When a show has been on as long as The Walking Dead, you tend to be able to spot where the writers are going with certain aspects of the plot. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it has gotten boring, but it does usually mean that it gets fairly predictable and while the show’s latest incarnation seems to be lightly rectifying the issues it had with its first season, Dead City is still feeling a little too obvious thus far. I’ll give you a good example: during the first half of its second episode, we not only are repeatedly shown that the accumulated forces are planning a large scale scouting/invasion mission of Manhattan that sees an army loaded onto a ferry as they sail off to battle, but we are further introduced to Victor, the man who has been a lifeline to the captive Negan thanks to his stirring talents with the violin. Now, anyone who has been watching The Walking Dead for a while will no doubt surmise two things: firstly is there is now fucking way we’re getting a mass invasion as early as episode two and secondly, that ernest fiddler is going to meet a tragic fate sooner rather than later. Wouldn’t you know it, they’d be right, but is the fact that Dead City is living up to expectations as disastrous as it sounds?
As Maggie and Ginny are taken to the staging area as part of New Babylon’s army, the former pleads with Perlie to change their plans as sailing towards Manhattan on a big-ass ferry is kind of like shouting out your punches before you throw them during a boxing match. Of course, boss woman Govenor Byrd and her psycho Major, Narvaez, not only ignore Maggie’s warnings, but after she discovers Hershel has tagged along and a smoke signal set to apparently warn the Croat that they’re coming, matters escalate, tempers flare and Maggie gets herself arrested after punching Narvaez in the face.
Meanwhile, while Negan’s inner torment about uniting the gangs of New York and becoming the Dama’s fist is being soothed by the violin playing of his new friend Victor, he still is called into action to launch an offensive against the advancing team from New Babylon and it’s here that the old Negan once again comes out. In the chaos that follows that sees the ferry crippled by mines laid in the water and methane bombs launched from the city, Babylon’s attempt to retake Manhatten spectacularly ends before it can even begin and only a handful of people are washed ashore to face the advancing Walkers that greet them.
However, in the aftermath, it’s noticed that some curious acts of self sabotage occured that raises some alarming concerns for both sides. The first is that it’s noticed that Negan temporarily halted the attack in order to let Maggie, Hershal and Ginny escape in time; but the second is that it was Hershal who set the smoke signal earlier and alerted the Croat to their imminent arrival. Obviously, very different reactions occur.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Another Shitty Lesson, it has a story that it tells with measured economy, it moves at a decent pace and a lot occurs including a sizable sea battle and more complications concerning which way Negan is going to swing. However, while the show doesn’t set a foot wrong specifically, it’s a little disconcerting that a show that once kept an entire generation on its toes with shock deaths and stunning revelations has become so easy to predict. The second someone announced that the first steps of New Babylon’s invasion was going to occur this episode, I knew it wasn’t going to happen; similarly, the exact moment that Victor started explaining to a despondent Negan about his touch childhood with a tyrannical, classical music obsessed father, you just know that this dude is going to bite it as much as a guy on a cop show who announces that he’s two weeks from retirement. Even the reveal that it’s Hershel that clued their enemies that they were coming isn’t the crater creating twist it should be as they’ve been hinting and telegraphing that betrayal pretty hard during the last episode and so we ultimately have an installment with three supposedly game changing occurrences that fail to raise an eyebrow.
In fact, the biggest surprise that I got from this episode is that despite my complete and total lack of shock, it still manages to be a neatly paced episode that’s light on its feet and still manages to have a couple of talking points of worth.
The first is that boat attack that not only manages to be pretty cool despite obviously being far cheaper than having an army storm Manhattan Island, but offers some pretty nifty carnage as it neatly offs all the Babylon leaders in one fell swoop except for Dascha Polanco’s driven Narvaez and gives us a glimpse at more of thr Croat’s funky, zombie-powered tech as he launches bombs filled with Walker methane at the ferry until it sinks beneath the waves. Of course, Negan holds the destruction off after spotting Maggie & Co. through a telescope and this leads us to the second aspect of the episode that succeeds in holding our attention: the dilemma of Negan.
While Lauren Cohen’s Maggie continues to go through the warrior mom motions, Jeffery Dean Morgan gets to wrestle with the internal struggles of whether or not to fully reclaim his old mantle and lead the army the Doma is trying to amass in his own inimitable and vicious style. It’s to the actor’s credit that you can actually tell when he’s succeeding in holding out against the lure of becoming a leader once more and when that old malevolent gleam in his eye is starting to once again flicker and a highlight is when the Croat manges to convince him to tell an old stories from his glory days where Negan got his Saviors to surrender to an opposing force only to switch out the venison for Walker meat during a celebratory meal. It’s such a shame that the show fast tracks Victor’s obvious death to the point where it has absolutely no meaning – I mean, we only first met him last week and heard his origin story a mere thirty minutes ago and it’s weird that the show would think that we wouldn’t guess that someone with a beautiful talent located in TWD universe wasn’t going to be killed to punish someone else.
So as it stands now, I can see that Dead City has now found its feet and the result is hopefully a nimble pace that prevent the frustrating fluctuation between rushing and dragging the plot that messed up the second season of Daryl Dixon. However, it seems that the price we have to pay is a show with precious little surprises in store as it zips its expanded cast through an adventure of the week. If Dead City manages to pull an unexpected blinder out of the hat over the next six weeks, I’ll gladly eat my zombified liver, but for now, a not boring/not gripping midpoint is the best we can hope for.
The episode may be titled Another Shitty Lesson, but luckily we are barely spared another shitty episode…
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