Summary
A middling premiere only raises more questions about why AMC continues to persist with Dead City despite none of it making sense or being any good.
You may recall that Season 2 of The Walking Dead: Dead City ended with one of the worst episodes of television ever committed to film, so I’d be lying if I said I was expecting much from Season 3. Even so, Episode 1, “Trillium”, manages to limbo under even those paltry expectations. I’m professionally obligated to keep watching, which is my excuse, but seriously – why is anyone still watching this?
I know what AMC is doing, by the way, and if anyone was unsure, this premiere makes it very clear. Maggie and Negan are getting together romantically by season’s end, I can feel it. At this point, I don’t care that it’s a fundamentally icky premise that betrays both characters and their established arcs and personalities, since both characters are already unrecognisable from how they have been portrayed in previous seasons of this very show, so who’s keeping track, realistically?
At the start of “Trillium”, Maggie and Negan are antagonistic again. Negan’s still smarting from Ginny’s death, so when he finds Maggie burying her, he flips his lid. But it’s all posturing. He’s really just sulking that Maggie didn’t finish him off with a knife to his back, and now she has taken to uncharacteristically begging to be friends with him so they can move on from the past and all the anger they’ve both shared. This is basically the opposite of how she previously felt. They’ve essentially traded places.
It doesn’t last, though, since after an episode of sulking, Negan begins to return the flirty banter in earnest. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile,” he tells her at one point towards the end. “It suits you.” Ugh! In the meantime, what we essentially have here is an episode-long farewell to the Croat, who, to be honest, I thought had died in the Season 2 finale, but mostly because I’ve purged most of it from my memory for my own mental health.
Basically, Dead City Season 3 is using The Croat to introduce a new hospital-based group, fronted by Renata and Luis, who flashbacks explain have had previous run-ins with the Croat. Back in his heyday, he was trying to be a sort of Temu Negan, which backfires a bit here when Renata and Luis stumble upon him in a newly infected state and have to weigh up whether to take messy revenge on the Croat before he expires or basically shepherd him along into performing one decent act for others before his death.
Naturally, they choose the latter, which functions as a convenient metaphor for putting the past and notions of revenge to bed to focus on the here and now and, if everyone’s lucky, building for a potential future. Sulky Negan isn’t in the mood for this kind of thing, so he spends most of his time drowning his sorrows in a bar with walker patrons operated by an enjoyable eccentric named Dillard, but he eventually agrees to help an expectant mother and her baby when Maggie plays up to his sense of heroism and the fact that she apparently cannot keep going without him.
Part of Maggie’s newfound positivity is the sudden reappearance of Hershel, which is extremely dumb. A significant part of the Season 2 finale was Maggie’s rather inexplicable decision to simply leave her son with a creepy evil old lady, taking the idea of respecting his choices just a tiny bit too far. Entirely off-screen, Hershel just reversed this decision and decided to go home to mommy, and we’re to just accept this despite how much it undermines Season 2’s most crucial conflict. At this point, it’s kind of whatever.
The Croat is dead, then. He expires from the infection, and Negan weeps a little over the loss, which is also a bit weird given the Croat was really unambiguously a bad guy, even after Negan had begun his face turn. It’s The Walking Dead: Dead City doing away with most of its second season remnants to clear the way for Season 3 to be about Maggie and Negan’s inevitable romance and, granted, their enduring battle with the Dama, who shows up at the end to remind everyone that she exists.
I’d love to say I’m looking forward to it, but it really does seem like this show has completely jumped the shark and doesn’t really care what we think anymore, so it’s probably going to be really terrible. I’ll be here either way.
