The Walking Dead: Dead City Episode 4 Review – Everybody Wins A Prize

With Negan, the menace felt like a deliberate part of his act; he did big public spectacles to make people understand the penalty for crossing him. With Simon, the cruelty felt performative, like he was trying to prove to the people around him that he was fit to be Negan’s right-hand man (this is reinforced by Jorne’s script this week). The Croat doesn’t feel like he’s putting on a show, except for perhaps himself. Negan’s crew wasn’t afraid of Negan. Simon’s crew were friends with Simon. The Croat’s brotherhood all seem to fear him, regardless of how highly placed in the organization they might be. The Saviors would have figured out a way to cooperate or suborn with Amaia (Karina Ortiz) and Tommaso (Jonathan Higginbotham); the Croat is going to smash them to bits.

Any plan involving sneaking into a heavily armed fortress surrounded by the hungry undead is going to be a difficult one to pull off, but at least Amaia and her group make a pretty reasonable attempt at divide and conquer, with Negan and Maggie moving the Croat in one direction and her group taking out the goons that remain behind. Unsurprisingly, everything goes wrong, but the plan itself is solid enough, given their lack of manpower and increasing desperation. Mostly, it allows the second unit team and director Kevin Dowling a chance to craft some very intense set pieces, from the creep through zombie-infested subway tunnels to get into Penn Station to skulking around within the narrow concrete halls of the station itself and further into the big trap set for the group by The Croat and his brotherhood.

The skulking and whatnot is really well done by all involved, but one of the better sequences in the episode is actually played for laughs. Negan has been leading The Croat on a wild goose chase throughout the bowels of MSG; at one point, Negan is up several flights of stairs from The Croat, and the two lock eyes. The Croat yells for him to come talk, Negan keeps running, and The Croat simply shrugs his shoulders. It’s a much-needed punchline for an episode that otherwise would be fairly dry, and it establishes that, perhaps, the Croat’s need for vengeance exists only in Negan’s head, not in the Croat’s reality until Negan refuses The Croat’s gift and crosses a line.

As Negan mentions in this episode, lots of people want him dead, including Maggie. He worked hard to earn forgiveness from the people he’d wronged at Hilltop, but clearly he hasn’t managed to forgive himself for the things he felt like he had to do to keep The Saviors in line. His fatalism, from making arrangements for Ginny’s care to sending his wife and child off to Missouri, stems from a place of pain. Negan deserves to die, according to Negan.