Summary
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 has consistently relied on annoying zombie tropes, but it’s at its worst in Episode 7, which struggles mightily to set up a compelling finale.
One of the most pernicious zombie media tropes is seasoned survivors suddenly becoming brain-dead to allow some drama to happen. The Walking Dead, in general, and Dead City specifically have leaned on this a lot, especially in Season 2 in the case of the latter. But nowhere is it more egregious than in Episode 7, “Novi Dan, Novi Pocetak”, which reduces Negan and Maggie to blithering idiots who can barely navigate basic post-apocalyptic scenarios, all in service of personal revelations that Negan has had about five times already by this point, and a redemption arc for the Croat that feels unearned given his sole narrative function has always been being psychotic.
We’ll start with Negan for once, since Maggie’s storyline builds to a cliffhanger intended to whet appetites for the upcoming season finale, though at this stage it’s quite difficult to imagine anyone even watching, let alone caring. But here we are. It’s side quest time.
Negan is still trying to nurse Ginny back to health following the previous episode, and is forming a surrogate fatherly relationship with Benjamin Pierce for very little justifiable reason at all. But Ginny’s in a bad way, and the only way to save her is to acquire some medicine. Luckily, Negan immediately hears rumours of a nurse who spirited away heaps of supplies in the pediatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, so he heads there, alone, to retrieve the goods.
The gimmick of this thread is that Negan encounters a bunch of child walkers — given he’s on a pediatric ward, naturally — and can’t bring himself to splatter any of them, which is just another mile marker on the long, long road of his “no, seriously, he’s a good guy now” redemptive arc. But it requires Negan to almost die multiple times, trying and failing to nonlethally fight off tiny zombie children. It isn’t supposed to be funny — quite the opposite, actually — but it ends up being just because the visuals are so stupid.
Negan also starts tripping balls and hallucinating, imagining a masked thief is Lucille (an admittedly nice cameo for Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s real-life wife, Hilarie Burton Morgan), then Annie, then Ginny, all while processing his own internal issues. We’re familiar with these, but he lays them out to Pierce early in the episode for good measure — he feels like he failed Lucille, he regrets his actions as leader of the Sanctuary, and so on, and so forth. These visions are manifestations of his own internal trauma, and confronting them allows him to process that. He returns to the theatre with a renewed sense of purpose, which is killing everyone in Manhattan who still opposes him (but obviously to protect those he cares about, since he’s a good guy now).
Zeljko Ivanek in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 | Image via AMC
The rest of The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2, Episode 7 focuses on the unlikely pairing of Maggie and the Croat. Maggie is still looking for Hershel, and the Croat seems to be the guy who can point her in the right direction (under threat of torture, but still). The Croat immediately suggests leading her to a high-rise apartment building full of funny Home Alone-style traps. The tension here is supposed to come from not knowing whether or not Maggie — and by extension, we, the audience — can trust the Croat, but he has been so thoroughly neutered as a villain that even though he’s obviously lying, it’s still clear that he presents no real threat. So none of this really takes.
It also, like the Negan stuff, requires Maggie to be dumb and mentally preoccupied to an extent that feels really forced, both in terms of trusting the Croat and also not being eaten by walkers. Of course, the Croat is lying, but really for the purposes of his old self-pitying arc. For personal reasons, from the apartment he leads her to, he used to regularly contemplate suicide, and still does, perhaps even hoping that deceiving Maggie will cause her to kill him and spare him the job he’s too cowardly to do himself. But that isn’t what happens, since Dead City continues to push the idea that everyone is basically an okay dude in this universe now, and no lead characters can be morally ambiguous enough to lash out and kill someone who has wasted a bunch of their time while they’re looking for their missing son.
Luckily, while in the apartment building, Maggie sees torchlight flashing in a window across the city, which is mighty fortuitous. Manhattan has a population of over 1.5 million people, but the only possible explanation for this is that Hershel is there, signalling to his mother. The Croat, now redeemed, I guess, accompanies Maggie to the location, which turns out to be the offices of The New York Times. And that should be your first clue about what’s up here.
Maggie doesn’t find this alarming, though, and heads inside, where she finds an uncharacteristically excited Hershel. But the reunion is undermined somewhat when the Dama, having survived being burned alive with only minor injuries, jumps Maggie from behind and knocks her out. Hershel betrayed her again. I told you about this kid! Unless Maggie is forced to murder him in the finale, then I’m going to be disappointed. But let’s be frank — I’m almost certain to be disappointed anyway.
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