The Big Apple’s most rotten inhabitants return in season two of The Walking Dead: Dead City. David Michael Brown has a (dead) reckoning with the show’s return.
The Walking Dead: Dead City - Season 2
The second season of The Walking Dead: Dead City is here to inject fresh plasma into this far from moribund franchise to sate the bloodlust of a rabid fanbase hungry for more. It’s been eleven seasons and six spin-off series since Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Grimes (a charismatic and affecting performance by Brit Andrew Lincoln sporting a perfect American accent) awoke from a coma only to discover that the world has been overrun by zombies after a virulent strain of the “Wildfire” virus caused the dead to walk the earth, no one could have predicted we were witnessing the dawn of a huge horror franchise.
The dark omens were certainly good. The Walking Dead was based on the best-selling 2003 comic book series of the same name by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard, which in turn channelled Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later. The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile director Frank Darabont created the show, taking on the role of showrunner and helped the show become a global television phenomenon. Riding on this bloody wave of pestilent ultra-violence, the undead shuffled into our consciousness at exactly the right time to bite a chunk out of the cultural zeitgeist.
Led by the aforementioned police officer Grimes, the remaining humans he gathered together were a delightful rag-tag group. Part heroic, part back-stabbing, all desperate to survive. And then they were killed off. Like that shocking moment in Game of Thrones when Sean Bean’s Ned Stark lost his head, no one was safe in The Walking Dead. The creatives were never afraid to kill off major cast members. And not always at the hands of the undead. That’s the brilliant conceit of the show and why it has lasted so long. We never really know who the real monsters are. Unless it’s a baseball bat-wielding Jeffrey Dean Morgan with a maniacal grin on his face.
The spin-offs came thick and fast. Fear the Walking Dead ran parallel to events in The Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: World Beyond took place ten years after the initial outbreak, while the anthology show Tales of the Walking Dead interwove itself throughout the timeline. Now, the spin-offs are more character-specific. The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon took the popular character to France. The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live saw the welcome return of Rick Grimes along with Danai Gurira as the katana-wielding Michonne Hawthorne and Pollyanna McIntosh as Jadis Stokes.
And Walking Dead: Dead City sees Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan reprise their roles as Maggie and Negan. The events of Season 1 unravelled around six years after The Walking Dead season 11 ended and took place over one week as the pair travel into a desolate post-apocalyptic Manhattan cut-off from the mainland—very Escape from New York—as they search of Maggie’s son, Hershel (Logan Kim). He’d been kidnapped by a sadistic band of survivors known as the Burazi, led by The Croat (played by Željko Ivanek). Maggie and Negan’s often fraught relationship came to a head when she traded him for her son’s life.
Now two years after Negan was exchanged for the life of Hershel, Season 2 picks up with the charismatic and seemingly reformed villain under the control of the sadistic Dama (Ozark’s brilliant Lisa Emery) who wants her captive, along with The Croat, to unite the disparate and deranged gangs who walk the mean streets of New York City. Her plan? To withstand an attack and turn the tables on the denizens of the settlement of New Babylon which is where Maggie and Hershel now find themselves.
While there is now far more focus on the Manhattan machinations of the feuding survivors on both sides of the Hudson River, the walking dead of the title are still a gnarly and delightfully gruesome bunch. Albeit an omnipresent lurking menace rather than a direct threat to mankind. The emaciated, rotting, desiccated, skeletal flesh-eating cadavers are created by Quentin Tarantino’s special effects house of choice, the KNB EFX Group. The company’s founders Greg Nicotero (who now acts as the show’s showrunner) and Howard Berger met on the set of George A. Romero’s gut-munching classic Day of the Dead so zombie blood runs through their veins.
With all roads surely leading to a civil war and a final confrontation between Negan and Maggie, it’s fascinating to watch humanity regress back to a time when the creature comforts we have become accustomed to are long gone and now replaced with the killer instincts and survivalist tendencies of our past. The Walking Dead: Dead City fuses that pioneering spirit with modern-day storytelling to great effect, often recalling zombie maestro Romero’s Land of the Dead and Survival of the Dead.
Dead City takes its desolate post-apocalyptic canvas, particularly the backdrop of a ravaged Big Apple, and goes for the jugular, never losing its grip. Those quiet desolate scenes of a lone man wandering the deserted streets of Atlanta may seem a long time ago, but The Walking Dead, as an all-encompassing franchise, continues to push the boundaries of television, both in terms of gut-wrenching violence and in the scale of show’s world-building… and destruction. It’s traumatic, disturbing and utterly compelling.
