Walking Dead Character Returns in TWD: Dead City Cameo

[This story contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Dead City season 1 episode 4.] There are some lines you don’t cross, and that line was crossed on Sunday’s “Everybody Wins a Prize” episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City. Last week, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) told Maggie (Lauren Cohan) about the moment he knew the Croat (Željko Ivanek) was “a rabid dog that needed to be put down:” when he disobeyed a direct order to release a girl intercepted by the Sanctuary. But the Croat believed her to be a scout for the Kingdom — intel he obtained just before fatally torturing his prisoner.

Sunday’s episode flashes back to the Sanctuary when Negan was the leather jacket-clad, baseball bat-swinging ruler of the Saviors. As he merrily jots down scribbles of “dead pricks” in a notebook, in walks his right-hand man: Simon (Steven Ogg).

“Hey, Neegs,” Simon says, “we got a problem.” That problem is the Croat, who disobeyed a relayed order to put the kibosh on the drifter they found holed up in a car a few miles out from the Sanctuary. “I’m not gonna say I told you so. I’m not that kind of guy,” the mustachioed bulldog of a man says. “But certain folks — a lot of folks — are saying it’s time to rein his ass in. Invest more authority in, you know, someone not unlike…”

But before Simon can annoint himself second-in-command, the Croat opens the door to his torture chamber to boast about breaking the girl who confessed to being sent by King Ezekiel. “He said to let her walk,” Simon barks. “He gave a direct order.”

The Croat counters that his “process” takes time. It’s a process that once determined the location of a hidden arms cache at the Hilltop, and one that Simon scoffs at: “I would have found that shit.”

As Simon mocks the Croatian, calling him a “Slavic, psychopathic nut job,” the typically chatty Negan lets Simon do the talking. He can only hang his head at the sight of the blood-dripping girl bound to a chair by ropes. Simon closes in. “Kids — KIDS! — is a line we do not cross,” he growls. “We all know that.”

It’s a line that Simon would cross on The Walking Dead: he ordered the massacres of the Scavengers and any Oceanside male above the age of 10. Years later, during the war with the Kingdom, Hilltop, and Alexandria, Negan’s once-loyal subordinate had become increasingly insubordinate. After his attempted coup to depose Negan as leader of the Saviors, Negan strangled Simon and chained his zombified body to the fence outside the Sanctuary.

New episodes of The Walking Dead: Dead City premiere Thursdays on AMC+ and Sundays on AMC.

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