Negan and Perlie get to know one another, and their relationship takes a hard left turn. Maggie and the other Tribe survivors escape through the sewers and have the absolute worst time.

The serial format for Dead City has allowed the show to do some things arguably no other TWD show has managed. Daryl Dixon got closest as it tracked Daryl’s journey across France but even then time passes between episodes. Here, almost no time passes between the end of the episode and the start of this one and it enables Brenna Kouf’s script to focus in on the characters, for both better and worse.

Gaius Charles and Jeffrey Dean Morgan do fantastic work as Perlie and Negan, and Kouf’s script gives both men a lot to work with. The reluctant, ‘enemy of my enemy’ approach Perlie takes feels very earned and Morgan’s hangdog Negan has rarely been more interesting. He has principles now, ethics and it’s so tiring, and he knows it matters so much. But he also know that his other choice is easier and darker. Negan has dragged himself out of the abyss and even now is hanging on by his fingernails.

Perlie is a very similar man in a lot of ways. His fanaticism is tied to the law and, as we find out this episode, it’s also tied to personal trauma. Negan’s losses turned him to the darkness, Perlie’s led him to cling to what he thinks is the light. As the episode continues though, we see that nothing is ever as simple as Perlie has been told. More importantly, so does he. This pays off his relationship with his brother beautifully, giving his entire plot an emotional weight that’s impressive, complex and real.

This is great and it makes the repeated reasoning behind Negan’s murders all the more maddening. We already saw this in episode 3 but it’s still the worst beat in the show. Not only because it’s the laziest possible justification, but because the more you think about it the lazier and more offensive it becomes. Annie, and it’s presumably Annie, was a great late-stage character played by Medina Senghore on the show. To have anyone reduced to a generic victim is bad enough. To do it to one of the show’s few POC characters in an episode where the others are either traitors or victims or both is maddening. This franchise worked for years to burn off its entirely deserved reputation as treating its POC characters disposably. This plot undoes far too much of that work.

Elsewhere Maggie and the rest of the Madison Square Garden survivors have just the worst time. The sewer scenes are a great chance for the show to refocus Maggie around what’s always been her best quality: she’s Smart. Jonathan Higginbotham’s Tommaso also gets a lot to do here, and we learn he’s both a traitor and, in a sense, Maggie’s fault. Tommaso sold his people out in return for a chance to go to the Bricks, the colony Maggie lives at now. She’s told herself she’s the hero for her entire life. She’s told herself that Negan is the architect of all her pain. Both those statements are true. Neither are quite true enough. This is really smart writing, and the fact it all unfolds as Maggie fights a magnificently gooey ‘Walker King’ of fused together Walkers is all the more impressive, and fun. Throw in the discovery Ginny makes that Maggie was lying about the Croat stealing the Bricks’ grain and you’ve got another episode which is fantastic until it really isn’t.

Verdict: This episode does so much right and one thing startlingly wrong. As it stands, it never quite lives up to its promise but when it works it works. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart