Summary
The Walking Dead: Dead City reinvents itself again to justify continuing. It’s still very silly, but the idea of a zombie medical drama kind of… works?
The Walking Dead: Dead City is so adamant about not being a typical show in this franchise — and figuring out a way to justify its continued existence beyond lining the pockets of AMC executives — that Season 3 has reinvented itself again already. Episode 3, “Emigrants”, is pretty unambiguously a medical drama, which is very weird. However, despite the fact that the whole underpinning idea remains very stupid, the characterisation remains wildly inconsistent, and the spin-off’s long-term future remains exceptionally bleak, there was something about this hour that I… strangely liked?
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of it is very stupid, which I’m going to point out. But fundamentally, “New Amsterdam but zombies” kind of works as an elevator pitch. You have all the usual tension about whether people will or won’t die, whether the rookie doctor’s Hail Mary play will pay off, and so on, and so forth. But you also have the added complication that any patient who bites the bullet turns into a flesh-eating undead monstrosity and starts rampaging through the survivors. Performing CPR on someone flatlining is suddenly a major gamble. Call me crazy, but I could live with a few episodes of this, if not necessarily a full season.
I doubt that’s where we’re headed, though, since Dead City clearly has other fish to fry. So, let’s talk about the silly stuff. For one thing, Negan turning semi-heel by killing the Dama against Maggie’s wishes is done away with pretty much immediately, since Maggie assumes the Dama killed herself (by stabbing herself in the chest from the front? Come on, Maggie). We still seem to be turning Negan into an unpredictable villain a little bit, but we’re clearly doing a softer version than I was expecting. “Emigrants” makes that pretty clear.
Case in point: Maggie using the Statue of Liberty as a Bat-signal backfires pretty much immediately. A bunch of survivors from Belleville turn up on small boats — how topical! — in need of urgent medical care, having been attacked by a different, rivalrous group out of Newark. But then survivors from Newark arrive, claiming that Belleville are the aggressors. Maggie and Renata’s equal-opportunity healthcare means that they’re all taken to the hospital at the same time, with their ongoing issues complicating the medical emergencies. While everyone is distracted, Negan and Dillard lead the leaders of the respective groups, Bauer and Claudia, away to another room for a game of pinata.
What Negan’s doing here is trying to get to the bottom of who’s at fault and to compel one leader to volunteer to take their group away. He spins Dillard around, blindfolds him, and arms him with Lucille, swinging wildly until someone talks. It’s a fundamentally dumb scene — especially given that earlier, Dillard was unwilling to finish off an injured walker — but it’s so Saviours-coded in how Negan is acting that it’s unambiguously continuing the idea that Negan still has a bit of latent psychopathy that needs to be addressed. But then it backs out by having Negan prevent Dillard from hurting anyone, despite not having really resolved the situation.
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3, Episode 3 can’t reconcile this with what happened in the previous episode. If Negan was willing to kill the Dama in cold blood, he’d be willing to hurt one or both of these two. It’s as if the show itself is unsure of whether it wants to present him as a proper bad guy or as a way for Maggie to interrogate her own beliefs about how to run things. It’s all rather strange and inconsistent, an effect compounded by the fact that both sides kind of get their way. Maggie decides that the best way to square things between the groups is to give them both something to fight for, so she puts them to work sorting out Central Park so that they can farm it before the season changes, which causes pretty much everyone to forgive and forget and to pick up scythes — made out of crutches and broom handles and such, a detail I rather liked — and get to work. But Negan is also proved right, since Bauer and Claudia can’t let bygones be bygones and end up killing each other.
Maybe the true wildcard will be Dillard. Negan spends the entire episode trying to toughen him up and ensure that he’ll have his back when the time comes, and that seems to have proved worthwhile when Dillard saves him from a couple of walkers when they’re trying to get the power back on in the tank room. But even though Dillard’s bar is full of new survivors at the end of “Emigrants”, and Negan has jury-rigged a moonshine-brewing kit, Dillard’s attention is elsewhere. Namely, it’s on Titicaca, the walker he keeps chained up in his room who can seemingly talk. Now, it’s unclear whether she can actually talk or whether Dillard’s just imagining she can, but given that he seems to believe the two of them are in love, I think it’s likely to be a problem either way.
Blimey, this show’s weird, isn’t it?
