The first new (and third, technically) The Walking Dead spinoff, Dead City, breathed street-smart new life into an admittedly ailing franchise. Then Daryl Dixon came from behind to sweep the franchise away into enchanting new territory. That particular spin off is scheduled to return this year, but Dead City‘s second chapter will not be too far behind.
Let’s refresh on what happened at the end of Maggie and Negan’s previous time in Manhattan and discuss what’s to come in the AMC series.
Plot
As viewers will recall, the first Dead City season included Maggie roping Negan into rescuing the kidnapped Hershel (son to Maggie and Glenn). And Negan essentially had no choice but to try and make things right. Sure, the foes had ended The Walking Dead in a semi-truce, but Maggie was not amused when the perpetrator who nabbed Hershel was the Croat, whose tell-tale whistle revealed him to be a member of Negan’s old Saviors crew. Once inside Manhattan, Negan and Maggie dodged urban-jungle hordes, including a particularly nasty variant, and a cockroach attack. Then Maggie ended up turning Negan over to the Croat and leaving with Glenn, yet the happy mom-son reunion didn’t go as planned.
Hershel called out his mom for being obsessed with vengeance against Negan to a fault. Of course, it’s hard to blame Maggie for feeling that way, since long-running PTSD isn’t exactly unexpected after seeing someone they care about (let alone their husband) get their brains bashed in with a baseball bat, but Hershel stood firm, and then Maggie made this final utterance of the season: “This thing with Negan… I’m gonna finish it. So I can just let it go.”
What was she declaring, really? Maggie had prefaced the line with how “[f]or most of my life, I felt like the world kept taking and kept taking, and I think at some point I thought that if I could just fight hard enough, I’d be able to get it back, a little piece of it at least.” Then she admitted that the vengeance means that “you just end up losing what you got. And I don’t want to keep doing that anymore.”
When quizzed by Entertainment Weekly on what this means, exactly (will Maggie rescue Negan or kill him?), Lauren Cohan stayed cryptic:
“I am hesitant to say … I know what it means, and I don’t want people to be directed because I have heard so many different perceptions of that moment. And I love seeing how differently people take it. So I certainly know what it is, and it makes me more excited to do a second season. It makes me really interested to put all that down on paper and on film, because the best part of this character yet is this place that she can go now. And it was not what I ever imagined.”
Jeffrey Dean Morgan also spoke with EW, and he believes that even though The Dama wants to recruit him and appears to be treating him well, “I think he thinks he’s f*cked.” Now, we can wonder how f*cked Negan is and whether Maggie will help him or just return to put Negan out of his (and her) misery.
Cast
Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan will clearly return as Maggie and Negan. Kim Coates of Sons of Anarchy fame has joined the second-season cast, which includes Gaius Charles, Mahina Napoleon, Trey Santiago-Hudson, Charlie Solis, Željko Ivanek, and Jonathan Higginbotham.
Zero crossover action has been confirmed for this season, but presumably, Daryl and Carol are completely out of the question. There’s also no reason for Rick Grimes or Michonne to be dumb enough to head into Manhattan, and we don’t even know whether more of The Ones Who Live is in the cards. So don’t expect to see any new original cast members this season unless a massive surprise or a change of venue happens. Still, it’s worth remembering that the three new spin offs do exist in “the same timeline.”
Release Date
With Daryl Dixon returning on September 29 for its second season, we can bet on early 2025 for Dead City‘s second chapter.
Trailer
Hang tight! AMC might not reveal a full trailer until Daryl Dixon: The Book Of Carol returns, so they can do so during a live episode broadcast. For now, we will have to make do with watching these cockroaches again.