Ah, The Walking Dead. We just can’t seem to quit you. What began more than a decade ago in reserved yet riveting fashion has expanded into an entire universe of television now spanning many years of its own. While there is something almost impressive about how the franchise has managed to carry on for so long, the narrative baggage it accumulated on the way has often dragged down the zombie epic. Characters fell into stagnant patterns far too often, rendering the story empty no matter how many people it tried to introduce or communities it stumbled upon. Forget the increasingly blunt hints it’d been dropping about the walkers themselves evolving (which didn’t amount to much anyway), the show’s biggest problem was that it often felt like a corpse going through the motions. Even when there was a lot happening in a plot sense, there was little that felt meaningful with so many characters just wandering around in search of some sort of purpose. Thankfully, an upcoming spinoff now provides some much-needed direction by getting back to basics while opening some new doors along the way. The Walking Dead: Dead City has molded the existing story into a tight narrative that is the best this franchise has been in quite some time.
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Dead City could have just been about broad survival, with the various conflicts that keep popping up in the apocalypse growing repetitive, but showrunner and writer Eli Jorne creates a more focused story. Picking up years after the end of when we last saw these characters, the plot is a straightforward one in which Maggie (Lauren Cohan) is trying to track down her son Hershel (Logan Kim), who has been taken from her by a menacing and cruel man known as the Croat (Željko Ivanek) for ransom. Alhough she manages to track him to the desolate city of Manhattan that is now cut off from the rest of the world, she realizes that she can’t go in alone and needs the knowledge of another to help her get her son back. That’s when she pays a visit to the last person she would ever normally want to see again: Jeffrey Dean Morgan‘s Negan. The man who killed Hershel’s father in the universe’s most brutal moment by far has insights into the Croat that may help her, which is a painful twist of fate the six-episode series must contend with.

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‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Complicates the Relationship Between Its Characters

Image via AMC

While this pairing choice could be a bridge too far for many, especially as it does go back on some of what was previously established about how the duo had come to a tentative truce, this primary hook makes for an experience more tied to a complicated emotional journey beyond just the ephemeral spectacle. Dead City might still live in the shadow of The Last of Us, with the Kansas City storyline and its horrifying conclusion feeling the most similar in terms of narrative beats, but it still manages to chart its own path. Where the original series frequently lost sight of its characters, this new spinoff offers a promising course correction by making them more developed. Cohan’s Maggie feels like an actual person trying to find a way to make a life that could occasionally be happy — or, at the very least, not solely defined by suffering.

That said, her character’s journey isn’t always the most well-written of narratives, especially when some of her deceptions start to strain credulity, but it does end up being a more multifaceted reflection about what it takes to survive. This has always been a part of The Walking Dead’s universe, with the main series trying to take an optimistic if hollow turn in the end, but Dead City serves as a reminder that all of these survivors have blood on their hands. Maggie is one of the few remaining characters still standing from the early days, and that brings with it a whole lot of darkness. She has watched those she loved be killed, which we are shown via flashbacks that often feel forced rather than natural, and has also killed many herself. Her search for her son is as much a search for redemption that will all come down to the series of pressing choices she must make about what type of person she wants to be.

While there is a bit more care put into this series, this is still the world of The Walking Dead, and the attraction for many remains the zombies. The craft behind these decaying beings has always been impressive, but previous seasons of the main show had often reduced them to being background noise that posed little threat. Some of this is out of necessity as the characters still alive at this point have figured out how to mostly survive their attacks. There is even a humorous moment in Dead City where the show seems to acknowledge this, with characters at a bar remaining largely unbothered by the fact that there are zombies roaming around outside. However, once it gets into the main thrust of the premise in the city setting, we are reminded of just how threatening they can be. The scene where they fall from the sky, which involves the use of scaffolding that not even John Wilson could have predicted in his episode dedicated to the subject, as well as a later sequence underground, shows how this is their world now. When walkers swarm into a stadium in one sequence, their lack of speed matters less than their sheer numbers. Even the characters who’ve carved out a life for themselves in the city are not all able to survive when death comes knocking.

‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Builds to a Fitting Conclusion for Negan and Maggie

While this handful of new characters folded into the narrative do work, with their subsequent demises actually carrying weight, they are merely a small part of a bigger story. The journey that Maggie and Negan are on is one that feels like a closing chapter for The Walking Dead — or, based on the many spin-offs coming next, the beginning of a new one. Fans of the series that have stuck with it for this long will probably be on board for this no matter what, but Dead City offers up a new entry point for those who dropped off to get back on board. While there are some details from the main series that it calls back to, it works as a confined narrative that won’t lose viewers who aren’t familiar with everything that preceded it.

There are some misdirects central to this that are often clumsily revealed just a bit too soon and would have been far more impactful if we discovered them at the same time key characters did. What makes Dead City’s conclusion still resonate, however, is what it represents about the characters and how they’ve changed. It is their journey that drives the plot, not the other way around as was the case in the main series. One closing conversational scene with Maggie in a car is one of the more genuinely emotional scenes this franchise has had in some time. When she looks out at a decaying landmark that had been referenced throughout the season, this visual moment speaks to the state of the world and the fraught journey ahead for the ones still alive. If the future of the series is anything like this first season of Dead City, with its recentering of a core group of characters and the strongest story that The Walking Dead has had in years, then there may just be some life to be found in this dead world.

Rating: B

The Walking Dead: Dead City had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. It begins airing on Sunday, June 18 on AMC and AMC+.