Well I must admit, I enjoyed this latest episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City quite a bit, even if some of the revelations were not huge surprises. I suppose that’s not a bad thing. It just means the show gave us plenty of clues to figure out what was actually going on.
In many ways, Episode 5—Stories We Tell Ourselves—is all about big reveals. So we’ll go down the list and discuss what we learned this episode and why it matters. As you can see in the top image, we got a pretty huge Easter Egg to the main show and both Rick’s first and last episode in it. When Negan is trying to escape from the marshal, he comes to a boarded up doorway with the words “Do not open. Dead outside” written on it, with ‘Do Not Open’ underlined.
Look familiar?
In the very first episode of The Walking Dead, Rick Grimes encountered this door in the hospital after waking. “Don’t open dead inside” this door reads.
In the final episode, this is the door Rick encounters in his hallucinatory state. It says “Don’t open dead outside” with the ‘Don’t’ crossed out.
This could, of course, be little more than a fun Easter Egg, or it could be a hint at things to come, a little bread crumb on the path to the Rick & Michonne show (which is literally, absurdly titled The Walking Dead: Rick And Michonne).
In any case, let’s move on to all the other interesting bits and pieces of this episode, beginning with my favorite part . . . .
The Coolest Zombie In ‘The Walking Dead’ Hands Down
When Maggie and her allies get trapped in the methane tunnels beneath Madison Square Garden (the second Madison-themed stadium in Walking Dead history, in which we also find oxygen tanks, another interesting nod to Madison’s character in Fear The Walking Dead, whether intentional or not) they encounter some zombies. Ginny and Maggie encounter by far the creepiest, scariest, most unique zombie in the history of this franchise.
The grotesque monster has somehow been fused together out of what appears to be four separate corpses. It’s a truly gruesome, creative take on a zombie and I’m thrilled to see this franchise go in this direction. We’ve seen some variants, but this was just awesome. I’d recommend people watch this show just for Negan and this magnificent undead creation.
Tomasso Was The Traitor
This wasn’t hard to see coming, either. We knew Tomasso (Jonathan Higginbotham) was the only person to ever escape the Croat, and we knew that the bad guys had a heads-up on the attack and were ready with a trap. It’s no surprise that Maggie (Lauren Cohan) figured it out and outed Tomasso’s treachery, though it turns out he really wasn’t doing it for terrible reasons. Desperate times and all that.
The Dama Is The Real Villain?
The Dama (Lisa Emery) which is Croatian for The Lady, might be the real boss, or at least a partner in crime at the top of the Burazi gang (which means “brothers” in Croatian) alongside The Croat (Zeljko Ivanek). He certainly seems to show her deference when they’re speaking, and she treats him like a subordinate. This is an interesting twist, though we still know very little about her. It appears they want Negan to help them fend off New Babylon and its Lawful Neutral marshals. This is a bit silly, but whatever. Maybe there’s more to it.
Maggie Is Lying To Negan
Lots of people saw this coming and I thought it made sense but didn’t really work given how hard the Croat apparently tries to kill Maggie and Negan. That trap was designed to kill everyone vis-a-vis a horde of zombies. If you’re making a trade, maybe come up with something less lethal and easier to control? In any case, Maggie is lying and is (understandably) willing to trade the man that killed Glenn in exchange for her son. I’m definitely curious to see how this plays out, even if I am—like many of you—kind of sick of the whole Maggie/Negan plotline in general. At least this has potential to be an interesting twist.
Ginny Knows
When Maggie somehow escapes the Zombie monster, she follows Ginny (Mahina Anne Marie) and finds the word LIAR painted in blood on the wall. Ginny clearly knows that Maggie is lying since she saw that the Croat had not, in fact, taken all that grain. And since she saw Maggie thinking about burning the doll. I can see why Ginny would be pissed, but at the same time it would be hard not to sympathize at least a little with a woman who lost her son to a maniac and is trying to get him back. Of course, it’s pretty obvious at this point that Maggie should have just been honest with Negan. He still would have helped her, but he’d know what the true stakes were.
Armstrong Is Having An Existential Crisis
The marshal, Armstrong (Gaius Charles—which, by the way, cool name!) finally let’s his guard down when Negan shows (again and again) that he wants to help him and could easily just leave him to die. He reveals that his brother was a total screw-up that ended up going to prison and probably dying there when the zombie outbreak occurred. It’s a motivating factor in his pursuit of justice, but he’s not so sure it’s as black and white as he once believed. Negan also reveals that the men he killed—the reason Armstrong is after him—were the ones who assaulted and robbed his wife.
More Disposable Characters
Overall, a really strong episode that was better than last week’s but I do have one complaint: Why introduce so many characters just to kill them all off? I liked Amaia (Karina Ortiz) and Tomasso and was hoping we’d get some new characters to last at least through the season, or maybe into next, but they both died. Tomasso’s betrayal and the fallout of that betrayal are basically pointless now. I just think these shows need to do a better job at two things:
- First, establish characters and make us care about them before killing them off.
- Still kill off more characters to avoid bloated casts!
That’s a tricky balance, but we’ve reached a point where we pretty much know certain characters will never die and others will die right away and that’s not great for dramatic tension. In the main show a whole swath of characters had such thick plot armor that you never really worried about them anymore. Meanwhile, over in Apple’s Silo main characters are killed left and right and you feel like you never know what’s coming. I prefer that! It’s a bit harder in a show with just two leads, but man was that a missed opportunity in the mothership.
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