TL;DR: The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 trudges forward like a half-rotted walker: occasionally gripping, full of haunted potential, but mostly stumbling over its own logic. By splitting up Maggie and Negan, the show dodges their worn-out trauma tango and injects a bit of narrative lifeblood. Unfortunately, the bloated cast and dark-as-a-cave fight scenes drag things down. For die-hard fans only.
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2
There was a time, somewhere between Rick’s sheriff hat becoming a meme and Glenn’s death-by-dumpster debate, when The Walking Dead mattered. Really mattered. It felt like TV’s last campfire — tribal, grimy, raw — burning in the dying light of prestige drama. But that fire has sputtered into a thousand spin-offs, and in this cluttered apocalypse carnival, Dead City might just be the tent show trying the hardest to justify its existence.
And that’s both its blessing and its curse.
Season 2 of Dead City picks up not so much where Season 1 left off, but where the writers decided things were inconveniently stranded. Characters who’d logically be halfway across the continent find themselves back in Manhattan’s apocalyptic open-air prison, doing the “dance of just-because-the-plot-says-so.”
Let’s start with the good: Negan, everyone’s favorite barbed-wire bat enthusiast turned guilt-laden dad figure, is more compelling when he’s isolated from Maggie. Separated for most of the season, Negan finds himself under the thumb of Manhattan’s reigning psychos — The Croat and The Dama, delightfully overacted by Željko Ivanek and Lisa Emery respectively, who seem to be in a totally different, way more fun show. There’s a faint whiff of Mad Max meets Shakespeare in the Park to their power play, and that’s not a complaint.
Meanwhile, Maggie is stuck doing her usual scowl-and-growl routine, this time at the hands of New Babylon’s fascist cosplay troopers. Lauren Cohan gives it her all, but the script seems confused about whether Maggie’s pain is a plot engine or just emotional wallpaper. There’s a grim satisfaction in watching her square off with Dascha Polanco’s hard-nosed Narvaez — a new character who starts off dull but ends up surprisingly magnetic — but it’s never enough to anchor the weightless drama around them.
The real surprise this season? Hershel. Not Hershel Senior, whose ghost still looms large, but the junior version — now a moody, self-destructive Gen-Z archetype (Logan Kim) who’s equal parts walking trauma case and angsty skater kid. At first, he’s insufferable in that “Why won’t these apocalypse kids just listen?” kind of way. But somewhere around episode four, something shifts. The show begins to subtly ask: what does legacy even mean in a world where history is eaten by the dead? Hershel’s story becomes less about him whining and more about him challenging the adults’ obsession with rebuilding a past he never knew. It’s one of the few genuinely thoughtful threads in a show otherwise too distracted by smoke bombs and tactical vests.
Unfortunately, not every character arc survives the trip. Ginny, the teen sidekick that no one quite asked for, is still inexplicably hanging around as if she’s supposed to emotionally anchor Negan. She doesn’t. Their scenes lack urgency or believability, and a particularly groan-worthy miscommunication in episode five feels like something out of The CW Presents: The Apocalypse! — not the gritty, morally complex world Dead City wants to inhabit.
Kim Coates shows up to chew some scenery as Bruegel, a kind of apocalypse sleaze merchant who feels like he stumbled in from a Fallout game. His subplot starts intriguing and quickly becomes a repetitive sideshow. By the end of episode six, you start wondering if his only purpose was to inject some Mad Max flavor and fill time before the real story kicks back in.
One of Dead City’s most interesting gambits this year is the setting itself. Central Park is now a feral no-man’s land, part overgrown jungle, part haunted museum. There’s a haunting beauty in how nature reclaims the ruins — a quiet echo of The Last of Us without the fungal melodrama. But even that atmosphere is undermined by direction and cinematography that mistakes “dark and moody” for “literally unwatchable.” Some of the season’s biggest action scenes are so poorly lit you’d think someone smeared Vaseline over the lens. Mood should never come at the cost of visibility.
But here’s the thing: for all its flaws, Dead City Season 2 has moments. Sharp, painful, electric flashes that remind you why this universe still matters. A line from Negan. A haunted look from Maggie. A rare act of kindness from a world that’s long since stopped rewarding them. These moments aren’t frequent, but they’re real. And that might be enough for the faithful.
By the time you crawl through episode six, your mileage will heavily depend on your investment in the Walking Dead mythos. If you’re a casual viewer hoping for a fresh story or clean slate, this city will eat you alive. But if you’ve followed these characters since Hershel’s farm, if you still whisper Lucille under your breath when you see barbed wire, then you’ll find something to sink your teeth into.
Dead City Season 2 is a series fighting its own zombification. It shambles through plot contrivances and a few laughably bad scenes, but it also pulses with a strange, stubborn heartbeat. It’s not elegant. It’s not smart TV. But it’s Walking Deadthrough and through: bloody, conflicted, and always asking if redemption’s really possible when the world won’t stop punishing you for surviving.
