‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Season 3 Review: Back From The Brink

Another year, another The Walking Dead season. By now it’s tradition, and as with the past decade or so, The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 is a mixed bag.

Following Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Season 3 follows the two survivors in New York City as they decide to stay on and help restart the City after the end of The Croat and The Dama’s tyrannical rule. They quickly learn that maybe society is not what they need. Read the synopsis below:

In season three, Maggie (Cohan) and Negan (Morgan) finally put aside their differences to build the first thriving community in Manhattan since the apocalypse, but when chaos in the city begins to arise, they are forced to question: have they learned from their old wounds or will their dark past spell doom for the entire city?

At its core, The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 pivots from the direction of the first two seasons and its pretty clear on both a narrative and meta level, with how disconnected it feels from the rest of the series. Like the plot of the season, The Walking Dead: Dead City returns from the brink of extinction after a tired Season 2 is revitalised into something more palatable and meditative. There are two great things about Dead City Season 3: exploration of character and those characters interacting with one another.

There is hardly any of that boring character regression from the previous seasons, and instead focuses on Negan mostly, exploring his violent tendencies, where it all stemmed from (especially in an alt-universe episode), and how he copes with that. That to me was the most interesting part of the season, and his relationship with Mason Dillard was one of the most enjoyable. The mirror to this is Mason Dillard and his development from a quirky, fun guy to a vengeful, distressed man. Jimmi Simpson is great in the role and easily slots in to be one of the best Walking Dead villains since Negan himself. Maggie gets a little here, but she and son Hershel take a back seat for a big part of the season.

The introduction of more survivors, played by Raúl Castillo and Aimee Garcia, is a welcome one, though is not effectively used much beyond creating tension in shunning Negan from the community. Both are great actors but sadly are not given enough material to really flesh out who they are.

As good as this season is, it’s hard to see where the show goes from here. I did think that at the end of the last season, and this show did manage to redirect enough to get more out of itself, perhaps a good stepping stone will be connecting it back to other mainline show characters. Yes, they brought back Beth for a cameo in the alternate universe episode, and that episode was great, even if it felt out of place tonally, but there are so many others that need to be updated.

The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 takes a dying show and resurrects it with enough juice to bring it back from the brink, analysing and exploring its characters in really interesting ways that haven’t been done before, despite ten years of development. Not only does the season thrive with its old characters, but some of the new characters are absolute highlights, and its eccentricity alone is enough justification for a watch.

The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 is now streaming on AMC and AMC+. The series stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lauren Cohan, Logan Kim, Željko Ivanek, Raúl Castillo, Aimee Garcia, and Jimmi Simpson.

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