Once upon a time, the main tension that arose from watching a season of The Walking Dead came from the fact that death could (and frequently did) obliterate any one of the beloved characters that struggled week by week to survive a zombie apocalypse. However, as time went on and the franchise proved to be far more resistant to repeated blows to the head than anyone could ever have imagined, the tension was replaced by a sense of anxiety about whether we could get through a season without things getting hideously dull and repetitive.
It’s an expectation that’s hung over every single spinoff show that’s emerged after the ending of the original series, and both Dead City and Daryl Dixon have frequently taken turns falling into all the old, familiar pitfalls as the same storylines kept getting regurgitated. However, once again, Dead City Season Three seems to be something of a surprise as the third episode of its more hope-based outlook delivers yet another offering that harkens back to the franchise’s roots.
Deciding to try and turn New York into a thriving community once more, and with troublesome elements such as the Dama and the Croat finally purged, Maggie and Renata have taken a leap of faith and powered up the lights within the Statue Of Liberty to act as a beacon in order to attract more people to them. Of course, this counts as being rather a risky endeavor as they have no idea what kind of people will arrive – but needless to say, Negan isn’t feeling especially hopeful about it.
Nevertheless, when two other groups do inevitably arrive, they do so bleeding and wounded due to the bitter feud they’ve both been embroiled in. While unsure who started what and who’s telling the truth, Maggie and Renata take in both the warring groups from Newark and Belleville and decides to make the risky move of helping both of them, even though their leaders, Claudia and Bauer, seem resolute in carrying on their own private war.
Amidst the threat of violence hanging in the air and an overworked power supply causing the lights to flicker alarmingly, some members of the core group forge ahead on new paths while other threaten to blackslide. Having seemingly thrown off the Dama’s influence completely, Hershal now gets his trial by fire as a surgeon, but when asked to kick Claudia and Bauer into line, Negan resorts to some alarmingly old-school tactics that hint that weeks of booze and XBox hasn’t dulled that sadistic edge of his entirely.
However, if anything is keep Negan in the game, it’s the protective streak he’s formed for Dillard as he tries to break the belief his friend has that he can converse with the dead. However, while Maggie and Renata make all the right calls at diffusing the war between Newark and Belleville, it seems that Dillard’s psychosis goes far deeper than Negan has ever suspected…
Well, in a display of neatness, episode 3 of season 3 now makes the show 3 for 3, as the reformation of Dead City keeps going in the right direction. Rather than getting stuck in the mud with opposing groups and overarching villains, Dead City continues to focus fully on building up New York as a workable community step by step. This week, we get to see if Maggie’s big gambit of inviting all comers to Manhattan is going to pay off, and immediately both her and Renata have some gargantuan moral choices to make when warring groups from two opposing communities arrive after a massive conflict has decimated both their ranks. Essentially one big social conundrum that our leads have to solve, “Emigrants” delivers a riddle where guessing wrong could have massive ramifications about what happen next and the puzzle is laid out pretty cleanly. Both groups have multiple casualties suggesting that neither is a superior force to the other, additionally, everyone claims that it was the other group that struck first and that they are violent scavengers. This leaves Maggie and Renata with an impossible choice – kill one side and you could be getting it wrong; kill both sides and the future of New York falls; but kill neither side and welcome them both in could just as easily invite disaster just as much as the other two. It’s a moral issue that delves right back to the origins of the franchise and while it’s a question that’s been posed by the franchise many times before, the nimble pace make the episode feel neither rushed or draggy. It’s also nice that it’s all mostly resolved in a single episode, and while in the past it might have lead to a plot point feeling underwritten, or lacking gravitas, it also avoids the season dragging out an overused plot point needlessly over multiple episodes.
Again, watching Maggie have a hopeful purpose that cancels out her thirst for revenge continues to give her a new lease of life and as a result, even Hershal now is becoming a rootable character now that he’s channeled his apocalyptic moping into something useful. But while the show still continues to discover that you can actually make characters in a Walking Dead show happy and still deliver the goods. It’s still the Negan and Dillard show that’s powering the bulk of the machine. While Negan is still in something of a cynical daze thanks to video games and booze, the fact that he’s trying to rehabilitate Dillard into hanging around living people is actually quite sweet. Be it convincing him to kill a dehabilitated Walker to break his delusion (an awesome animatronic creation that also calls back to the franchise’s early days), or filling his bar with living, breathing people to fill his life back up with beings that actually have heartbeats and blood that’s above room temperature. Obviously the old Negan threatens to surface every now and then (he’s already “suicided” the Dama, and his treatment of Claudia and Bauer is a worrying callback to his time running the Saviors), but what proves to give this wonderfully weird relationship some extra sauce is the revelation that Dillard is way more gone than we previously thought. Heading up to his apartment to change for the crowd of people filling his bar, we discover that he has a Walker stashed in his bedroom who he genuinely believes is talking to him. Even more alarmingly, it seems that the voices he’s hearing are accusing him of turning his back on his undead “friends” and that he shouldn’t put his trust in Negan. If the rest of the season continues to deliver episode long issues for Maggie to solve while gradually building up the bizarre – but fascinating – Dillard subplot, then I’m all for it, because it’s certainly been working so far.
The simplification of Dead City continues to provide good, solid, above average episodes that keeps on providing interesting stuff for the likes of Maggie, Hershal and Negan to grapple with. While some may find the rather basic resolution of the Newark/Belleville war a rather obvious metaphor for Maggie’s own relationship with hatred, it still hits all the right notes. However, as refreshing as this return to Walking Dead’s basics is, I’m keeping my eyes firmly locked on Dillard – because if anything superlative is going to happen, it’s going to come from this guy.
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