Dead City’ Season 2, Episode 1 Review — How Much Stupid Can You Fit In One Episode?

It’s become quite clear that the entire strategy and point of The Walking Dead: Dead City is just to capitalize on Negan nostalgia. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is, once again, the only reason to watch this show. There are far more reasons not to waste your time. Spoilers ahead.

I think the best way to talk about this episode is to just go through the list of silly, stupid, annoying things that happen. This isn’t the most ridiculous show in the Walking Dead universe, but it shares all the other spinoffs’ habits of inserting all kinds of nonsensical crap into the plot. Let’s list some of this episode’s headscratcher moments:

Early on, Maggie takes Hershel Jr. out hunting. With a throwing knife. Not a big dagger, but one of those little throwing knives you use for target practice. They’re hunting deer, and he’s frustrated when he misses. But what would have happened if he’d hit the deer with that tiny knife? Well, it might have cut the deer if he threw it with enough force to penetrate its hide, which I doubt. The fact is, you cannot hunt deer with tiny throwing knives. It’s ludicrous. Maggie, standing next to him, has a bow. You can hunt deer with a bow.

Hey, at least it wasn’t a CGI deer. We all remember the CGI deer, right? At least it wasn’t that. You could probably have killed that stupid CGI deer with a throwing knife.

Later, Maggie agrees to go back to NYC with the New Babylon group if they agree not to conscript anyone for the mission. I guess New Babylon conscripts people, and then sends them on dangerous missions the very next day. If anyone tries to get out of conscription, they’re hanged. But Maggie, being a good upstanding individual with morals, doesn’t want any part in that, so she volunteers. One of the New Babylon leaders ask the marshal from last season if she’s really “worth twenty people” and he says he thinks so.

In order to test this, they round up about twenty zombies in a little horse corral which Maggie has to fight to “prove” herself. Ginny, the teenager who Negan was protecting last season, wants to volunteer, so the two of them fight the zombies together. Mind you, they don’t try to kill any from across the fence, they just barrel into a corral filled with nearly two dozen zombies and fight them with knives.

This is stupid on numerous levels. First off, why would you “test” one of your most prized soldiers, who is volunteering for your mission and has valuable intel about the target and location, by putting them in a situation that (if it weren’t for plot armor) almost certainly means death? That’s not very smart! The plot armor really evaporates any possible tension in this scene, of course, so it all just feels like a waste of time and yet another moment to make New Babylon leadership look like mustache-twirling cartoon villains.

Over in NYC, the mustache-twirling villains have locked Negan up in a cell for the past year. I guess he turned them down when the Dama gave him an opportunity within the organization at the end of Season 1. Well, they threaten his family this time around and so he’s forced to help out. Their goal? To unite the clans, er, the vying factions of NYC thugs into one unified force to fight off the New Babylon army who wants their zombie fuel.

Negan meets these two other factions at a zombie fight. Remember when the Governor would have people fight zombies for sport and have the whole town watch? Well, these guys skip the human component and have two zombies fight! Zombies decked out in armor, with spikes on their faces. How they get zombies to fight one another is, well, not at all explained. We’ve never seen zombies fight one another before now, but I guess when they’re put in a little makeshift arena, they just ignore all the living flesh and brains around them and fight each other instead. It’s . . . it’s just so stupid.

The two other factions, meanwhile, appear to be The Breastplate Gang and the Homeless People. Each faction has to have its own look, you see. The New Babylonians all dress like Civil War reenactment actors. They must have found a stash of uniforms somewhere.

Negan’s job is to give a speech and convince the other two factions to join the Dama’s group. The Croat has made him a brand new Lucille bat (I guess Negan must have blabbed about it) but with a twist. He’s included…some kind of button-activated zapper that knocks one of the faction leaders down. I guess a nonlethal upgrade to a bat covered in barbed wire and nails is . . . cool? Cool for a kinder, gentler Negan, though I’m not sure why the Croat would want that. Seems pretty goofy to me.

Then there’s Maggie. I just have a hard time with Maggie. Her scene with Hershel Jr. when he wanted to go and she wanted him to say was just such painful melodrama. Maggie looks cool and she’s a tough fighter, but I still can’t handle her accent and it gets much worse when she’s in a Very Dramatic Scene.

Ultimately, I’m left wondering: What’s the point of this show? It’s just another faction war between groups of people we care nothing about. This entire franchise is just the same thing over and over again, whether it’s The Ones Who Live, Fear The Walking Dead, Daryl Dixon or this. Factions fighting other factions endlessly. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Pick any of these shows, and the plot is almost identical. Our heroes almost never die, but they also never really gain anything. No real arcs or tension because there are no real stakes. No real character development, but also not much world development. Everything is stagnant. There’s never a victory condition. It just spins on endlessly, flailing from one humdrum conflict to another. It’s like the writers only have one idea and they just recycle it over and over again with a new batch of characters in a new location that we could frankly care less about. It’s all so dreadfully generic and boring at this point. Why are we still doing this?

“If you don’t like it, don’t watch it,” they tell me. Yes, but where’s the fun in that?