THE WALKING DEAD: DEAD CITY
MANHATTAN TRANSFER
NEW YORK! NEW YORK! IT’S LITERALLY A HELL OF A TOWN AS MAGGIE AND NEGAN ARRIVE IN NEW SPIN-OFF SERIES THE WALKING DEAD: DEAD CITY
WORDS: TARA BENNETT
Will Maggie finally have her revenge on Negan?
ASK A LONG-TIME THE Walking Dead fan for a specific scene that broke them and the season seven premiere, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” is likely to be cited.
Not only did it usher in the brutality of villainous Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and the Saviours, but it also featured the horrific exit of fan favourites Abraham Ford (Michael Cudlitz) and Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun).
The comic book readers knew that the seminal moment of Negan putting his baseball bat, Lucille, through Glenn’s head was coming, and would be the pivotal catalyst in Maggie’s (Lauren Cohan) arc as a leader and single mum. But watching it play out with the actors so viscerally remains an all-time darkest entry in 11 years of storytelling.
So much so that, seven years later, the impending spin-off series The Walking Dead: Dead City – featuring Maggie and Negan on a mission to New York City together – has left plenty of fans aghast at the very notion of the two co-starring in a series.
PRIME BEEF
That’s not to say the characters haven’t existed near one another in the wake of Glenn’s death. But it’s always been an uneasy coexistence, dictated by necessity, without there being any real closure between the two.
Negan certainly saw the error of his ways, moving towards a path of contrition by the end of season nine. But Maggie has never bestowed her forgiveness upon him. That’s why The Walking Dead writer and Dead City creator Eli Jorné figured it was high time the two finally confronted the elephant in the room.
“[Their history] is not something that I was scared of, or that I felt like I was saddled with,” Jorné tells SFX. “In fact, I was like, ‘This is the show!’ When Glenn was killed, that was hard, obviously, when it’s a beloved character who dies. But to me, the flip side of that was that this universe is going to tell the story of what happens when you lose someone that way. Not just for the person who lost him, but the person who did it.”