'The Walking Dead: Dead City' Season 2 Review: Please, Someone Beat Me to Death With Negan's Bat Already

The Last of Us is dominating TV, but before this tale of humans and zombies at the end of the world, there was The Walking Dead. It's what viewers talked about every week — until Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) did you-know-what. Even though the original series overstayed its welcome, it still lives on through several spin-offs. Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) were reunited in The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, and so were Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride) in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.

Then there was The Walking Dead: Dead City, set in New York City, with the unlikeliest of partners, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan, working together to rescue Maggie's kidnapped son. It was a decent show that forced former enemies to fight as one, but two years later, the spin-off has returned with an unnecessary second season. Maggie and Negan have to go back to the Big Apple, but this time they are mostly kept separate. Over six of the eight episodes made available for review, The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 limps along more slowly than a rotting walker. Even the once-compelling Negan has become utterly dull. Unless the last two episodes do something really big, it's time to let this particular spin-off die.

What Is 'The Walking Dead: Dead City' Season 2 About?

The Walking Dead: Dead City first premiered with an interesting premise. When Maggie's now-teenage son, Hershel (Logan Kim), is kidnapped from her community and held in the wastelands of Manhattan by one of Negan's former Savior members, the Croat (Željko Ivanek), Maggie convinces Negan to help her. Now that the former villain has turned good, he owes her anything she wants after all the grief he caused her. At the end, it's revealed that Maggie brought Negan along not just for help but as a trade to the Croat for her son. Negan is forced to stay behind with the leader of this show's baddies, the Dama (Lisa Emery), to be the figurehead for her community in its battle against New Babylon. Hershel is released to Maggie, now minus a toe that the Dama cut off, but mother and son are back together.

Where Season 2 of The Walking Dead: Dead City fails is in its return to the same setting. Daryl Dixon, by contrast, moved around France, but, in the upcoming third season, is leaving that country behind. While it was fascinating to see how destroyed New York City looked in the first six episodes of Dead City, now it's just more of the same. New Babylon, with the likes of Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles), who has worked his way up to colonel, is going from community to community, looking for "volunteers" to fight Dama's followers in NYC. They don't have to say yes per se, but as Armstrong's group hangs one man in front of everyone, saying no doesn't seem wise either.

To protect everyone, Maggie agrees to return to Manhattan with them, and Hershel sneakily accompanies her. New Babylon, including its power-hungry soldiers like Lucia Narvaez (Dascha Polanco), thinks they have the upper hand, but it's Maggie who sees every trap they're easily walking into. The problem for the viewer is that we couldn't care less about who lives and dies in New Babylon. Maggie and Hershel have to make it, but everyone else is just fodder.

Maggie and Hershel's Relationship Has Promise in 'The Walking Dead: Dead City' Season 2

That said, Maggie and Hershel don't have a lot to do in the second season of The Walking Dead: Dead City. They fight bad guys, fight walkers, meet some good guys, rinse, repeat. However, their relationship is the heart of the story, especially since the series makes the unwise decision to mostly keep Maggie and Negan separated. There's still a lot of emotion to unpack between mother and son, and Dead City does a good job of digging into it.

Hershel is the teenage son of Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun), a man who died before he was born. He never knew his father, but his life is consumed by him — because Maggie can't let him go. Outside of Hershel, Glenn is all she thinks about and cares about. In Hershel's mind, Maggie only sees Glenn when she looks at him. Who Hershel really is as a person goes unnoticed, which is even more painful now that he's entering young adulthood. He doesn't care about Negan, and cares even less about trying to save everything to return to some world that seems like it was pretty awful to begin with.

As a result, Dead City Season 2 pursues an intriguing direction where Hershel might not be the hero. We know that the Dama is evil, but she manipulates Hershel into thinking he can help her create a new and better world. She's wrong, but all Hershel sees is someone who cares about him rather than who he came from. There's a compelling drama there, but it's being told amid a much more tepid story. Whenever the narrative focuses on New Babylon, Dama, or the Croat, rather than Maggie or Hershel, it grinds to a halt.

Negan Has Shockingly Become The Walking Dead's Most Boring Character

So what about Negan? At least The Walking Dead: Dead City has him to lean on, right? Sure, Negan is there, but his character is neutered to pointlessness, with the once-cool, charismatic guy viewers loved to hate nowhere in sight. Dama wants him back as a way to recruit people, and Morgan does bring that guy out in a few short moments, including with a new Lucille that can do some new tricks, but those moments are few and far in between.

Now, Negan's only doing what he has to because the Dama is threatening his family. He's gone soft, protecting Hershel from afar and begging for the lives of people who are nice to him to be spared. That's great for his development as a human being, but it makes for some dull TV, especially when Morgan is given little else to do apart from mumbling and looking miserable.

The Walking Dead world is certain to live on for at least a few more years, but The Walking Dead: Dead City doesn't seem to have much story left to tell. Like the worst seasons of the original series, it's merely shuffling in place, desperately searching for something of bigger substance to chew on.