‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Season 2 Ending Explained – Well, That Was Legendarily Terrible

Look, I’m a reasonable man, so there’s no way I was expecting the ending of The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 to be any good. Too much of the show has been too bad for too long for that to have ever been a possibility, especially after whatever was going on last time out. But Episode 8, “If History Were a Conflagration”, is impressively bad. It plumbs new depths of nonsensical badness to deliver a finale that is so ludicrous it comes across as a pastiche of itself. Although, at this point, that’s basically what these spin-offs really amount to (except Daryl Dixon, that one’s alright). 

But seriously, this is properly, confoundingly stupid, and not just in a fun nitpicky way either. It’s fundamentally idiotic at its core. It completely misunderstands how human beings think, feel, and behave, it grossly minimizes the idea of long-term psychological trauma, it does an utter disservice to Maggie and Negan both, and totally misses the point of what was ever compelling about these two characters and their unhealthy dynamic in the first place. It’s legendarily rotten, even by the standards of this franchise.

So, let’s break it down.

The Last Supper

Bruegel’s planned hostile takeover of Negan’s operation goes awry pretty much immediately in this finale when Negan quite literally turns the tables on him. Bruegel, Perlie — with whom he’s still constantly arguing about Maggie’s safety — and a handful of Bruegel’s goons turn up at the church for a negotiation that’s really an ambush on both sides. Negan has prepared a lavish banquet, and Bruegel has bought a gift in the form of a giant, rare statue, all in the name of peace.

Promptly, Negan upends the table to reveal a bunch of walkers hidden underneath — somehow nobody heard them — and then gets a couple of his goons armed with flamethrowers to set the pews alight. Perlie had already realized that the pews had been doused in accelerant but didn’t think to move, so he and Bruegel are trapped in a fiery walker killbox. Luckily, Bruegel had a bunch of weapons stashed in the statue, so with the help of those, they’re able to escape into the dungeons.

That’s where Negan corners them, but we’ll return to this in a moment, since there’s another element to introduce.

Trauma Response

Following the “shocking cliffhanger” of the penultimate episode, Maggie remains a guest of the Dama in the offices of The New York Times. Her comically blatant attempts to escape are waylaid by the Dama’s entry, and the two women finally meet. The Dama even lays out her plan, which is essentially just to use Maggie to kill Negan. All this, for that? Are we expected to believe that she essentially groomed Hershel for the explicit purpose of manipulating his mother’s lingering emotional trauma to turn her into a hired gun? That’s a really silly plan. So much could have gone wrong.

Of course, the Dama knows which psychological buttons to press, reminding Maggie of what Negan did to Glenn, and how many people she has lost along the way, and how it might feel — this a bit more subtly, granted — to lose Hershel as well. Then Hershel himself, who’s apologetic but nowhere near enough to justify the long-con deception here, takes a run at the same goal. He frames Maggie killing Negan as finally setting herself free, giving them a chance to live as a family.

Maggie, somehow not able to see what’s going on here, agrees. She leaves to kill Negan with the promise of returning to Hershel and playing happy families. It’s extremely silly.

Lisa Emery in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 | Image via AMC

History Repeats

What this means is that Maggie is also lurking in the dungeons when Negan corners Bruegel and Perlie. So, she’s there to see Negan force them both to their knees and re-enact the whole “eenie meanie minie mo” routine with Lucille, just like when he killed Glenn. Like so much of the ending of The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2, this bit is so forced it beggars belief. Negan does eventually kill Bruegel, but not by bashing his head in immediately. Instead, he force-feeds him the methane he covets so much and sets his head alight from the inside, which, to be fair to this finale, is a pretty cool death. Then he smashes his head in anyway, largely for Maggie’s benefit, even though he has no idea she’s there.

These shenanigans give Perlie time to leg it, so Negan gives chase. They have a bit of a climactic scuffle, which Negan gets the upper hand in, but Maggie, who’s extremely triggered by this point, creeps up from behind and stabs Negan in the back. She then picks up Lucille and follows him into the dungeons with the express intention of braining him, but she’s distracted by an eerie hand extending out through the bars of the nearby cell that Negan is desperately crawling towards.

All In This Together

Yes, sadly, in spite of the working ventilator that Negan found in the hospital, Ginny has expired and turned into a walker. Negan’s heartbroken as he crawls towards the cell, so much so that Maggie seemingly just forgives him on the spot. She hands him her knife, all sympathetic like, so that he can put Ginny out of her misery. Glenn who?

This isn’t dumb because Maggie finally gets over her desire to kill Negan — truthfully, she should have gotten over it ages ago — but because she gets over it 30 seconds after being so not over it that she tried to murder him. I get that Jeffrey Dean Morgan is charismatic, but nobody’s this charismatic. Maggie, who just stabbed him, and Perlie, whom he just tried to kill, drag Negan to safety and nurse him back to health, almost as if none of what we’ve seen had ever happened.

And get this! Maggie goes back to the offices of The New York Times, and Hershel immediately intuits that she didn’t kill Negan, though how he knows this is anyone’s guess. So Maggie willingly leaves him with the Dama. And this is framed like it’s a pretty reasonable thing to do, like the Dama hasn’t been the villain who, for two seasons, has deliberately preyed on severe emotional trauma to manipulate people into achieving her own ends. Maggie promises to stay in the city in case Hershel needs her, which is so batshit insane that reproducing it here made me a little sick in my mouth.

But not so much as the fact that Dead City Season 2 ends with, and I promise I’m not joking, a three-way monologue between Maggie, Negan, and, for some reason, Perlie, about how they’re all going to face their futures together like a mad apocalypse throuple. Truly demented stuff. Thank goodness it’s all over.