A NEW HOPE
A NEW HOPE
MAGGIE AND NEGAN FIGURE OUT HOW TO FORGE A NEW FUTURE IN THE WALKING DEAD: DEAD CITY
WORDS: TARA BENNETT
WHEN IT COMES TO THE Walking Dead television universe, all manner of characters and Walkers have come and gone, but one constant has been Maggie Rhee’s (Lauren Cohan) flaming hatred for Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). A decade ago, Negan sealed his fate with her in the season seven episode “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be”, when the sadistic leader of the Saviours used Lucille, his barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat, to crush the cranium of her beloved husband, Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun).
It has taken the last four seasons of The Walking Dead and the first two seasons of the spin-off series The Walking Dead: Dead City for Maggie to barely tolerate having Negan in her orbit. He’s certainly lingered in her life, first as a prisoner of the community of Alexandria and then as a remorseful ally to her Hilltop community. The whole premise of Dead City is that Maggie knows Negan’s strengths, which is why she begs for his support to infiltrate Manhattan to find and retrieve her kidnapped son Hershel (Logan Kim).
The first two seasons have been bumpy, to say the least. Season two ended with Maggie stabbing Negan, but she also watched him suffer a personal loss so heartbreaking that it spurred a genuine détente between them. Which begs the question: what does a genuine Maggie/Negan peace treaty look like in this post-apocalyptic world?
Showrunner Seth Hoffman tells SFX that he knows exactly what that looks like because he’s the architect of their relationship thaw in The Walking Dead: Dead City season three. A former writer on The Walking Dead seasons four through six, Hoffman kept his toe in universe’s spin-off development until Scott M Gimple, the chief content officer for the franchise, asked him to take over Dead City this season.