The Walking Dead: Dead City (AMC)

Television

‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ episode 6 ‘Doma Smo’

After a very promising start, ‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ stumbles at the end of its first season.

July 23, 2023

Last week’s penultimate episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City concluded with the series’ main plotlines rushing toward a shared conclusion:

Negan and Marshal Armstrong appear to finally be on the same page. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the fact that they’re stuck on the island of Manhattan together. Armstrong has a plan to commandeer one of the floating docks from the Chelsea Piers, but his injuries won’t make it easy to get there.
Ginny figured out that Maggie was lying about why Hershel was taken by the Croat. The former Savior had actually blackmailed Maggie into finding and capturing Negan — a task he was charged with by his previously unseen boss, the Dama.

Ginny lit a flair in the middle of the city so that Negan could find her. This is likely to draw attention from other parties (both alive and undead), as well. If Negan gets to her first, however, then the revelation about Maggie is sure to make things all types of awkward — assuming that the mute girl is able to communicate it to him.
We haven’t seen Hershel in anything other than a flashback since the first episode, but I’m sure he’s fine.

As always, the recap portion of this review will contain plenty of spoilers. The sequence of events has also been streamlined for the sake of clarity.

Knives Out

The Walking Dead: Dead City (AMC)

The episode opens with Negan and Armstrong heading toward the flair. Negan assumes it’s Maggie and is surprised to find Ginny waiting for him. Since Manhattan is apparently a very small city, Maggie catches up to everyone moments later.

As walkers begin shambling toward their location, Armstrong offers to take Ginny back with him while Negan and Maggie finish their mission to rescue Hershel. Ginny refuses, going so far as to utter a few words — which definitely sounded like the beginning of an explanation about Maggie.

Realizing Ginny won’t leave with Armstrong unless he makes her, Negan drops a bomb and reveals that he’s the one who killed her dad. He makes sure to completely break the little girl’s heart by proclaiming:

“You’re just a debt I had to pay. That’s it.

Ginny briefly appears deflated before steeling herself and heading off with Armstrong. As she leaves, we can see that Negan is barely holding it together.

The next morning, Maggie tells Negan that she recognizes how hard it was for him to push Ginny away. After the pair discuss their plan to confront the Croat, Maggie opens up and reveals that, like Negan, she had a dream about going to New York as a child. Instead of the Statue of Liberty, it was the Herald Square Macy’s Department Store at Christmas time.

As if by divine providence, the Croat drives by the same Macy’s at that exact moment.

The pair track the path of the vehicle to the building Maggie originally spotted that’s been spewing smoke at various intervals. After they head inside, Negan asks what she thinks Ginny was trying to tell him. Maggie posits that the girl simply wanted to explain her decision to travel to Manhattan, but Negan sees right through the lie.

The Walking Dead: Dead City (AMC)

After eyeing each other for a moment, Maggie pulls one of her knives, which Negan knocks away. She pulls another, but Negan knocks her down before she can stab him and runs toward a zombie-infested port. Maggie pursues him out onto a platform, where Negan pleads with her to stop. After fighting for a bit, Maggie stabs him in the shoulder. Negan roars in pain/anger before kicking Maggie off the platform and onto a perfectly situated container covered by a tarp.

Maggie gets back up just in time for Negan to jump down, take one of her knives, and hold it to her throat. After getting her to drop the other blade, he lets go of his before correctly surmising Maggie’s plan to exchange him for Hershel. He also tells her that the two of them (who make a “badass team”) could’ve gotten Hershel back, but she still wants him to pay for killing Glenn — a sentiment that he wholeheartedly understands.

Moments after Negan is done with his speech, the Croat appears overhead with his goons. Maggie grabs a knife and holds it to Negan, who doesn’t make an effort to stop her.

Dire Departures

The Walking Dead: Dead City (AMC)

The Croat and his goons take Negan back into the city via an ambulance with Maggie still holding him at knifepoint. Along the way, the Croat reveals that he’d been searching for Negan all over the east coast for a long time. He decided to change tactics after meeting a former Savior named Jerome, who told him about what Negan did to Maggie’s husband. After hearing about the person she became following her husband’s death, the Croat decided to blackmail her into doing the job.

The Croat also admits that during their encounter in the fourth episode, he secretly hoped to keep both Negan and Hershel (just case you needed more proof that the Croat is a bad guy). Now that Maggie has fulfilled her end of the deal, however, he agrees to give her son back.

The Walking Dead: Dead City (AMC)

The ambulance arrives at a bank where Hershel is being held. While the Croat is retrieving him, Negan asks Maggie to look after Ginny. Before she can answer, Hershel walks out looking a bit dirty and freaked out, but otherwise unharmed. After a tense moment, Negan gently puts her hand with the knife down and willingly exchanges places with Hershel. Maggie then moves forward and embraces her son, who doesn’t seem particularly thrilled to see her.

Hershel’s displeasure becomes even more apparent when they return to Maggie’s truck, where he admits to feeling safer as a prisoner instead of constantly waiting for the next bad thing to happen back home. When he finds the hat Maggie kept to give him, the boy points out how messed up it is to receive a souvenir from the time he was kidnapped (which is honestly a pretty solid observation). Things come to a head when Hershel states his belief that Maggie cares more about revenge and survival than she does about her own son.

Meanwhile, the Croat reminisces about his time with Negan during his brutal reign as the leader of the Saviors. He also expresses regret for disobeying Negan’s order not to kill the girl from the Kingdom — a mistake he promises to never make again.

New Paths

The Walking Dead: Dead City (AMC)

After dropping Ginny off at the Bricks, Armstrong returns to New Babylon, where he tells his superiors that he found Negan and was forced to execute him. In response, the New Babylon leader subtly threatens the marshal’s family before demanding he tell his story again — this time with all the parts he omitted regarding the methane fuel she already knew about.

Back at the Bricks, Maggie visits a sleeping Ginny and places the girl’s stuffed dinosaur next to her. She then visits Hershel’s room and tries to explain why she’s been so hard on him. After feeling like the world kept taking from her, she’s put herself in a constant/impossible battle to claw back whatever she can. Maggie then promises to finish her conflict with Negan so that she can let it go…which pretty much undercuts her entire point, but whatever. Maggie later finds some of Hershel’s drawings, which include a portrait of the Dama.

Back on the island, the Croat takes Negan inside the theater to visit his beloved leader. On the way there, he tells him how he regaled the Dama with stories about what a great and charismatic leader Negan is. This apparently convinced her he was the exact person they needed for the inevitable war that was coming due to other civilizations wanting their fuel.

Upon entering the Dama’s office, she kicks the Croat out before giving him a dressed-up version of the same pitch. When Negan attempts to brush her off, she giddily presents him with the tip of one of Hershel’s toes. The Dama then explains how she intuited that Negan likely feels a strange sense of responsibility for the boy. Because of this, she knows he’ll do whatever she says — especially since Hershel has been completely brainwashed.

If Negan doesn’t comply, she can simply take Hershel back to remove even more parts from his body.

The Verdict

The Walking Dead: Dead City (AMC)

Remember last week when the Dama uttered these words to the Croat?

“…everyone knows the ending is all that matters.”

It’s a shame that this prescient moment of dialogue didn’t carry over into Dead City’s actual narrative. Even with the recent announcement that it’ll be getting a second season, the conclusion we got for this story was terribly disappointing.

For starters, the main villain wasn’t even introduced until near the end of the penultimate episode. That’s fine if she was going to be part of a cliffhanger leading into season two, but she was hurriedly given the reigns to the series’ central conflict (outside of the Maggie vs. Negan that appears to have no end in sight).

As if that weren’t bad enough, her plan depends on Negan ONCE AGAIN unwillingly leading a bad group of people like he did with the Whisperers. I know it’s not the exact same circumstances, but it’s close enough to feel tediously familiar.

Meanwhile, all the interesting stuff either happened off-screen or just got started:

Hershel being brainwashed by the Dama.
The Croat becoming resentful toward the Dama.

Maggie having to care for a girl who knows she turned Negan over to some bad people.
Marshal Armstrong discovering that his leader might be just as ruthless as the people he’s dedicated his life to fighting.

It’s totally fine if Dead City wants to continue its story with another season. Heck, it might even be great. But just because you tag the end of your narrative with a split screen of Maggie and Negan doesn’t make the resolution meaningful or satisfying. Instead, it feels as though we watched the beginning of a fun ride go over one of those bombed bridges leading out of Manhattan.

Thankfully, the individual performances once again kept this episode afloat. They weren’t enough to make it good, but that’s partially due to Gaius Charles being sidelined for most of it. We didn’t get to see Logan Kim portray Hershel Rhee enough, although his brief about of screen time this week was definitely compelling.

As for the big showdown between Maggie and Negan, that failed to deliver despite Lauren Cohen and Jeffrey Dean Morgan putting everything they had into their performances. The quiet moments we’ve seen between their characters were far more impactful than their impromptu knife fight. It’s not usually a good sign when both the audience and the characters on screen can all forget about what should’ve been a fairly severe/deep wound.

On a more positive note, Dead City once again looked absolutely gorgeous. Let’s hope that the next season of the series keeps the brilliant acting and technical aspects while hammering out some of its major story issues.