TL;DR: A zombie show finally remembers it’s supposed to surprise us. Episode 6 delivers a one-eyed bear, emotional gut punches, and a Negan that might actually be evolving. Not quite a masterpiece, but the best this season has to offer.
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2
You know you’re in deep with a show when it takes a literal bear attack to shake you out of mid-season malaise. “Bridge Partners Are Hard to Come by These Days” might be the most unhinged, emotionally tangled, and unexpectedly poignant episode of Dead City yet—not because of the action (though the bear was metal as hell), but because it finally stops being embarrassed about the kind of story it wants to tell.
After a sleepwalk of a season so far, Episode 6 yanks the series back from the brink of irrelevance. We’re gifted a Maggie at war with her own trauma, a Negan who might just be self-aware, and a villain who knows the game better than we do. There’s blood, betrayal, and the most emotionally conflicted bear fight since The Revenant. Welcome back, Dead City. I missed you.
Lauren Cohan deserves hazard pay for carrying the weight of Maggie’s ever-tightening grief spiral. The scene where she catches Hershel sneaking walker blood into the water supply should’ve been a CW melodrama. Instead, it plays like a punch to the sternum. She sees what her son is becoming—angry, radicalized, hollow—and knows she had a hand in it. The kid isn’t just rebelling. He’s defecting. He’s choosing his trauma over his mother.
Then comes the grizzly bear, lumbering in like a fur-clad metaphor. It’s massive. It’s missing an eye. It’s pissed. And when Maggie fights it in a scene that’s part horror, part dark comedy, and part fever dream, it becomes the most viscerally entertaining moment this show has pulled off in two seasons.
It takes Hershel’s last-second knife barrage to bring it down, and by then, he’s already vanished. Maybe to the Dama. Maybe to Bruegel. Maybe to the emotional void he’s been slipping into since Episode 1.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan gives us a subdued, layered Negan in this one. He’s still snarky, sure, but it’s like watching a man play poker with himself. The scenes with The Croat are especially compelling, thanks to Zeljko Ivanek’s tragically twisted performance. He grins like a man with a knife behind his back, and the moment he realizes Negan played him—the turn, the rage, the beatdown with Lucille 2.0—feels earned.
But here’s the real twist: Negan doesn’t kill him. He tells him to leave, like a scorned lover telling their partner to pack up and get out. It’s not mercy. It’s condemnation.
And then there’s Ginny. Sweet, angry, tragic Ginny, who collapses before she can shoot Negan. Her wound is festering. She’s dying. And in the moment he holds her, it’s clear: Negan is losing everything he let himself care about. Again.
Let’s talk about Kim Coates as Bruegel. He’s got a face carved out of leather and the charisma of a man who’s survived more than one apocalypse. He’s not the Dama. He’s not the Croat. He’s worse: he’s charming. You want to believe him.
Perlie (bless Gaius Charles for making the most out of this increasingly conflicted soldier) seems tempted by Bruegel’s offer to wipe out everyone and rule the ashes. The final scene, where Bruegel plays cards with a zombified Narvaez and tells Perlie he doesn’t need his help, he just wants him to play, is as chilling as it is effective.
Everyone is playing everyone. But Bruegel plays for fun. That makes him the most dangerous of them all.
Episode 6 doesn’t reinvent the zombie wheel. But it remembers why The Walking Dead worked in the first place: it’s about people who want to be better, and the world that keeps daring them to fail. This episode hums with tension, emotion, and just enough bear-based madness to make it unforgettable.
With only a few episodes left, Dead City may not be aiming for greatness—but it might accidentally stumble into it anyway.
Verdict: Emotionally brutal, unexpectedly fun, and finally paying off weeks of slow burn. More of this, please.
