The Walking Dead universe has been infected by terrible villains
The dramatic stakes in Dead City are practically nonexistent.
The Walking Dead: Dead City (Photo: Robert Clark/AMC)
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.