The Walking Dead: Dead City Recap: “People Are a Resource”

“People are a resource” is a philosophy that Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) expressed on The Walking Dead. And it’s something that the Croat (Željko Ivanek) has taken literally on The Walking Dead: Dead City. After Negan revealed his history with the psychopathic Savior underling on last week’s episode, Sunday’s “People Are a Resource” explained how the Croat has embraced the mantra at the new Sanctuary: a zombie-swarmed Madison Square Garden. “Death is no end. It is our fuel,” the Croat says. “Because people are a resource!” 

We open on a flashback to Negan and Ginny (Mahina Napoleon), who hasn’t said a word since her father’s death. Negan has spent months trying to find her a safe place — and she’s trying to find her stuffed dinosaur. In the present, Ginny tracks her father figure to Manhattan, where Negan and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) have fallen in with native New Yorkers Amaia (Karina Ortiz), Tommaso (Jonathan Higginbotham), and Luther (Michael Anthony). 

They’ve been surviving in the city since the military bombed the bridges and quarantined the island during Operation Cobalt at the onset of the zombie outbreak. “We watched them blow up the bridges. The tunnels. Leaving us in this death trap,” Amaia recalls. Then the Croat showed up with his Burazi — his brotherhood — to recruit people and offer them protection. Or his “paranoid, crazy version of that. Kill or be killed.” But Amaia and Tommaso “don’t take no orders from no bridge-and-tunnel nutcase, so now he tries to kill us. Steal from us. Catch and torture us so he can learn how to kill and steal some more.” Only one of them ever escaped alive: Tommaso.

It’s discouraging for Maggie, whose son, Hershel (Logan Kim), has been kidnapped by the Croat. As Maggie excuses herself to breathe down sobs in private, Negan assures Amaia and Tommaso: “She’s tougher than she looks, and she looks tough as shit.” 

She’ll need to be. To get to the Croat, they’ll have to get through his walker moat that surrounds his “sanctuary.” A turkey parade float lures the “fleshies” to Madison Square Garden, and according to Luther, there’s no way inside the arena. Maggie suggests the sewers, but Amaia explains that the Army “shoved in all the fleshies they killed till they got turned into fleshies too. Sealed it up nice and tight.” Negan and Maggie figure that if someone broke out, then there’s a way back in.

Tommaso is hesitant to return, but Amaia wants vengeance for the Croat’s Burazi invading their home and slaughtering their people. It triggers déjà vu for Negan, who recalls a fella down south who showed up out of nowhere twelve, fifteen years ago: 

“Everybody flocked to him because he knew what they needed, what they wanted. Protection. Sanctuary. So we built a badass fortress. Formed an army out of psychopaths. And he forced people to join. And if they didn’t? The hammer came down. Now soon enough, the people, they got fed up with it, so they got together. And they decided it was time to take that hammer back.” 

“It worked,” Maggie says. Negan smirks: “Hell yeah, it worked.”

Tommaso recalls making a break for it by following the framework of the old Penn Station, eventually making his way through the tunnels to freedom. The group reverse engineers a prison break to reach the cells, but Negan figures the Croat would have moved prisoners off-site after Tommaso’s escape. “It’s what he would’ve done. He and the Croat know each other. They go back. Way back,” Maggie reveals. “He knows how he thinks.” Negan took a shot at the Croat and blew his ear off, so it’s decided he’ll bait him and lure him out of the arena. Once they get him to divulge Hershel’s location, they’ll kill the Croat. The rest of them will get the jump on the Burazi, while Maggie and Negan finish off the Croat: “An eye for an eye,” Negan says. “A dick for an ear.” 

Luther isn’t convinced Negan can bait the Croat into showing himself. He rebuffed Negan’s ask to bum some beeswax for his cut hands, and he’s unapologetically blunt about being unwilling to die to save a kid who “is already dead,” Luther tells Maggie. “I think you know that.” 

Inside the arena, the Croat has New Babylon Marshal Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) handcuffed to a rail. The Croat sits down to eat Pašticada, a Croatian braised beef dish, as he explains how the arena enjoys such luxuries as lights, heating, electricity, drink, and food. 

The Croat worked in alternative energy. When he arrived in New York, he deduced the most abundant natural resource on the island: death. “The sewers are full of it. As the bodies break down, they produce methane, and because the intermolecular forces are weak, the gas can be pressurized into a liquid fuel at regular temperatures.” Using (dead) people as a resource, the Croat has built a sanctuary.

Recoiling at the sight of a maggot in his rotting meat, the Croat doles out the waiter’s punishment: by placing a handcuff key in his mouth. Making him swallow. And then fatally bludgeoning him before throwing the waiter’s body to the arena floor below.

