Aside from the original series and around four seasons of Fear The Walking Dead, I kind of fell out of favour with the other spin-offs that orbited the main show like a decaying solar system. As a result, I’m not fully prepared to comment about whether The Walking Dead franchise needs revitalizing just in case shows like The Walking Dead: World Beyond and Tales Of The Walking have already delivered. However, what I can say is that a bout of much-needed revitalization isn’t coming from Dead City any time soon, as the fledgling mini-series seems to be content to carry on exactly the way things have been going with a second episode that reliably keeps things moving despite playing up to some of the most irritating tropes the show has been dining out on for at least the last five years
After fleeing a Walker infestation that sees them trapped in a building located in the midst of of a heavily congested New York, uneasy Maggie and Negan discover that the only way to escape is to follow a strange old lady we later find out is named Esther and who only seems to speak Hebrew. Realising that the only way out is up, the trio navigate a lift shaft whose bottom is with a broken mass of biting dead and make it to Esther’s escape route, a precarious looking zip line that leads to the next building. However, while escaping, Maggie encounters a bit of trouble after getting distracted by music being played, by flat out refues Negan’s help despite the ramifications of her falling is that the only things that will break her multi-storey fall is either a mob of the undead or a quick meeting with the sidewalk.
Esther ultimately leads our scowling leads to her tribe of people, a naturally suspicious group whose numbers have been steadily been dwindling.thanks to the actions of the Burazi, the henchmen of the Croat who wear distinctive, spiky crash helmets in order to head butt any attacking Walker into a second death. While Negan and Maggie cool their heels, the former retails us of the Croat’s origin as one of the very first Saviours, but whose love of unnecessary torture led to Negan attempting to assassinate his former protege. This, of course, makes Maggie even more concerned about her son, Hershel, who’s abduction by the Croat is the whole reason everyone is in this mess. Meanwhile, Ginny, a young mute girl who once traveled with Negan, struggles to settle at the Hilltop while determined lawman Perlie Armstrong takes time out from perusing Negan to discover what happened to his brother (spoiler: nothing good) only to end up meeting the Croat face to face.
One of the most irritating aspects about the main show in the Walking Dead’s pantheon was that the bigger the show got, the bigger the cast became, but as the population swelled, the show found it tough to make them all have interesting plot threads, leaving most to get lost in the shuffle and the dead to become barely secondary threats. Unless I miss my guess, this is exactly the sort of problem the scaled down Dead City was supposed to neutralise with Negan and Maggie scraping over 11 years of continuity off their boot and forging into an all new adventure with a sharper focus on a more localized adventure. Well, it seems that The Walking Dead just can’t stop going back to the same old storylines again and again as Who’s There gets right down to business by going back over the same old stuff. Hands up anyone who was praying that Dead City would mix things up will no doubt be pissed that we’re subjected to yet another plot that sees two human factions locked in a battle of survival while the living dead aimlessly wander about in the back ground until the plot can think of a typically cool use for them. While I’ll concede that The Walking Dead’s modus operandi has always been the drama born between people’s behavior in a rot infested dystopia, the show was always at it’s most watchable when it was simply the living vs. the dead and less a bloated version of George A. Romero meets A Tale Of Two Cities and Dead City could have been an excellent chance to enforce a shift back into more immeadiate survival horror. Why did we even need new people at all – why, instead of Hershel being a hostage, could he and others simply have gotten trapped while scavenging un Manhattan and Maggie and Negan have to enter a literal city of the dead to rescue him – think The Day After Tomorrow but with more flesh eating.
However, as somewhat of a missed opportunity as Dead City is, episode 2 is still, at its core, a reliable slice of standard, Walking Dead shenanigans that still break out the moves when it needs to. Be it the violent methods of yet more groups of survivors (crash helmets retro fitted with nails and bandsaw blades for that perfect Glasgow kiss and flesh ripping harpoon guns may not be the most practical – they’re damn cool), to the occasional example of creative peril (lift shaft stuffed with Walkers and a rickety ladder), the show is consistently entertaining if never completely engrossing. You’ll notice the new characters, but you’ll barely bat an eyelid once they bite it.
Most indicative of the Dead City’s inability being stuck somewhere between forging new paths and treading old ground is that of Negan himself. On one hand, the desperate retconning of the character in order to make some of his past exploits less nefarious have rung as hollow as a pumpkin on Halloween, so his truly impressive reversion to his old ways when he spectacularly uses one of the Buzari as a human sprinkler system to make a statement is a welcome sight. But in the other, the constant question of how much of Negan is truly the brain bashing, throat slashing, face burning villain and how much was a necessary act to keep the Saviours in line is a plot point that’s already been hashed out, ad nauseam, even since Negan was imprisoned for his crimes back at the end of season 8. Still, getting Jeffery Dean Morgan to bust out some vintage, swaggering Negan is always a sight to behold, whether roasting a henchman for his neck beard/rat tail combo or butchering a man purely to add some memorable punctuation to his shitty knock-knock joke – it’s just a shame it’s part of yet another ongoing thread that’s grown more mold than a Walker’s hairline.
Hardly boring, but if you owned a carpet that was as well-worn as some of Dead City’s storylines, you’d throw it out…
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