The Walking Dead universe has been infected by terrible villains

The dramatic stakes in Dead City are practically nonexistent.

The Walking Dead universe has been infected by terrible villains

A quartet of insipid antagonists loom over the ongoing second season of Dead City, the Walking Dead spin-off centered on frenemies Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Underwritten and barely threatening, a couple of their foes are unceremoniously defeated in episode five, while this week’s outing sees another banished from town. Dead City‘s villains are either cartoonishly disposable or hurriedly redeemed, a trend that’s also seen in recent offshoots like Daryl Dixon and The Ones Who Live. This raises the questions: Why, 15 years after TWD‘s debut, do the powers-that-be insist on spinning the wheel over any honest attempts to reinvent it? Why expand an apocalyptic universe if the life-or-death stakes for our heroes are practically nonexistent now?  

At least TWD dared to introduce Negan’s savagery by having him bash in the heads of two beloved characters, much like in the comics. The message for the good guys was abundantly clear: Don’t mess around with this leather jacket-clad dude or his barbed-wire baseball bat. But that was back in 2016, when TWD hadn’t become a derivative spin-off churning machine for AMC yet, and the writers could take the time to flesh out Negan’s complex past. Considering the number of prequels, sequels, and anthologies since then, the creators are rinsing and repeating an already overdone formula. That’s why any evil machinations seen in Dead City, Daryl Dixon, and TOWL are as stale as the corpses roaming around in these shows. So it makes no impact when, in DC season two, The Croat (Željko Ivanek)—who kidnapped Maggie’s teen son, Hershel (Logan Kim)—is overpowered by Negan, or when Dascha Polanco’s rigid marshal is taken out by a walker in one of the goofiest and most poorly executed action sequences in the franchise’s history. 

Speaking of zombies, they’ve become nothing but a distracting backdrop. In the good old days, the original horror-drama thrived on the tension derived from its dystopian setting. The pilot’s opening minutes, in which Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) shot a zombie girl in her head, revealed a brutal reality wherein anyone could become an adversary if bitten. Rick and his pals were frequently put on a warpath against these menacing creatures. And season two’s premiere, when a throng of ambling walkers approached the group on a highway, remains a highlight of the show’s run, emphasizing the danger they were up against and how anyone still alive would end up if a walker sank its teeth into their flesh.  

Over time, however, the infected who once elicited terror became like ants milling around in a house—unwanted but easy enough to get rid of. Instead, TWD adamantly made the case that humans were the true monsters (shocker!), relying on their worst impulses to survive in this bleak new world. That’s why Shane’s (Jon Bernthal) slow but inevitable heel turn was a crushing blow, as was the collapse of Alexandria and challenges to the group like an unwell CDC scientist, a militant officer in a hospital, escaped convicts, crazed cannibals, and authoritarian leaders such as The Governor (David Morrissey).  

So far, spin-offs led by original characters haven’t captured an iota of the dread that watching early TWD evoked. In their respective sagas, Negan, Maggie, Daryl (Norman Reedus), Carol (Melissa McBride), Michonne (Danai Gurira), and Rick face off against a roster of villains painted with annoyingly broad strokes. Take Daryl Dixon, in which Reedus’ crossbow-loving lead finds himself in Marseille. Even across the ocean, series creator David Zabel apparently had no desire to turn in a fresh take on how the world is coping. Daryl’s enemies are now fluent in French, but they still feel like shells of the villains this franchise has presented before. 

The same problem derails TOWL, which was co-created by Gurira, Lincoln, and TWD vet Scott Gimple. In it, Rick and Michonne reunite after several years apart, but their sentimental conversations aren’t enough to bolster this dull series. The couple works together to bring down the Civil Republic Military (CRM), referred to in TWD often as a cruel organization, so Rick can be free and go home to his children. TOWL arrives with these pre-established stakes, but the CRM’s corrupt structure is dismantled in no time (and with zero buildup) by the duo. The spin-off’s greatest error, though, is wasting the presence of Lost‘s Terry O’Quinn, who stars as a CRM leader but isn’t afforded meaty dialogue. 

Hiring talented actors and not letting them chew the scenery is an issue with Dead City, too. Lisa Emery stole the show in Ozark as a gun-toting psychopath, but she mostly just lingers around as The Dama, who is seemingly killed by fire in season two just when she was getting a juicy backstory and more pathos. (That said, we don’t see a body, so Emery may return in a last-minute finale curveball.) Similarly, Kim Coates is cast here as a blubbering, monologue-loving combatant who already looks easy to defeat. It’s all so foreseeable. As a franchise, TWD has apparently lost its ability to marry suspense and character-driven stories. And all we have now are multiple recipes for disaster. 

 
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