happen. It’d be bleak, but it’d also be genuinely provocative television and would go a long way towards justifying this spin-off, which even at its best has never risen beyond that cynical idea of giving two fan-favourite characters something to do. It’d also be a really interesting way to round off Maggie’s longstanding grief over Glenn’s fate. How would she reckon with the idea that their son, his legacy, is a danger to everyone?
This idea was toyed with in Episode 3, when flashbacks made it clear that Hershel is working at the behest of the Dama, who manipulated him into believing that she’s the only person who truly understands him. The smoke signal was him, which we and Maggie figured out in Episode 2. And all of this percolates in the background of “Feisty Friendly”, even while the bulk of the focus shifts to Bruegel, the only one of Manhattan’s remaining gang leaders that the Dama hasn’t managed to sway into her ad-hoc anti-New Babylon alliance.
Bruegel cuts an eccentric figure. He’s based in a museum and has the preening aesthete sensibilities of someone several social stations above your average conman, which is really what he seems to be. He talks to a walker he keeps chained up, who happens to be his champion gladiator, undefeated in 26 walker fights. This seems unlikely given you’d expect fights between zombies to be a 50/50 affair, which doesn’t go unnoticed by the Croat, who calls out Bruegel publicly when everyone is supposed to be making nice to try and get an alliance off the ground.
Despite all of this petty back and forth, the Dama has all the cards. She’s able to keep Negan in line by threatening his family, and she knows, thanks to the smoke signal, that Hershel is the kid he kept alive during the ferry bombardment. This means that she knows another ally is coming to her, one whom Negan won’t readily hurt. Interestingly, we also get a brief bit of backstory for the Dama, whom Benjamin Pierce, brought along to the sit-down in the trunk of the car, correctly recognises as a fearsome art critic who once attacked a writer who made a play mocking her.
Kim Coates in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 | Image via AMC
Once again, The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2, Episode 4 conspires to bring Maggie and Negan together. Hershel running into him in the previous episode is bad news for Perlie, since he has made his reputation in New Babylon on the strength of having supposedly killed him, so he takes Maggie and Hershel to the museum to look for the methane, presumably to keep them out of the way of an endlessly suspicious Narvaez. In the meantime, Narvaez seems to have found a manipulable target in Ginny, who is on a mission to kill the man who killed her father, who Narvaez correctly intuits is Negan. So, Perlie’s secret isn’t going to remain a secret for very long.
It takes Maggie and Perlie roughly five minutes to make contact with Negan, who has to be cautious about how he helps them because of the threat to his own family. Luckily, he also suggested that Bruegel’s membership in the Alliance be contingent on the outcome of a walker fight between his champion and one of Negan’s choosing, so all attention is on that. It’s Negan who tells Maggie that the Dama is in control of Hershel, and even though she has already figured this out for herself, she’s still in denial about it. As if to confirm what we already know, we get a glimpse of Hershel running into the Dama, presumably to be given more off-screen instructions about what his next move should be.
Bruegel’s walker champion wins the fight, despite intervention on both sides that strongly tests the rules, but Negan whispers something to him that causes him to join the alliance with no strings attached either way. Why didn’t he just say that to begin with? There’s a very prominent feeling in this episode of everyone being privy to information we’re not, to such an extent that it’s becoming frustrating. The Dama also catches sight of Maggie as Negan’s trying to create a commotion so she can escape, and she seems entirely unconcerned, having no doubt intuited that she would have accompanied Hershel. If she knows that Maggie and Hershel are there, she presumably also knows that Negan is in cahoots with them, which makes it harder to buy into the Croat’s brewing jealousy over Negan’s preferential treatment.
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2, Episode 4 ends with the revelation, if you can call it that, that Bruegel’s walker champion isn’t a walker at all, but instead his beloved old bodyguard, Tony. There’s something up with Tony, who seems to act exactly like a walker despite not being one, but there’s so little context that I couldn’t quite figure out what his deal was before Bruegel slit his throat. Since the Croat made such a fuss about there being something suspicious about him, he has served his purpose. Bruegel still clearly has plans and can’t be trusted, but then again, in this show, I’m not sure anyone can.
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