Is The Walking Dead: Dead City’s Glenn Reference a Timeline Discrepancy?

[Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Dead City season 2 episode 4, “Feisty Friendly.”] It can be difficult keeping track of time in the apocalypse. We know that August 27, 2010, is the day the world ended in The Walking Dead universe, and that The Walking Dead: Dead City takes place furthest in the timeline (season 2 is set circa 2027). In the first season, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) generously estimates he first formed the Saviors some “12, 15 years ago,” not long before Negan’s gang forced the pregnant Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and her husband Glenn (Steven Yeun) to their knees in the sixth season finale of The Walking Dead.

Glenn’s “Last Day on Earth,” as the episode was titled, was in 2012. Months after Negan took his barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat to Glenn’s head, Maggie gave birth to Glenn’s son, the now 15-year-old Hershel Rhee (Logan Kim).

That means that Glenn died just about two years into the apocalypse, and that the events of the first seven seasons of The Walking Dead — from the CDC, to the farm, the prison, and then to Terminus and Alexandria — all happened in the span of less than 24 months. So it’s understandable that Maggie may have misremembered when a sweet moment with her late husband actually took place.

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In Sunday’s “Feisty Friendly” episode of Dead City, Maggie and New Babylon Federation Colonel Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) reminiscence about the old world and the food they miss most. For Armstrong, it’s a breakfast sandwich you’d get from a hole-in-the-wall bodega. For Maggie, it’s a Kit-Kat.

“Sometimes, early on, you’d luck out and find a candy bar. Last time I saw a candy bar was three years in. It was my birthday, and he surprised me,” Maggie recalls somberly, referencing Glenn without uttering his name.

That scene has now come under scrutiny as a potential timeline discrepancy. “Three years in” to the apocalypse would date Maggie’s candy bar birthday present from Glenn to have happened in 2013, by which time Glenn was dead.

It’s not a scene that played out on The Walking Dead, so it’s hard to say for sure when the exchange might have happened. But there was about an eight-month time jump between seasons 2 and 3 (when Maggie, Glenn, and the rest of group left the Greene farm for the prison), and another months-long time skip between seasons 3 and 4. There’s also about a month between the death of Maggie’s sister, Beth (Emily Kinney), and the group arriving at Alexandria in season 5. Some two weeks after that, Maggie reveals she’s pregnant, and Glenn dies not even two months later.

As difficult as it may be to believe that Maggie misremembered the last time she broke off a piece of a Kit-Kat bar some 15 years ago, a lot happened in a short amount of time. And let’s remember: there’s no real keeping track of time in the apocalypse.

New episodes of The Walking Dead: Dead City season 2 air Sundays on AMC and AMC+.