Maggie’s inability to let go of her trauma has pushed away both her reason for going to NYC and her potential best ally in Negan; as he reminds her, had they worked together, they could have gotten Hershel back without any need to turn Negan over to The Croat because they make, in Negan’s words, a bad-ass team. Eli Jorne makes good use of Maggie’s lingering trauma in the script; Maggie doesn’t know who she is without that pain, without that loss, so she’ll never let it go, which Negan understands, even if it’s to his own detriment. The leader of the Saviors, at the end of the day, was just a character he adopted; The Widow is Maggie because without that, she has no idea who she is, and without Negan, there is no Widow and thus, no Maggie. She’s merely the sum total of her losses, and that’s taken a toll on her relationship with everyone around her. Even now, with Hershel back, she’s got nothing to define who she is as a person.
That’s a difficult thing to get across, even with the script pushing it forward. When The Croat talks about The Widow, and about how he used her obsession with Negan to force her into cooperating with his crazy scheme to track down Negan, Cohan does a good job of selling that realization on her face. She’s been duped, she knows it, and not by someone particularly subtle. She wasn’t outsmarted in any sense of the word; everyone knows how to manipulate her and it’s using her family and her desire to hurt Negan back. No doubt The Croat isn’t the only one to push those buttons to get what they want out of Maggie.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan puts across a resigned sense of disappointment regarding his part in the proceedings, and his ultimate fate of slipping back into character, this time at the behest of forces beyond his control. It’s great work, and the scene in which Negan pushes Ginny (Mahina Napoleon) away is beautifully done, because it’s never quite clear if Negan is weaponizing the truth or just adopting the character and lying to Ginny to try to keep her out of harm’s way. Gandja Monteiro does a solid job of allowing the actors to do what they do with characters they know well, and the editing, particularly of the reaction shots of Ginny to Negan’s words, and the framing of characters in the scene, really allow the emotional impact to come through. Maybe it’s being a dad, but Negan pushing his stand-in daughter away for her own good despite the pain it clearly caused him hit me hard.
Maggie is too straightforward for her own good; see Negan, hit Negan, look for Negan again. Negan seems incapable of being honest with anyone and would rather lie to get what he wants than say his true feelings. He gets what he wants out of it, and he gets to take the easy way out. Whether that’s because Negan Smith the person can’t do what needs to be done. Perhaps this is him taking the easy way out. Perhaps this is Negan trying to get back into character because he knows that’s the only way he’s going to get out of whatever The Croat and The Dama have planned for him. Ultimately, it’s left open for debate, and it is unclear what Negan is going to do with the opportunity he’s been given.
He doesn’t seem especially thrilled to be back in the business of empire building, and it’s hard to blame him after what happened to his last empire. Like Perlie (Gaius Armstrong), he seems to be resigned to working for people he doesn’t particularly like as they head towards a war over the resources still present on Manhattan island. As a stand-alone series, the first series of Dead City is fun and offers enough new wrinkles to keep things interesting without any real resolution to anything aside from the Hershel plot.
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