While The Walking Dead: Dead City is a spin-off of The Walking Dead, the series has been charting its own course. There are new characters, but the story largely centers on two fan favorites from the original series, villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and hero Maggie (Lauren Cohan). The pair remain at odds with one another, the trauma of Negan’s brutal killing of Maggie’s husband Glenn (Steven Yeun) looming like a dark cloud over any possibility of the pair ever becoming anything more than forced allies.
Throughout Season 2, as Maggie desperately tries to let go of her pain for Hershel’s sake (Logan Kim), Negan continues to show signs that the “old Negan” still lingers. Though he’s undoubtedly a changed man, a particular scene in the Season 2 finale, Episode 8 titled “If History Were a Conflagration,” conjured up horrifying old memories while also delighting fans.
Negan’s Nursery Rhyming Is Back
Following the big fight between Negan, the Burazi, and Bruegel (Kim Coates) in the Season 2 finale and his followers, a massive fire breaks out in the church, intentionally set by Negan and the Burazi. Bruegel manages to escape to the basement, where Negan follows him, Perlie (Gaius Charles) not far behind.
Negan and Bruegel come face to face, but Negan also has others from the Burazi behind him. Bruegel knows he is in trouble. There’s no way out. He begs Negan for mercy as Perlie arrives at the worst possible time. Bruegel tries to pin the blame on Perlie, indicating that he was working with Perlie and New Babylon Federation all along, and it’s all Perlie’s fault that this happened.
Now, Negan finds himself in a predicament once again, just like he had so many years ago when Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his group savagely attacked members of the Saviors. Negan has many people who deserve to be taken down for what happened. But who should be the sacrificial lamb? Decisions, decisions. Naturally, what Negan does when he has difficult choices to make is recite a nursery rhyme. Negan orders both men to get down on their knees, giving fans a sense of déjà vu as they recall the most horrifying moment in The Walking Dead that marked Negan’s introduction.
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He holds out his bat, which fans have aptly named Lucille 2.0, and points it back and forth at their heads. “Eeenie, meenie, miney, mo,” Negan says as he tries to leave the decision about who should be the victim in the hands of fate (and children’s songs). He continues to the end of the nursery rhyme, stopping on Perlie. He hoists the bat over his head, about to bring it crashing down on Perlie’s head. But before he follows through, Negan stops himself.
He wanted to kill Bruegel, so he had decided that he was going to go with his instinct instead, nursery rhyme be damned. Bruegel has been a thorn in his side, a dangerous enemy. Pleading for his life, Bruegel’s big mouth won’t stop. He rambles on about the methane and about how he and Negan can rule Manhattan and this precious resource together. Negan’s not buying it. If Bruegel wants the methane so badly, Negan advises, he can have it.
Negan takes a gas tube and shoves it into Bruegel’s mouth, then lights his mouth on fire, burning Bruegel slowly but painfully from the inside out. Once Bruegel is dead, Negan thrusts the bat into the air and down onto the former foe’s head anyway, exactly as he had done to Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and Glenn in The Walking Dead.
The scene is almost as horrifying as that game-changing scene in The Walking Dead that saw so many fans abandon the show. But it’s not nearly as impactful. This time, Negan is killing someone fans view as a clear “bad guy,” not a hero. He was a character we only barely got to know. However, the brutality of the scene is amplified from an emotional standpoint for another very significant reason.
The Scene Is Even Worse With One More Detail
There’s one small but crucial detail about this scene that makes it especially disturbing, even if fans predicted the victim would die by the end of the season. Unbeknownst to Negan, Maggie has secretly returned to fulfill her promise to Hershel, and she witnesses the whole thing.
The terror in her eyes as she saw Negan do something she witnessed him do once before, and that led to the deaths of her husband and good friend, is palpable. If other moments on the show triggered her PTSD, such as when Negan slit a man’s throat and threw him over the edge of a banister in Season 1, or even the first time she saw him holding the new bat, this scene sealed the deal. Maggie may realize at this moment that even if Negan is different now, his old self still lingers inside.
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Perlie manages to escape, but Negan charges after him. But right before he’s able to deliver a devastating blow to Perlie like he did to Abraham and Glenn so many years ago, Maggie runs up behind and stabs Negan in the back. It appears that this is the long-awaited end for the villain, but that isn’t the case.
What happens next suggests a very different Negan and may be the one moment that convinces Maggie that the showmanship of it all, the evil part of Negan that seemingly took pleasure in killing in such a brutal way, is not the most important part of him anymore. It might only ever have been a convincing façade.
In Ginny’s Death, They Might Find Peace
This marks the first major character death of the series following the fake-out death of The Dama (Lisa Emery), and this moment quickly changes tone. As Negan crawls along the basement floor to get to Ginny (Mahina Napoleon), Maggie slowly follows, wanting to watch Negan breathe his last breath and feel the sense of closure she has desperately needed for so long. But together, they see a small arm reaching out from behind the room where Ginny was being kept with tubes and oxygen, while Negan hoped to nurse her back to health from her severe injuries. They hear the faint sound of grumbling, and reality sets in.
Both of them were so concerned about protecting their interests, protecting themselves, and eliminating enemies that they forgot about Ginny. And sadly, it’s too late. She has perished, and she has turned. For the first time since the flashback scenes of Negan and his wife, the real Lucille (Hilarie Burton), Negan is showing genuine, unadulterated emotion and grief.
Maggie watches in disbelief as he weeps, calling Ginny’s name, over and over. She recognizes that Negan had genuine feelings of love for this young girl, whom he took in as if she were his own daughter. Despite Ginny wanting to kill Negan for having killed her father, he felt a desperate need to protect her, and now has a tremendous weight of guilt for not succeeding.
Recognizing the first time she’s seeing genuine feelings from Negan, Maggie slowly hands him her knife so that he can put an end to Ginny’s suffering. As he continues to sob, Maggie sees Negan, arguably for the first time, as a real human with feelings, emotions, and the capacity for love.
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Sadly, the realization had to come from such an emotional moment, and after such a devastating scene where Maggie likely felt like she was reliving the moment her husband was brutally killed all over again. But it makes for an interesting full circle to the story.
At the heart of the show has always been these two bitter foes, and it seems they might finally have come to a stalemate, a truce without vitriol and hatred behind it. Negan may still be the type of man who will force people to their knees, torment and taunt them, and brutally murder them without blinking an eye. But he’s also a husband and a father now. He has made connections with people that truly mean something to him. Not everyone is dispensable. He has something to fight for and live for.
With Maggie now recognizing this, she may come to terms with the reality that killing Negan won’t bring Glenn back. And now, she knows it won’t get her son back either. Negan is better to Maggie as an ally than he is as an enemy, or even dead. Little pig, little pig, Maggie might finally be ready to let Negan in. Stream The Walking Dead: Dead City on AMC+.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
