Regardless of your feelings about the places the show eventually went, you can’t say that The Walking Dead hasn’t earned the label of phenomenon.Kickstarted by the absurdly gripping comic created by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, the subsequent adaptation became more than just a ratings smash, it became a weekly dose of visual crack that had devotees stumbling to their viewing devices every week like the lipless zombies that popped up every week. The show was huge and subsequently spun off spin offs left, right and centre, but as time went on, the rot began to set into the main show due to some samey storylines, more and more human villains and plots that often shuffled slower than the living dead themselves.
In 2022, after 11 seasons, the main show finally went down for good, but that wasn’t the end of the undead shenanigans, not by a long shot. While sister show, Fear The Walking Dead, was similarly starting to wind down, various spin offs for the more beloved characters were announced and the first to lurch off of the starting grid is Dead City; a show that aims to close the complicated relationship between Maggie and reformed villain, Negan. Can The Walking Dead take a big, bloody bite from its former glories or would it have been best to leave the franchise moldering in a dank corner? Shuffle on my friends and enter the Dead City to find out.
We open on Maggie who is scoping out the island of Manhattan for some mysterious purpose who then shows she hasn’t lost a step by caving in the head of a marauding Walker in a blind rage. The reason for this rage is her son, Hershel, who, after numerous raids on Maggie’s settlement known on the hilltop, has been taken hostage by a splinter fraction of the Saviours, a group that bullies settlements to give them supplies in payment for their “protection”.
When it comes to tackling the Saviours, Maggie reluctantly realises that if she’s ever going to get her son back alive, she’ll need aid from the man who knows more about this particular group than any other man alive – primarily because he once ran them. That’s right, Maggie needs the help of Negan, the man responsible for the infamous and very fatal bludgeoning of Hershel’s father, Glen, but when she tracks down the swaggering, one time despot, she finds that he’s got some baggage of his own.
With the mute Ginny in tow, Negan is being pursued by a trio of marshalls from a community called New Babylon who wish to bring him to justice (aka. kill him) for the crime of multiple murder, but after making a deal to secure his young ward’s safety, Maggie and Negan head to Manhattan to rescue Hershel from the sadistic leader of this iteration of the Saviours known only as the Croat.
With the marshalls, Saviours, Walkers and an uncomfortable amount of roaches all standing in their way, they’re about to find out that the Big Apple has gotten decidedly rotten.
If I’m being honest, even though I held out longer than some, I also became one of the number of viewers who gradually tuned out from Walking Dead over the years. However, despite dipping out midway through Season 9, my lapse was mostly gradual and not, as some people proudly stated in forums, a rage quit of a series that was stuck going round in circles. However, thanks to the final season helpfully popping up on Disney+, I managed to finally finish the main series and sort of step away from it after the plot lines had long since started eating its own tail.
Well, it looks like I’m back again as Dead City is less a fresh take on the saga as a whole, but more of a step back to a simpler time when the Walking Dead didn’t have such a sprawling cast of equally bland characters and over familiar surroundings to keep track of. One of the reasons that the underrated Fear The Walking Dead (another show I lapsed from) was more interesting is that not only did the show move around the country, adding much needed new flavours to its undead gumbo, but the core group of the family (up until where I got to, at least) forced the show to maintain more of a focus than its bigger brother had. Well, thankfully the reduction of characters and change of location manage to enfuse this, the first of a few Walking Dead mini spinoffs, with a bit of renewed energy as it settles on one of the most intriguing/frustrating relationships in the entire series – that of Maggie and Negan. Anyone who has even brushed past a later episode of the show know the bad blood that exists between these two as the murder of Maggie’s lover, Glen, was a ridiculously seismic event both in the black and white pages of the source material and the show, but since then, Jeffery Dean Morgan’s bat swinging bastard was gradually rehabilitated onto the side of the “good” guys much to Maggie’s disgust. Well, we’re back into the realms of thoughtful, lingering death stares and long speeches of justification as the two are forced to work together once again.
Out of all the plot threads The Walking Dead repeatedly drove into the ground week after week, the Maggie/Negan relationship is one that still has legs, although while Lauren Cohan and Morgan slip back into their roles like comfortable – if grimy – slippers, no real new ground is trodden here, at least not yet. Elsewhere, new aspects to this dilapidated world are tacked on harmlessly, such as the marshalls of New Babylon, a bunch of ranger types led by Gaius Charles’ Perlie Armstrong, a man whose sense of justice makes Judge Dredd look like Billy the Kid, or Željko Ivanek’s gaunt bad guy who apparently was one of Negan’s most brutal lieutenants despite the fact that this is the first we’ve heard of him.
Yep, so far, so familiar and in a post The Last Of Us world, Dead City is already starting to feel somewhat dated, but while the characters and scenarios smell as ripe as the tattered under garments of a particularly shabby Walker, some of the newer elements manage to make this first episode worthwhile.
The location change to New York helps immensely, giving the episode a kinship with other, dystopian movies that’s portrayed the City That Never Sleeps as a murderous husk such as Escape From New York and I Am Legend and the sight of the island looming out of the fog as our heroes approach is worth the admission along. Elsewhere, the episode gives us Manhattan-specific reasons why y’all should stay the fuck out as any loud noise cause Walkers to blindly step out of the windows of any one of the skyscrapers surrounding you causing it to literally rain dead people and also; anyone with an issue with cockroaches might be best served by looking away.
The safe, recognizable start for Dead City isn’t about to revolutionise the franchise any time soon, but it still hits where it counts (the Walker with a live rat scampering around inside its gullet is old-school, Walking Dead, genius) and, with only a manageable, six episodes in the chamber, it hopefully won’t be a season I’ll be walking away from any time soon.
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