'The Walking Dead: Dead City's Latest Episode Proves 'Daryl Dixon' Was the Only Spin-Off We Needed

Reaching 11 seasons during its prolific run, The Walking Dead slowly petered out as one of its major complaints was repeating the same old storylines and ideas. More recently, it tried to revive the franchise with a new slew of spin-offs, each revolving around some of the fan-favorite characters of the show, and it achieved this with varying degrees of success.

We've had two seasons of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, focusing on Norman Reedus' titular character and adding his best friend Carol (Melissa McBride) to the cast, and one season of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, centering on the reunion of the iconic couple, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira). We are currently in the middle of the second season of The Walking Dead: Dead City, taking us to the island of Manhattan where Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) capture the limelight. However, of the three spin-offs, only Daryl Dixon has ventured into new territory, and while Dead City was promising for a bit, the latest episode just confirmed it is falling into the franchise's fatal flaw of repetitiveness.

'The Walking Dead: Dead City' Season 2 Is Recycling Old Ideas

With Negan under the Dama's (Lisa Emery) thumb and the ranks of New Babylon closing into Manhattan to get their hands on its methane, Dead City sees Negan, the Dama and the Croat (Željko Ivanek) approach one of the Manhattan groups in hopes of securing an alliance. We're introduced to another potential villain, Bruegel (Kim Coates), who leads his group with a greedy smile and eccentric manner. Yet Bruegel and his community remind us of one from the early seasons of the flagship show, namely the Governor (David Morrissey) and Woodbury.

The walker fighting ring is another version of the entertainment the Governor used to provide in Woodbury, where contestants would fight gladiator style in a ring of walkers, including Daryl and his brother Merle (Michael Rooker) briefly in Season 3, "The Suicide King." Just replace the human contestants with walkers, throw in some gambling, and you get Bruegel's fight club. The Governor also used to chain up his zombified daughter and essentially keep her as a pet, unable to let go. This time, Bruegel has a human pet who also used to be someone fairly important in his past. Bruegel himself is another rendition of the witty and comedic Negan, but we can sense he is hiding a psychotic streak, just like the initially congenial Governor.

The show is evidently falling back on the same concepts but just upping the ante to convince us they’re new. The only truly new idea in Dead City is how they create methane from walkers and its vast potential for restoring the pre-apocalyptic world with electricity. But even the war over resources is getting old, a fact even Hershel (Logan Kim) points out, asking why they need to re-capture the old world. In contrast, the two seasons of Daryl Dixon had genuinely fresh ideas, with the French landscape, killer nuns, and killer children gangs, as well as an array of variant walkers, including burners, ampers, and, most recently, hallucinogenic radioactive walkers. Next to this, Dead City is clearly falling into a rut.

'The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon' Is the Only Spin-Off Making Headway

As Dead City returns to the original show's flaw of being repetitive, it is easy to question the purpose of the spin-off. If anything, it seems like the show is solely relying on the popularity of its two central characters, particularly with the old Negan making a comeback. The Ones Who Live took a similar approach, depending on the nostalgia of and yearning for Rick and Michonne to return to the franchise and turning the spin-off into superficial fan service rather than authentic storytelling. Daryl Dixon absolutely relies heavily on the popularity of the eponymous character and has parallels with another famous post-apocalyptic show, The Last of Us, but at least it extended itself beyond Daryl and used him as a foundation to introduce the new concepts mentioned before while maintaining a fresh approach to storytelling.

With the third season teased to cross yet another border into Spain, it seems to be the only spin-off vying for untrodden territory in the franchise, and is the only one making any genuine headway at this point in time. As such, Daryl Dixon is the only spin-off with a purposeful direction, while the other two seem to be just a means to an end. If Dead City wants to continue churning out seasons like Daryl Dixon, it needs to find a way out of its rut and figure out a clearer direction to pursue without recycling old material.