If the first season of The Walking Dead: Dead City was Escape From New York, then the second season is The Warriors. Set on the gritty, ultra-violent streets of a dystopian New York City, the 1979 cult classic begins with a conclave of territorial gangs — an attempt at a truce to unite and secure their turfs against a common enemy. The pulpy gang movie is, in effect, a live-action comic book, its themed tribes rooted in fantasy rather than any sort of street-gang realism.
The sophomore season of Dead City is more comic book-y and even pulpier than the first, which sent longtime enemies Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) on a mission together into post-apocalyptic New York. They went there under the pretense of rescuing Maggie’s son Hershel (Logan Kim) from one of Negan’s former Savior underlings, the Croat (Željko Ivanek), but in a season-ending twist, it turned out that Maggie betrayed Negan. She handed him over to the Croat (who strong-armed Maggie into bringing Negan from the mainland to Manhattan in exchange for her son), and then Maggie returned home with Hershel, having traded Negan to the Dama (Lisa Emery), a power broker who wanted Negan to unite and lead the city’s gangs in order to protect the island’s natural resources from outsiders.
That natural resource is the Croat’s methane made from the abundant amount of zombie bodies on the island, and those outsiders are the soldiers of the New Babylon Federation: colonizers from the mainland out to take over the electricity-generating methane operation to replace their dwindling supply of ethanol and bring back the old world.
The Walking Dead: Dead City season 2 premiere (Sunday, May 4, at 9:00 p.m. ET on AMC and AMC+) picks up about a year after the season 1 finale. The Bricks (a relocated Hilltop colony) is now a member of the New Babylon Federation of territories under the authority of Governor Byrd (Jasmin Walker), who sends Colonel Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles), a former marshal, and the stringent Major Narvaez (Dascha Polanco) to draft soldiers for an “exploratory mission” to take back New York. Once the capital of the world since overrun by the dead and lawless barbarians, the New Babylonians are out to restore law and order — and power — to make Manhattan a bastion for civilization. To do so, they need to seize the methane.
Maggie is conscripted into New Babylon’s army, and agrees to return to the island without resistance if no one else from the Bricks is forced into enlisting, including her son. Ginny (Mahina Napoleon), a friend of Negan’s until she learned he killed her father, volunteers so she can get back to Manhattan and get her revenge, and Hershel ends up sneaking along to the island for his own reasons.
Meanwhile, in New York, Negan is a prisoner of the Dama. From his cell, he’s reduced to eating cockroaches and relieving himself in buckets, but he’s confident that the Dama and the Burazi pose no threat to Hershel because he’s safe with Maggie. (“She is a mama bear that would tear out your throat with her teeth right after she gutted you with her claws,” he warns the Croat.) Learning of New Babylon’s plans to invade the island, the Dama plays a different card: she forces Negan to comply by threatening his wife and son, Annie (Medina Senghore) and Joshua.
The influence of The Warriors is never felt more than when the Dama has Negan gather the New York gangs to form an alliance against the New Babylon Federation. Wearing a black leather jacket and wielding a replica of his barbed wire-covered baseball bat Lucille (newly upgraded to deliver electric jolts), Morgan comfortably slips into the old Negan, a persona he used to terrorize Rick Grimes and his group back on The Walking Dead. He’s putting on a show as instructed by the Dama, giving Morgan a chance to gleefully embrace the villain Negan who had that part of him snuffed out by nearly a decade in jail. But when he drops the facade, Morgan’s Negan is wearier, contrite, and, some might say, softer. Morgan goes from one to the other — sometimes in the same scene — without a hitch, his humanizing performance selling just how much Negan, now a father, is a changed man.
Negan and the Croat are tasked with convincing two of Uptown’s three territorial clans to join the Dama, bringing them into conflict with gang leaders Christos (Animal Kingdom‘s Jake Weary) and Bruegel (Sons of Anarchy‘s Kim Coates). The latter is a scene-chewing, Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday type, an extravagantly dressed gambler and wild card described as a “slippery, silver-tongued eel” and played with aplomb by Coates.
Regrettably, the third clan, the Foragers, are the kind of cartoonish characters who would be at home among the goofier gangs in The Warriors. As their name implies, the holistic people led by Roksana (Pooya Mohseni) reside in Central Park, a no man’s land overrun by tall grass and wild zoo animals (who are heard, but not seen). Taking the term “urban jungle” too literally, their style of dress can only be described as Tarzanesque, making the Foragers resemble tribal humans from Planet of the Apes and too much of a departure from the otherwise punkish, Mad Max aesthetic. (Not to mention that too much of the plot takes place in the “jungle” that the urban park has become, which means eschewing the darkened concrete jungle that is New York for the same plain forest setting that has been seen on every other Walking Dead series.)
Still, the second season does make use of more iconic New York locations after the first season showed a decaying Statue of Liberty and a walker-filled Madison Square Garden. Set pieces take place on the Hudson and within the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and we see landmarks like Radio City Music Hall and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. New York doesn’t feel like a character as much as it should, and the full city blocks of walkers lurking below the rooftop ziplines or zombie bodies dropping from those same rooftops are missed this time around.
Another thing that’s missed: the main event of Maggie and Negan headlining their own show together. They spend far too little time together the second time around, and are kept apart for most of the first six episodes of the eight-episode season (AMC withheld the final two episodes from critics).
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live and The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol also had their respective co-leads — Andrew Lincoln’s Rick and Danai Gurira’s Michonne, and Norman Reedus’ Daryl and Melissa McBride’s Carol — embark on their own individual journeys before being brought together, but by keeping Maggie and Negan in their corners except for the briefest of exchanges, Dead City loses its hook of pairing off Maggie with the since-reformed man who murdered her husband Glenn (Steven Yeun).
Glenn goes unmentioned by name (except for being referred to as Hershel’s dad), which fans are sure to be disappointed to learn after last season had Maggie relive the horror of his death in The Walking Dead‘s brains-bashing season 7 premiere. (To be fair, Dead City takes place some 17 years later.) This time around, Maggie shares most of her screen time with Hershel, who still harbors anger and resentment towards his mother for what he calls an “obsession” with Negan. I don’t quite buy that Maggie’s hatred for Negan overshadows her love for Hershel, although that’s how he feels — something that is repeatedly stated in the few times Maggie tries to get her resentful and distant son to open up and close what seems to be a chasm between them. Complicating matters is Hershel’s complex attitude toward the Dama, and Maggie’s complex relationship with Negan: namely her feelings of guilt for handing him over to the Dama, and how, understandably, her holding onto this vendetta has affected and poisoned her relationship with her son. Cohan gets to play a different side of Maggie, at times the ferocious “mama bear” and at other times a mom wracked with guilt and wrestling with this schism that brings out shocking sides of her son.
Dead City is at its best when Cohan and Morgan are unpacking the grief and guilt that has intertwined Maggie and Negan’s stories together to the point that the series perks up any time they’re sharing the same space — whether that’s as frenemies or foes. Like methane, that kind of electricity can power an entire city.
Rating: 3 out of 5
The Walking Dead: Dead City season 2 premieres Sunday, May 4, at 9:00 p.m. ET on AMC and AMC+.
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