‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Season 2 Drops Apocalypse Pros Maggie and Negan ‘Back Down to Zero’

Note: This story contains spoilers from “The Walking Dead: Dead City” Season 2, Episode 1

After a combined 18 seasons in “The Walking Dead” universe, Scott M. Gimple considers Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to be zombie-bashing pros. That’s why it’s been so thrilling to force these two characters to return to the highest stakes apocalypse landscape imaginable in “The Waking Dead: Dead City”: New York City.

“New York is a new environment for them. They might be pros out in the world, but in New York, they kind of go back down to zero,” Gimple, chief content officer for “The Walking Dead” television franchise, told TheWrap. “That’s refreshing. After all this time, they don’t know what’s around every corner. They don’t know how to handle every situation that falls in their lap. And we see their strength, heroism and maybe the ability come out because of those situations.”

It’s not just the endless mass of walkers that makes New York City a challenge. It’s the fact that Manhattan is an island and that its urban environment hides danger in every block. In nearly every zombie show, movie, comic or game, New York is quickly written off as a lost cause. That’s what makes this season’s war between the divided communities of Manhattan and the New Babylon Federation so enticing.

“It’s the geography. It makes things different. It makes the people who survive there different. It makes their communities different. It makes the nature of the walkers different. It makes the nature of survival different. So it was really, really rich with possibility,” Gimple said.

“It’s the city of possibility and resourcefulness and power. And these are all the themes that we got to to dive into being in the city,” Cohan told TheWrap. One of the actor’s favorite aspects of Season 2 was seeing the beauty and culture of the city.

“Even though it’s sometimes being misused by our baddies, it’s also depicted with such decay and artfulness that it is kind of this dreamy landscape,” Cohan said. “It was a level up.”

Maggie is certainly back at Level 1 at the beginning of this new season. Throughout “The Waking Dead,” Maggie is known for her independence and fighting skills. She may have began the series ignorant about the apocalypse, but by the show’s end she becomes the leader of the Virginia colony known as The Hilltop.

Those high ranks are far from where Maggie is at the start of “Dead City” Season 2. After trading Negan to the Manhattan-based Croat (Željko Ivanek) in exchange for her son Hershel (Logan Kim), Maggie finds herself indebted to the New Babylon Federation. After being on top for so long, Maggie starts this season on possibly the lowest rung of the ladder, seen as a possible traitor by this group she doesn’t trust. For Cohan, much of this season was about exploring Maggie’s loss of control.

“It’s upended when New Babylon comes and there’s a test she has to face that is unavoidable in order to protect Herschel and other people from going to fight a war they don’t believe in. But then there’s also the control of being a parent and knowing that you have to let your child find their own way and loosen the grip in a world that’s so full of danger,” Cohan said. “Herschel is obviously a much more capable kid than most, but it doesn’t change the dynamic that I felt to be very relatable in a normal setting, in a normal world.”

New episodes of “The Waking Dead: Dead City” premiere on AMC and AMC+ at 9 p.m. ET.

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