‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Episode 1 Review — What Happened To The Apocalypse?

Whatever happened to the apocalypse? In AMC’s latest Walking Dead spinoff, Dead City, we spend time in bars with neon signs. Cars have a surplus of gasoline. People don’t just have food and water, they have a watering hole to whet their whistles at.

Old West Marshals (or, rather, modern day Marshals in Old West cosplay) track Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) with Old West-style wanted posters, but somehow they know all his old crimes—remarkable forensic capabilities for a world torn asunder by the zombie plague. And why have neon lights but not a normal printer? Did they really print these wanted posters on an old-timey printing press, too? Or do people in the apocalypse just really like playing pretend?

We are given hints about, but never shown, a powerful new community known as New Babylon, from whence these Marshals come, but I’m not even a tiny bit curious about this group. It’s just more of the same. A new community to cause our heroes trouble. A new cartoon villain to contend with.

All of the same repetitive stuff but none of the struggles you might actually encounter in a world brought so low. Maggie (Lauren Cohan) is always impeccably dressed, her hair perhaps more perfectly styled than ever before. She wears designer jeans and her white shirts are never dirty. (Cohan is also more beautiful than ever, but that’s another story).

Whatever ruggedness Negan may have is undermined by his own dapper appearance. This is not a hard man living in a hard world. This is a man living in a world with all our own world’s creature comforts. Where is the dirt and grime?

The Walking Dead flirted with the idea of resource scarcity at one point, but that was quickly abandoned. In the first of many spinoffs, Fear The Walking Dead has spent years ignoring the realities of the apocalypse. Endless batteries and gas. Fresh water and food. Walkie-talkies to spare. Now, here we are in Dead City where all these things are in abundance. And abundance should only be used to describe one thing in a zombie apocalypse show: Death. But even the grim reaper feels absent here. After all, we’ve spent years with these characters. They seem fairly impervious to death.

In Dead City, Maggie has inexplicably tracked down Negan to get his help in rescuing her child, Hershel, from a mysterious villain known as The Croat. She realizes he must have known Negan because when he took her son, he whistled the Negan whistle. Why she didn’t ask the New Babylon Marshals to help her in this task instead is not explained. Negan agrees to help her if she helps a young girl he’s been protecting. We get a lot of Maggie and Negan dialogue that feels rehashed from the main show, as though their relationship is determined to spin forever like a wheel.

Anyone new to this universe, just hopping in now, must be terribly confused without the relevant context. And yet, I find myself confused as well. Why are we on this new journey with these old characters? Didn’t we just say farewell to them, and didn’t they just say farewell to one another? Maybe not in their world’s timeline, but in ours the Negan/Maggie arc was nicely resolved at the end of The Walking Dead, and here it is dug up again, bloated and corpselike—though also stylish and groomed—a few months later.

I like the setting. A zombified Manhattan is a cool idea, and one that perhaps ought to have been explored in the main show instead of the dreadfully boring Commonwealth storyline. If The Walking Dead had been bold, they would have abandoned the comic storyline when they lost the characters that made that storyline matter. They would have taken us to the Dead City long ago, and we wouldn’t be here in what feels more like an afterthought than a story worth telling.

But we are only one episode in. Maybe I will change my mind as the weeks go by. The Croat (Željko Ivanek) could be a potentially interesting villain, though his appearance at the end of this episode just fills me with a gloomy boredom. Another crazy bad guy torturing prisoners? Cutting ziplines and laughing as they fall to their death? Also—ziplines?

I think perhaps that I am simply asking too much. I want a zombie show that makes the apocalypse brutal. Spend one night camping by a campfire, and you’ll be dirtier and more weather-worn than these people. Now imagine camping forever. No more power. No more clean water. No more refrigeration. No easy food. Every single person you encounter a possible threat because resources are so scarce and the law is nowhere. Add zombies to that mix. The fear you’d feel would be overwhelming.

None of that is here. None of that has been here in The Walking Dead universe for a long, long time. Anyone who survived would be hard and broken. None of these goofy communities would exist. This is a series that cuts every corner and cheats both its viewers and its own potential to be something more in the process.

Easy outs, boring conflicts, and an apocalypse devised by people who have never spent a night out in the wild.

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