While the more cheerful and hopeful tone taken by Dead City has thus far provided something of a resurgence in quality for the long running show, I think we can all agree that it’s about time for some major hardship to occur in order to spice things up. In the first four weeks, we’ve seen Maggie and Negan finally bury the hatchet (not a real one, thankfully), the group rebuild and populate a new community in record time and even ensure that they’re properly stocked for medical supplies – but a community isn’t fully cemented until it’s tested and it seems that’s where “Imperialis” is going to take us.
However, before the metaphorical cracks start to show, it’s some literal ones that’s set the ball rolling after a poorly timed sinkhole punches a serious dent in the food supplies. Cue musings about leadership, the nature of how humans act when the chips are down, and a stirring men on a mission setpiece that’s conceptually strong enough to hang a completely new spin-off on.
In the aftermath of the sinkhole, Maggie and Renata find that the peace and harmony they’ve managed to cultivate is only as strong as the promises they’ve made, and now that everyone’s been forced to strictly ration the remaining food, that old fear is starting to return. With many folks vocally disgruntled that the dream they’ve been sold is crapping out already, Maggie and Renata realise that they’ve got to take people’s minds off of the issue by ensuring that the power stays on indefinitely. However, to do that, they’ll have to mount a massive Walker wrangling mission to keep their methane converters running non-stop for the months it’ll take to build the food stocks back up.
Bringing together a team of off-beat misfits together to pull this risky mission off, the group has to breach the Empire State Building – which is utterly crammed with living corpses – and try and siphon out all the Walkers they need without causing a total stampede. Impressively, the mission comes off without a hitch (mostly), with absolutely no casualties whatsoever – which may actually be a first considering that most of the twelve members involved are expendable characters we’ve only just met. However, while Maggie and Renata manage to get the lights back on and New York celebrates, there’s still some issues that remain.
When a member of the community, Fabian, decides to steal food to feed his family, he’s caught by Renata who forces him to confess his selfish act. After being shunned by everyone, he ends up in Dillard’s bar, mouthing off about how he’d like to kill the two women who run the place – however, the person he’s mouthing off to ends up being Negan, who ends up executing Fabian in front of a stunned Renata and then flat out refuses to acknowledge her authority when she tries to arrest him. After four episodes of hope, this could be the fault line that finally brings everything crashing down.
It was going to happen sooner or later – and it was always going to be Negan who instigates it, but now that life in New York is finally working, it makes sense that we’d kick off the second half of the season by starting to tear everything down. However, while previous seasons may have caused everything to go tits up over the course of a forty-five minute episode, “Imperialis” realises that to do so would unravel all the good work that it’s done. Leaving Negan’s more tyrannical instincts to surface until the third act, the show makes the smart choice of continuing to build that hope all the way through the episode thanks to various scenes of acceptance. It’s triggered by the central mission, which sees a gang of almost cartoonish misfits to band together in order to mount a Dirty Dozen style mission to grab more zombies. If this were any other season of The Walking Dead, the mission would have undoubtedly failed, or at the very least seen the hastily named “Dead Squad” all torn to pieces.
However, despite a couple of slight hiccups, the mission accrues zero casualties despite some of the members being crazed former firemen, deranged priests and even a one-time porn star. In fact, if The Walking Dead ever needed another spinoff, having Negan and Dillard headline the Dead Squad wouldn’t actually be a bad shout despite matters getting dangerously close to becoming silly. Despite being a voracious threat, the Walkers are strangely docile as they’re hearded out of the foyer of Empire State, and there’s even a spot of slapstick as there’s a running joke involving Walkers falling out of windows being a hazard as they splat like gore-bombs in the street. But beyond this, there’s even more moments of quiet triumph. A drunken Maggie and Negan admit that if the world hadn’t ended, they probably would have been friends; Dillard finds acceptance from the Squad despite his habit of keeping Walkers as companions; and there’s even a quieter moment that sees Hershal paint a mural of Luis’ missing wife to honor her after he finally accepts that she’s probably dead.
Yep, everyone seems to mostly be playing nice during all this hardship, but it only takes one to screw it up, and after Fabian is caught hording food for his family, it seems to be the pivot point that could prove to incite disaster. While Renata initially handles the theft peacefully, Fabian is humiliated by his deeds, and after getting drunk, Negan gets into a conversation about the quality of leadership New York is experiencing. However, while Negan suggests that the Big Apple would be better off if it was Maggie solely calling the shots, Fabian mouths off about wanting to kill themselves both, which triggers his drinking partner to use an actual trigger. What’s extra ironic is that Negan saved Fabian’s life only last week and with Renata entering just before the deed is done, she gets a ringside seat to her no killing rule getting violently broken.
While the collapsing of a New York street may have set this all in motion, it’s the fracture between Renata and Negan that’s most in danger of ruining everything that’s been built. With Negan gradually going back to his old ways by killing with impunity and swearing like a fifteen year-old, and Renata remaining steadfast that she’s not going to allow a psycho to run around free, it’s going to take Maggie to piece this back together. But whose side will she actually be on? While she, more than anyone, knows what an unregulated Negan can do, she’d probably also admit that that taking a life is completely necessary to maintain order in extreme situations. However, there’s also the issue that a stray bullet from Fabian’s execution has killed one of Dillard’s pet Walkers, and as the guy secretly feels that they’re still alive, who knows what that’s going to do?
The fact that Dead City has taken so much care to build up this new community means that now the more harsher aspects of the franchise are returning, it actually means something now that we have so much to lose. However, with previews of the sixth episode suggesting that the show is trying something completely different, with some sort of “what if…” alternate timeline story, expect a slightly later wait time for things to finally start falling apart.
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