We’re only some months out from the primary of the post-Strolling Lifeless Strolling Lifeless spin-offs: Lifeless Metropolis, through which Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) search the zombie-filled ruins of New York Metropolis searching for Maggie’s kidnapped son Hershel. Given how low The Strolling Lifeless finale’s rankings have been, your want to look at Lifeless Metropolis could also be contingent on how you might be in zombies falling out of skyscrapers… as a result of I’m unsure what else Lifeless Metropolis has to supply.
My qualms, aside from that I watched everything of TWD, stem from a sequence of quotes concerning the sequence from showrunner Eli Jorne. Right here’s Jorne, talking at a WonderCon panel, on the crux of Lifeless Metropolis: “That is the following chapter on this story about Maggie and Negan. One other piece of it for me was what’s on the core of Maggie and Negan’s relationship—the grief, and loss, and trauma. How do you navigate one thing like that? To me, that was at all times the middle of the present. That’s on the core right here.”
ComicBook studies that Jorne additionally mentioned the unique present did “an incredible job” exploring Maggie and Negan’s complicated relationship, however that the brand new present will “actually zero in and peel away all these layers and go deeper and deeper and problem the characters.”
Uh-huh. I received’t dig into whether or not TWD did “an incredible job” exploring their relationship, however I’ll say the unique sequence spent loads of time exploring it. Maggie and Negan spent nearly everything of their screentime throughout seasons 11th of September with one another; over time, Negan grew more and more penitent, and Maggie stayed uniformly livid and distrustful of him regardless of how typically he saved Maggie or Hershel. It often would appear like they’d attain some form of truce or understanding, however then Maggie would revert again by the following episode.
And that’s okay. Irrespective of what number of brutally trustworthy heart-to-hearts you’ve got with somebody, if that somebody beat your husband to demise with a baseball bat in entrance of you seven years in the past, you’d have a tendency to carry a grudge! Apart from, the second AMC introduced that Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan could be reprising their roles for the spin-off, it was apparent that the 2 would proceed their battle as a result of that’s how TV exhibits work.
However what I’ll take umbrage with is Jorne’s assertion that there are any layers left to peel away. The one factor The Strolling Lifeless would do with these characters is to peel again a layer and uncover one other layer precisely like the primary beneath. TWD exhaustively explored their relationship to repeatedly reveal there was nothing beneath the layers however extra of the identical. It was not nice.
So once I hear Jorne say “We get to actually zero in and peel away all these layers and go deeper and deeper,” I believe what he means is that Maggie’s going to be livid at Negan for killing her husband and Negan goes to repeatedly attempt to show he’s a modified man, which is to say a rehash of TWD seasons 9, 10, and 11. I may simply be pessimistic after watching the primary sequence, and I don’t have any schadenfreude right here; if Lifeless Metropolis finally ends up being good, then good for it. But when it comes right down to watching Maggie and Negan’s relationship not evolving, then I’d somewhat have extra zombies falling from the skies.
Need extra io9 information? Take a look at when to anticipate the most recent Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s subsequent for the DC Universe on movie and TV, and every thing you might want to learn about the way forward for Physician Who.
