The Walking Dead: Dead City Premiere Recap: “Old Acquaintances”

“I don’t want to hate you anymore,” Maggie (Lauren Cohan) told Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) on The Walking Dead’s series finale. Negan finally apologized for bludgeoning her husband, Glenn (Steven Yeun), with his barbed wire-covered baseball bat, but Maggie couldn’t forgive or forget. “When I look at you, all I see is that bat coming down on his head, blood running down his face,” Maggie said. “I hear him calling for me. And I hear you mocking him while he’s dying.” Not wanting to remember Glenn like that, Maggie laid her vendetta to rest. But like a zombie, the feud is fresh out of the grave on The Walking Dead: Dead City. 

Dead City‘s premiere, “Old Acquaintances,” opens with Maggie scoping out New York City from across the river. The city that never sleeps is still and eerily quiet, except for the groans of a massive walker horde shambling through the streets of the dead city. An animated opening titles sequence reveals the fall of New York. 15 years earlier, the U.S. military’s Operation Cobalt blew up the city’s bridges and tunnels to contain the zombie virus spreading like wildfire. Cut off from the mainland, Manhattan is an Isle of the Dead.

Years have passed since Maggie and Negan last saw each other on The Walking Dead, and she’s spent the last few months tracking Negan to the Easy Stay Motor Inn motel and cocktail lounge. He’s holed up at the roadside hellhole doing “groaner work,” clearing walkers around the seedy establishment. Maggie drops her map book as she gives chase to the spooked Negan, who is accompanied by the young Ginny (Mahina Napoleon).

“Thought you were better on your feet,” Maggie tells Negan, knife to his throat after blocking a swing from his crowbar. “Good to see you too,” grins Negan. A wanted poster wipes the smirk from his face: “If you have any information on this man, notify any office of the New Babylon Marshals. Do not approach unless armed.” Negan proudly pockets the wanted poster stamped with a seal: “Tranquillitas Ordinis: New Babylon Federation.” She asks the whereabouts of Negan’s wife Annie (Medina Senghore) and their child, but he deflects. He tells the unspeaking Ginny that he and Maggie are “old acquaintances,” and he’s now figured out that she’s not there to kill him.

Maggie explains how, a few weeks back, the Croat (Željko Ivanek) raided her home at The Bricks. The Croat’s Burazi outnumbered and overpowered Maggie’s people, stealing their grain and establishing a monthly extortion schedule. They took a hostage as collateral: Maggie and Glenn’s son, Hershel (Logan Kim). She tracked them up the Hudson, but they made it across the river and into Manhattan. Maggie needs Negan to help save her son from the Croat, who was discommunicated from the Sanctuary for being too extreme even for Negan’s Saviors. “There were a lot of psychos in my crew back then,” says Negan, “but he always stood out as being an exceptionally insane son of a bitch.” Why would he help her?

“Because you owe me,” Maggie tells him. “You’re the last person that I wanted to ask for help. But it doesn’t look like you’ve got too many options yourself. Because if I found you here, the marshals will, too.” She’s right: after smuggling Negan and Ginny out of New Babylon, the capital city of the New Babylon Federation, Marshal Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) isn’t far behind.

Marshal Armstrong gets a lead from the bar owner (Michelle Hurd) and feeds her to the “groaners” outside the motel for a capital offense: Code 14, Section 8, aiding and abetting. Negan is wanted for murdering a magistrate in cold blood along with four other men, according to Armstrong, who anticipates executing the fugitive under Code 14 Section 2 of New Babylon Law. “Nothing so magnanimous as a hanging or a beheading, no. For what this man has done, he’ll be dangled upside down and sawed in half, length-wise, from the groin to the head — very, very slowly.”

On the road, Negan reveals he was doing a stint on a farm about a year ago when the marshals came poking around. Ginny asked to leave with Negan, taking nothing but her most precious possession: a stuffed dinosaur. She hasn’t spoken since someone brutally murdered her father. Maggie agrees to give Ginny a home at The Bricks — a farming community the relocated Hilltoppers established in an old brick factory — in exchange for Negan’s help saving Hershel. Negan realizes Maggie can’t kill him: “If I’m dead, you don’t get your son back. You need me.” Through gritted teeth, Maggie reminds him it “cuts both ways. And I’m sure the marshals would have something to say about that.” He’s not quite innocent, but not quite guilty of his accused crimes, either, and he believes he’s paid for what he’s done.

Flanked by Marshals Fritz (David Chen) and Jano (Trey Santiago-Hudson), Armstrong has tracked the dysfunctional duo to Jersey City, using Maggie’s map book as a guide. A ripped-out page gives away their destination: Manhattan. The distracted Armstrong unfurls a note: “JOEL ARMSTRONG. Oliver St. Apt. 505. NY, NY.” Maggie and Negan manage to take Jano hostage, using the junior marshal as insurance to get across the river by hijacked boat. But the trip is rocky. Tensions boil over until Negan confronts Maggie about her increasingly reckless behavior: “I get how having Hershel taken has you spinning out, stirring up emotions, memories, all sorts of shit. But vengeful thoughts that I thought you had put to bed? Clearly, you have woken the hell up! But what I don’t get is after all these years, you still think I’m the bad guy. I’m not. No one is. But you know what, Maggie? Maybe everyone is. Ask yourself one question: how many husbands and fathers have you killed?” Maggie, already suffering from Negan-induced nightmares about Glenn’s death, fires back: “What you did, you don’t ever put something like that to bed.” 

On Manhattan Island, Maggie and Negan trek into the city with Jano in tow. “Where are all the chompers?” he asks, and it’s a good question: there should be a million-plus of the undead roaming around here somewhere. Before they can continue toward the building that has been conspicuously blowing smoke at the same time every morning and night, Negan asks Maggie to look after Ginny. Suddenly, it’s raining bodies. Reawakened walkers fall from stories above, crashing to the streets below like human-sized hail. Someone is piloting an asphalt paver playing music and leading the walker horde like the Pied Piper, forcing the trio to take cover in a laundromat.

Armstrong is in hot pursuit, accidentally shooting and killing Jano as he opens fire on Negan. The by-the-book lawman who only wants to get back to his wife and three daughters just committed a capital offense. As walkers flood inside the laundromat, Maggie’s scuffle with Armstrong almost turns fatal. “I need him to save my son,” she explains, fending off the marshal long enough to escape with Negan.

Elsewhere, Hershel is tied to a chair in a dark room. “Look at you,acting so tough. Just like your mother. Or maybe your father?” tauntsthe Croat. “Tell me: did you ever meet the man who killed your father?He lived among your mother’s people for years. Negan. What do you knowabout him?” The torturer continues his monologue, picking through histoybox of tools. “When I was a boy, I was fascinated by Manhattan. Allthose people on such a tiny island. Pushing, shoving. The irony is that,in death, the city is so much more alive than it ever was. Because thestruggle galvanizes you… shows you the strength you had inside allalong.” To be continued.

New episodes of The Walking Dead: Dead City premiere Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on AMC. Stay tuned to ComicBook/TWD and follow @CameronBonomolo and @NewsOfTheDead on Twitter for more TWD Universe coverage.