Summary
As if it hadn’t already, The Walking Dead: Dead City becomes a parody of itself in Episode 6 of Season 2, leaning on a CGI bear for drama because there’s nothing left to really worry about.
You know what The Walking Dead: Dead City needed to rejuvenate a flagging Season 2? Spoiler alert: It wasn’t a one-eyed CGI bear. I would have personally suggested some better writers, or at least a last-minute swerve that injected some drama and conflict into the whole thing, but Episode 6 doesn’t bother with any of that. Instead, “Bridge Partners Are Hard to Come by These Days” descends into parodical territory by having every character become circuitously introspective, teleport around Manhattan for very thinly justified reasons, and then leans against a one-eyed CGI bear — no, that wasn’t a joke! — just to create some peril.
It probably should have been obvious when the previous episode stupidly removed two major antagonists that we were going to run out of road, but even I didn’t expect the whole thing to be quite this bad. The behind-the-scenes mini-featurette that always plays after the episodes was especially hilarious this week because Lauren Cohan directed the hour, so everyone has to pretend she’s an artistic genius and that the zombified corpse of Major Narvaez somehow constitutes one of the most powerfully emotional performances in franchise history. Truly demented stuff.
I’m killing time a little because there’s very little to actually recap. Both plot strands tread water while Negan and Maggie both consider their storied history and unclear futures, and then everything bends over backwards to accommodate the finale by having a bunch of random nonsense happen. I suppose we’d better start with Maggie.
Maggie and the remnants of New Babylon, including Hershel and Ginny, are technically captives of Bruegel, but not really, since he makes a big point of playing nice so that they willingly help him steal the methane from the Dama (nobody knows she’s dead yet) and wipe out her entire group — including Negan. Maggie isn’t keen on this idea and would rather they stole the methane themselves without entering a partnership with Brugel, since he’s flagrantly planning to betray them either way, and she’d also quite like to save Negan’s life without admitting that’s what she’s doing.
Perlie sees through this immediately. It occurs to me that this conflict has been going on so long, and has been put on hold so many times for so many different, often illogical reasons, that it’s basically impossible to buy into the idea that Maggie has any remaining antipathy towards Negan at all. It might be a bit of a stretch to boil down the lingering trauma of her husband’s head being smashed to pulp to simply “get over it”, but that’s how I’m feeling. On this matter, if nothing else, I agree with Hershel. It’s tedious.
I assumed we were done with the whole “Hershel loves the Dama” subplot after his frank heart-to-heart with Maggie in the previous episode, but not quite. Here in Dead City Season 2, Episode 6, he tries to poison the remains of the community by polluting the drinking water with walker blood. I’m not sure this would even work. The entire gimmick of The Walking Dead‘s infection is that everyone is already infected, which is why they turn when they die of natural causes, so would drinking the blood work the same way as a bite? It doesn’t really matter, but this is the kind of rubbish you think about when there’s nothing else going on.
Anyway, Maggie catches Hershel in the act but is surprisingly unbothered about the severity of this action. It’s nothing another conversation can’t fix, I guess, but that conversation is interrupted by the arrival of the CGI bear. This whole stretch is so dumb. The bear is clearly not physically present in the scene, so the whole thing looks preposterous, and the payoff is Hershel helping Maggie take it down and then magically disappearing in the aftermath. We’ll return to this in a minute.
The ridiculous CGI bear in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 | Image via AMC
In the meantime, let’s check in on Negan. Following the death of the Dama, the Croat is now in charge and has summoned Negan’s family so that they can all either go their separate ways or live happily ever after — whatever Negan chooses. There’s supposed to be a sense of brotherhood here, or even, perhaps, a kind of surrogate father and son dynamic. But I’d just like to remind everyone that in Season 1, the Croat’s entire deal was that he was such a psychopathic nutcase that he was too unstable and violent even for peak Negan. So, I’m not buying his needy internal crisis. And I’m really not buying the “surprise” when he figures out that it was Negan who set him up to kill the Dama with the squished rat, because the previous episode revealed that, and it was painfully obvious anyway.
This leads to a fight between the Croat and Negan, which Negan eventually gets the upper hand in, and then he rather inexplicably lets the Croat go. Expelling him is supposed to be an emotional moment, but it just strikes as being really stupid. Negan later rationalizes it in a very roundabout way by having a conversation with Benjamin Pierce — a character I’d forgotten about to such an extent that I just had to trawl through previous recaps for his name — and theorizing that when he was the leader of the Saviors, he might have been the bad guy after all. You don’t say!
Negan’s family also arrives in Manhattan, but he immediately orders them to be turned around and sent back; again, it’s supposed to be emotional, and again, it isn’t. Although he probably has a point that they’d be in danger if they were around him, since who knows what kind of one-eyed wildlife might still be lurking around New York?
The next day, Maggie turns up on Negan’s doorstep because Hershel is missing. This comes right after the bear fight and is so sudden that I thought I missed something major, but the latter third of The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2, Episode 6 seems to work like this in its entirety. Hershel is gone, and Maggie is at Negan’s place; he points her in the right direction, and she tips him off about Bruegel. Then Perlie is talking with Bruegel, who reveals that Narvaez told him where to find Perlie before she turned into a walker; Bruegel’s keeping the walker version of her around for basically no reason at all beyond dramatic flourish, and for some reason Perlie is partially swayed by all this as a partnership pitch. And then Ginny is holding Negan at gunpoint and collapses in his arms due to a very bad, infected wound. It’s one of the worst edited and structured sequences of television in recent memory.
All of this for what? To set up a finale in which Maggie, a character we’re sick of, tries to track down Hershel, a character we hate, completely independently from Negan, a character we like, whose relationship with Maggie was supposed to be the entire selling point of this spin-off. Dead City has long since lost the plot and is limping towards a truly nonsensical conclusion. You can expect AMC to renew it for Season 3 sooner rather than later.
