Summary
The Walking Dead: Dead City continues to try to justify its existence in Season 3 by manufacturing conflict where there is none and being wildly inconsistent with its character arcs and dynamics.
The problem with keeping a show going long beyond its use-by date is that it has to keep manufacturing reasons to stick around. The Walking Dead: Dead City is doing this so flagrantly and shamelessly in Season 3 that it’s not only laughable but also slightly irksome, since we’re expected to swallow a lot of nonsense that we know is illogical and silly just because AMC refuses to put these characters out of their misery. Episode 2, “Haven”, drums up conflict out of thin air, then undermines long-running character arcs and dynamics to sustain the new, made-up conflict. It’s a dreadful hour of television.
After killing off the Croat in the premiere, the point of this outing is to eventually kill off The Dama. This doesn’t make a great deal of sense to those of us who were assuming that she’d once again be the season’s Big Bad, but she isn’t, since it looks like we’re turning Negan into a villain again. Why? It’s a good question. Negan’s arc for years has been one of rehabilitation, and the fact that he was redeemed is central to his relationship with Maggie, since their dynamic is contingent on him having turned a corner. Evidence has piled up to support her claims that Negan has changed on a fundamental level. To try and walk that back now just seems utterly nonsensical.
But here we are. While Maggie, Renata, and Luis have turned the hospital into a flourishing self-sufficient community with an abundance of early-warning security measures, Negan has spent his time chilling out in Dillard’s bar, playing Gears of War — by mashing buttons like a chimpanzee, an eternal annoyance of mine that I can’t believe still crops up — and generally keeping himself to himself. He has an agreement with Maggie whereby if the red danger lights come on, he gets on the radio to see what the threat is, but beyond that, he’s happy to keep himself isolated from the core hospital group.
The latest alert is two dorks who Maggie overhears talking about the Dama, so Maggie, Negan, and Perlie, who’s due to leave for New Babylon, head out to follow them and find her. They all end up in a theatre where the Dama has amassed a small army of brainwashed loyalists, and the “heroes” are forced to kill everyone when they attack. The Dama almost gets away by dropping a chandelier as a distraction like something out of a cartoon, but she falls foul of a single walker and ends up getting captured. Inexplicably, Maggie prevents Negan from finishing her off and instead takes her back to the hospital as a prisoner.
This is already dumb on the face of things, but the stupidity only compounds. Initially, Maggie doesn’t mention the capture to Hershel, but she’s forced to tell him when he’s patching Negan’s leg up — Hershel’s training under Luis to be a doctor, and Negan got some glass in his leg from the falling chandelier — and starts asking too many questions. Maggie assures Hershel that he’ll be completely safe from the Dama’s influence, and she’s right, since he never interacts with her at any point in the episode. So what was the point of this scene? It mostly exists so that Hershel can ask Maggie to teach him to be okay with killing people so that when the time comes he’s ready to do it.
And yet Maggie is thinking about trying to rehabilitate the Dama, with her justification being that if even someone like Negan can become a good guy, why can’t she? Given that the Dama’s whole thing is manipulating people to her own ends, this seems like an unfeasibly stupid decision to me, but apparently executing her would violate the values of the community they’ve built in the hospital, even though the fact that the Dama’s in the hospital is because Maggie took her there. She could have just killed her back at the theatre!
Anyway, the Dama’s on hunger strike, which may solve the problem on its own, but Maggie is reluctant for her to die a slow and painful death, so she serves her a knife with dinner just to give her the option of killing herself and being done with it. None of this makes a great deal of sense.
Also nonsensical, but at least played for laughs, is Dillard’s belief that he can communicate with walkers, which ends up getting him and Negan stuck on some scaffolding. The latter’s able to save them both by throwing bricks down on the heads of the walkers below, and I definitely feel his frustration at still having to explain the very fundamentals of zombie-apocalypse survival in 2026, but the fact he’s calling it out doesn’t invalidate the fact that he’s having to do it. We’re just padding out the runtime.
And yet it’s Negan’s advice that Maggie wants when it comes to dealing with the Dama, since she’s apparently struggling with the idea of keeping her alive, even though keeping her alive was entirely Maggie’s choice. This is sort of where The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3, Episode 2 starts to plant the seeds about Negan being the new bad guy. He’s sceptical about Maggie’s utopian ideals for the hospital. He thinks the only way she’s not going to have to play judge, jury, and executioner is by welcoming more people in who can fulfil the functions of a civilised society. But there aren’t enough civilised people left. Maggie takes this spiel completely the wrong way and decides to plan out a massive expansion effort so they can plow Central Park and basically take over New York. Renata doesn’t love the idea, but she’s also too soft to tell Maggie no.
“Haven” ends with Maggie and Renata relighting the Statue of Liberty to serve as a sort of Bat-signal for the needy, with Maggie adamant that her open-doors policy will work out and that Negan’s rehabilitation is proof that she’s doing the right thing with the Dama. While this is happening, though, Negan murders the Dama anyway, proving Renata’s point that he isn’t as fundamentally changed as he would like people to believe. He leaves the knife in her chest, so when Maggie gets back and finds a walker in the cell, she must surely know that Negan was responsible (unless she buys the idea that the Dama stabbed herself in the chest, from the front, which wouldn’t surprise me).
There also seems to be a large group of armed, dodgy-looking men heading towards New York, so it’s very likely that Negan’s point is going to be proved sooner rather than later. Isn’t this stupid?
