by Rich Cross
There’s a palpable sense of anticipation surrounding each of the new spin-offs from The Walking Dead franchise premiering in the next eighteen months. The excitement that’s preceded the arrival of Dead City has focused on two of the show’s features: the reunion of Maggie and Negan and the setting of Manhattan Island in New York, a walker-infested urban nightmare cut-off from the rest of the world by the destruction of its bridges by authorities desperate to quarantine a zombie outbreak. With so much of the drama of the original show set in America’s rural hinterlands, the return to a devastated urban landscape is an irresistible prospect.
The simmering and sometimes explosive tension between Maggie and Negan became one of the most compelling relationship dynamics in the later seasons of The Walking Dead. The murderous crimes that warlord Negan inflicted on Maggie’s family were inexcusable and unforgivable. Maggie spurned all the attempts by a penitent Negan to redeem himself, but circumstances forced her to rely on him to protect her son in ways she remained appalled by. In the original series’ finale, Maggie reaffirmed to Negan that there would be no reconciliation between the pair, no settling of accounts and no drawing of a line.
Dead City begins with a time-jump, as characters deal with the reverberations of events that have occurred off-screen. Maggie is on a solo mission to rescue her kidnapped son Hershel from merciless raiders who have decimated her community’s stores and threatened to return for more. Tracking them to their Manhattan enclave, Maggie seeks out a fighter willing to help her take on the crime gang. Negan, meanwhile, is on the run, a fugitive from a marshal patrol sent by the enforcers of New Babylon. No longer travelling with his wife and daughter, Negan is looking after a young girl named Ginny. When the three of them meet up, Negan admits to Maggie that he has history with the psychotic crime boss, known as ‘The Croat’, who took Hershel. With the marshals in pursuit, Negan and Maggie head out across the river to the island.
The script for Old Acquaintances, written by showrunner Eli Jorné, has a lot of scene-setting work to get through. But he delivers just the right mix of action and character work, as the story gives the viewer the first glimpses of the streets, alleyways and crumbling buildings of the shattered city. The writers of the endlessly awkward final half-season of Fear the Walking Dead would do well to take note of Jorné’s believable and naturalistic dialogue before beginning work on the last six episodes of that sister show.
Director Loren Yaconelli wrangles some haunting visuals from this first foray downtown, making inventive use of the night-time cityscapes and the shadows and half-light of broken interiors. There are some gruesome surprises along the way, even as, at this opening stage of the season, Yaconelli and Jorné rightly only give hints at the true, appalling scale of the undead infestation on the island. Much of the drama in this first instalment has the rhythm of a miniseries, which helps to give proceedings a sense of urgency and forward momentum.
Lauren Cohan has long since crafted Maggie into that blend of warrior, leader, and fearless protector that makes the character so watchable. Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s journey as Negan, from vindictive sociopath to (still unreliable) ally, has been no less transformative. But it’s the blood and grit of the complex history of these ‘old acquaintances’ that makes them a pairing able to sustain the scrutiny of a spin-off. Of the new characters, Gaius Charles cuts an impressive figure as determined marshal Perlie Armstrong, while Željko Ivanek invests ‘The Croat’ with the kind of tightly-wound sadistic persona which surely foreshadows the explosive outbursts to come from him. Assured and confident genre TV, this all adds up to a very promising beginning.
New episodes of THE WALKING DEAD: DEAD CITY premiere on Sundays on AMC in the US
