‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Season 2 Episode 7 review: “New Day, New Beginning”

Sometimes in stories, characters need to revisit the past in order to move into the future. Some shows use time travel or flashbacks to accomplish this. The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 Episode 7, titled “Novi Dan, Novi Pocetak,” follows one of our main characters as they go on both a physical and mental journey that allows them to come to terms with aspects of the past that still haunt them.

The title for The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 Episode 7 is Croation and translates to “New Day, New Beginning.” It follows Maggie and Negan on two unique missions. Maggie finds the Croat and makes him agree to help find Hershel. They end up going to the same place in the picture that Hershel drew earlier on in the season that shows two skyscrapers with a dilapidated bridge connecting them together very high up. Along this journey, Maggie and the Croat talk a lot about the Croat’s upbringing and early life but Maggie still doesn’t trust him.

 

The Croat saves and helps Maggie several times along the way and slowly makes her lower her guard a bit. Instead of being the menacing and evil man that we all saw during The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 1, this man was quiet, sad, hopeless and reflective. After the two go their separate ways and Maggie finds Hershel, it’s revealed that the Dama survived, and Hershel is still working with her.

Negan tends to Ginny’s wounds and realizes that he needs more medical equipment. He learns of a hospital nearby that has the piece of equipment needed to help Ginny. Before he leaves, he briefly has a vision of his wife Lucielle (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s real-life wife) which shows his inner guilt. He sets off to the hospital and slowly navigates the inside. He soon comes across walkers, but they’re children that were patients in the hospital. Negan, who famously has defended children, could not bring himself to put down a child walker and accidentally hits his head.

This causes him to hallucinate Lucielle, Annie, Joshua, and Ginny. He apologizes to all of them and feels that he let them down, especially Lucielle in her final days of her cancer battle. He’s able to get the medical equipment and help Ginny, but he also comes back with a newfound belief that he can’t show mercy.

Between the two stories in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 Episode 7, Negan had the more powerful one. His evolution as a character really took a turn in one particular episode of The Walking Dead Season 10. The episode, titled “Here’s Negan,” was a loose retelling of a special issue comic of the same name. It explored Negan’s life before he was introduced in the show, and showcased his relationship with his wife Lucielle. This episode was very emotionally deep and really explained a lot of what made Negan into the man we eventually meet. And the fact that his real-life wife Hilarie Burton Morgan played Lucielle in the episode and in this series made it so much more powerful.

 

“Here’s Negan” showed how even when the world required Negan to be ruthless and violent, the thought of Lucielle would bring him to his knees due to the pain of losing her and the guilt he carried for not doing enough. In that episode we see Negan say goodbye to his beloved baseball bat (named Lucielle after his wife) and in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 Episode 7, we see him saying goodbye to Lucielle herself in an equally emotional moment. I know some fans have been complaining that Negan is becoming too soft and too much of a “good guy,” but as this week’s episode showed, sometimes these emotional moments can unlock hidden anger and violence.

Maggie’s story in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 Episode 7 unfortunately felt a bit lackluster in comparison. For most of this season we’ve watched the same cycle repeat itself. Maggie and Hershel fight, Maggie ignores the fact that Hershel is shady, Hershel disappears, and Maggie must find him. The Croat’s contribution to this story was surprisingly decent and explored his character’s backstory. Overall, the episode was very well paced, and the hallucination sequences were beautifully handled. Next week, the Dama is back in play and Negan is ready to “line everyone up.”