Outside, Maggie removes a modest tin box from her bag. Inside are trinkets and treasures from a lifetime ago: A photo of the Greene family on the farm. Her father, Hershel Greene. Her sister, Beth. A picture of Maggie and her baby son. And then Hershel’s watch – the one he passed down to her husband. Tucked inside is a drawing of Glenn. Negan interrupts to give Maggie a baseball cap he found inside a tourist shop. He remembered Hershel used to wear one like it, so he thought Maggie could give her son the hat when she sees him again.

Then Negan does something even more unexpected: he shuts up and listens. He listens as Maggie recounts her strained relationship with her son — “I could have said ‘left’ and he’d go right just to spite me” — and how they argued before he was taken. “I screwed up so many ways before then,” she confesses, choking out the words. “Fumbling through, doing it by ourself… there weren’t a lot of people that meant anything to me in this world. But there were enough. And whatever’s left of all of them is inside this box.” 

It’s Negan’s turn to open up. A few years ago, he was living with his wife, Annie, and their son, Joshua, in a quaint cabin outside of New Babylon. When Annie went into town to do some trading, five men robbed and beat her. Negan tracked the men to some shit drinking hole and killed them in a rage, making him a wanted man. The punishment for murdering a magistrate and four other men under Code 14 Section 2 of New Babylon Law? Being dangled upside down and sawed in half, length-wise, from the groin to the head — very, very slowly. 

“After that, we were on the run, and it was very hard for Annie. So I put ’em on a wagon train to Missouri, and I said I’d be right behind ’em,” says Negan. “I stayed. I think about them every single day. I hope to god they are okay, and maybe I have no right in hoping that. I don’t know, Maggie. I mean, what else do we have? Besides hope.” 

She softens. “I thought you knew how to shut up.” Negan chuckles, and Maggie takes Hershel’s cap.

On the street, Ginny watches as a Scavenger Woman (Aixa Kendrick) collects her dropped dino doll. At the arena, the Burazi huff methane from a tank and mask attachments. Armstrong is forced to inhale the methane before being shoved into a caged ring with the zombified waiter. The rowdy Burazi hoot and holler at the spectacle of the cage match as Armstrong overcomes the effects of the gas, maneuvering himself into a position to decapitate the walker waiter and collect his prize — the handcuff key deep in his guts.

Elsewhere, the Scavenger Woman meets up with Amaia and Tommaso. Maggie recognizes Ginny’s stuffed dinosaur among her collection, and tells the scavenger that she knows a little girl who likes things like that. The woman hands the doll to Maggie with a smile.

Back at the arena, the Croat is impressed with Armstrong’s “show.” He remembers how his family — his wife, Mia, their daughters Nika and Hana, and his son, Filip — had become “a meal for another starving family. I was too distraught toeven think of killing myself, and by the time that would’ve occurred tome, I had already found the man who would become my new family andteach me how to protect the things that matter.” Things like the note that Armstrong has hidden in his boot.

The Croat unfurls the note and reads it aloud: “Pearlie, I don’t knowif you’ll even read this. I feel dumb it took me so long to realize youall changed your numbers. I wonder what those other people thought whenthey heard my messages. I’ve been trying so damn hard, but it’s too muchfor me. I’m too weak, and I can’t do it by myself. I need help. Pleasehelp me. Please come find me. I don’t like it where I am, and I justwant to come home—” He’s cut off. Armstrong says he’s alone on the island, hunting a wanted man: “His name is Negan.”

At the safehouse, Negan rummages through the kitchen and pockets a grater. He tries to smooth things over with Luther, but the big guy confronts him with the wanted poster that Negan proudly pocketed because of its flattering likeness. The poster describes Negan as being antisocial, prone to extreme violence, with above-average intelligence and charisma — and instructs anyone with information about the fugitive to notify any office of the New Babylon Marshals.

Negan tries to talk his way out of a fight, but like a cornered rat, he scurries and spars with the brawny man who wraps him in a crushing bear hug. With a guttural roar of anguish, Negan goes for the only melee weapon he can reach: the grater. Negan drags the metal shredder across Luther’s face, causing him to stumble backward, and the fight ends when Luther is accidentally impaled by a pipe to the back of the head.

In an alley, Maggie holds Ginny’s dinosaur. She puts the stuffed treasure in a bin and palms a match. She doesn’t see Ginny watching from behind a car in the dark. Ginny remembers that day with Negan in the woods, when he found and returned her doll. She remembers him whistling two tones, the whistle that his cancer-stricken wife, Lucille, used when she was sick and couldn’t get out of bed. “It didn’t matter what I was doing or where I was. I came running. You do that, and I’m not around, I will be there. Deal?” She nods. “Talk is cheap anyway, kid. Believe me, I oughta know. It doesn’t matter what people say.” Ginny falls into a hug. He assures her: “It only matters what they do.”

Ginny watches Maggie light the match.

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.