Summary
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 isn’t improved by the couple of deaths Episode 5 provides. Stupidity is still running dangerously rampant.
With Episode 5, Season 2 of The Walking Dead: Dead City reaches a clear turning point. Two major(ish) characters are dead, including the ostensible Big Bad, so it’s difficult to know where exactly things are going to go from here. If nothing else, “The Bird Always Knows” proves me right in my theory that the show was never going to commit to its most compelling idea.
This is an episode in which major developments occur, but also one in which it feels like nothing really happens. There’s an inescapable feeling that the developments are a result of something needing to happen, vague attempts to wrongfoot the audience by doing things that are unexpected, even if those things don’t make a great deal of sense or necessarily benefit the overall story. I, like most people, couldn’t stand Major Narvaez, but her unceremonious demise here feels like a waste of all that built-up antipathy. It’s time to admit, I think, that Dead City simply isn’t any good.
But we have a word count to meet, so let’s go over it all anyway. As ever, plotlines are largely separated here, with Negan continuing to navigate the complex dynamics of Manhattan’s warring syndicates — and the internal politics of the Dama’s operation — while Maggie tries (and fails) to stop New Babylon from making dumb fascist decisions. The Maggie stuff is definitely stupider this week, but there are still some puzzling details in Negan’s subplot, including the fact that we seem to be resorting to the Season 1 status quo where the Croat is the primary villain, despite the fact that by this point he has been undermined and outsmarted so consistently that he’s impossible to take seriously.
We might as well start there. Early in “The Bird Always Knows”, the Croat discovers that a substation has been sabotaged, leading to a power cut. This lands him in hot water with the Dama, especially since he’s already in her bad books to begin with, and she continues to belittle him and favour Negan. Thus, it’s the Croat who’s sent to do the grunt work while Negan is dispatched to liaise with Christos, the final remaining gang boss who hasn’t aligned with the Dama against New Babylon (and the guy Negan humiliated during his big speech in the premiere).
As it turns out, Christos is a pretty reasonable family man, and Negan is able to get through to him quite easily — at least until the Croat turns up to reveal that he has evidence Christos was responsible for the substation sabotage. Somehow, the Croat had already activated a bunch of methane canisters, which knock out Christos and all his men, and while they’re unconscious, the Burazi murder them all. The Croat frames this as just punishment for the sabotage, but it’s quite clearly a way for him to try to get back into the Dama’s good graces. Predictably, it backfires.
I didn’t like this entire sequence. As soon as Christos is made sympathetic, it’s immediately clear something bad is going to happen. The storytelling is just lazy, with the Croat teleporting into a scenario to do villain stuff just to remind viewers he’s a bad guy. But he never really seems dangerous or smart or threatening like a proper bad guy should, since the Dama was making fun of his outfit like two scenes prior. Are we supposed to be laughing at this guy or fearing him? It still isn’t clear.
And it’s so obvious that Negan is manipulating the tension between the Croat and the Dama that the way this conflict comes to a head in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2, Episode 5 is just silly. The Croat and the Dama get into an argument about how he’s treated, and when the Dama returns to her quarters later, she finds her prized pet rat squashed to death. She assumes it was the Croat, but earlier, Negan had made a point of telling the Croat that the Dama treats the rat better than him, so it’s clear he’s responsible, even before the final scene of the episode, which finds Negan scraping matted rat from the bottom of his shoe.
This brings us to our first major death. When the Croat goes to see the Dama to talk things out, she’s fuming about the rat, and they get into a tussle which sets the room alight and traps the Dama under a bit of furniture. Instead of helping her, the Croat just watches her burn to death. This is an exceedingly clunky way to get rid of the season’s primary villain. It’s almost as if the showrunners don’t want any conflict left for the back half of the season.
Lauren Cohan in The Walking Dead: Dead City | Image via AMC
Maggie isn’t faring much better. She and Perlie get back to Roksana’s place to discover that Narvaez has taken over and imprisoned Roksana for incredibly sketchy reasons. Thanks to Ginny, she now knows that Perlie didn’t kill Negan after all, so relieves him of his command immediately and tasks Maggie with tricking Negan and the Croat into an ambush under the guise of New Babylon’s surrender.
In typical fashion, Maggie completely ignores these instructions and tries to take down Narvaez, but she fails because Ginny holds Hershel at gunpoint and refuses to back down. This is a potentially interesting angle that is utterly wasted because the show can’t decide what it wants to do with Ginny and can’t wait to kill off Narvaez, which would have been much more satisfying further down the line when she had become even more irritating.
The way it happens is weapons-grade stupidity. First, she hangs Roksana, for reasons that I’m still not entirely sure I understand, and then plans to hang Maggie. But everyone’s too distracted to notice a horde of walkers pushing against the gate, and they eventually break in. They feast on Roksana’s chanting followers, who simply allow themselves to be eaten, and then begin overwhelming the New Babylon soldiers. It’s Ginny who cuts Maggie down, even though it was Ginny who got her captured in the first place, so I have no idea what the plan for this character is.
Either way, Narvaez uses Hershel as a human shield in order to escape while Maggie pursues her, but she dopily walks right into Walker Roksana and gets unceremoniously eaten. It’s very silly. Both of the characters we’re supposed to despise are already dead, with several episodes still to go, and in another blow to the show’s potential conflict, Hershel also confesses to Maggie that the woman he drew was the Dama, and he set off the smoke signal in Episode 2. Now that secret’s out and the Dama’s dead, there’s really no reason to worry about Hershel’s Stockholm Syndrome, which was easily the most compelling angle.
Instead, we’re to worry about… Bruegel? He turns up towards the end of The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2, Episode 5 to confront Maggie, Perlie, Hershel, and Ginny, so I guess so. But his sudden arrival doesn’t disabuse me of the notion that nobody writing this show has any real idea of where it’s going.
RELATED:
