YMMV / The Walking Dead: Dead City

• Alternative Character Interpretation: In "Everybody Wins a Prize", Simon berates the Croat for doing what he did to a young girl, insisting they don’t commit such atrocities on children. This is coming from the same man who still committed genocide against boys over the age of 10 and later ended up being willing to embrace the Final Solution to a tee. He’s also shown to be needling Negan that he should be given more authority instead of the Croat. Is Simon actually that repulsed by the Croat’s actions, or is he just coming down hard on the side he knows Negan is going to take as a way to suck up to him to get more of the authority he wants?
• Contested Sequel: Some like the show for giving the Walking Dead universe a change of scenery and focusing on Maggie and Negan while giving them additional depth and a solid supporting cast. Others consider the show So OK, It's Average and think the Maggie/Negan rivalry has been done to death and already ended perfectly in the finale of the parent series.
• Improved Second Attempt: A common complaint about The Walking Dead and Fear is that both shows suffer from having too many characters, which inevitably causes many of them to not get the screen time and focus they deserve. Dead City rectifies this by focusing specifically on Maggie and Negan, having them appear in every episode, and giving them both clearly defined arcs that move the plot forward. The supporting cast is also very small and likewise, most of them appear in every episode with clear arcs.
• Love to Hate: The Croat may be a monstrous sadist, but seasoned character actor Željko Ivanek turns him into a tremendously entertaining villain who's strangely likable due to his cheerful demeanor which accompanies his horrific actions, his tenuous sanity which lends him a terrifyingly unpredictable air, his glorious moments of pure ham ("NE-GAAAAAAN") and his genuine confusion as to why Negan doesn't seem like Negan anymore. It also helps that his goals and motivations are somewhat different from previous villains in the franchise, who (with some exceptions) are mostly just standard post-apocalyptic warlords. The Croat on the other hand has honest scientific curiosity about the zombies and how they can be used as fuel.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The first episode has a sequence where Maggie and Negan try to hide behind some debris from a horde, only to be set upon by a stream of roaches that fly onto them. It's pretty nasty, and actually causes both characters, battle-hardened survivors, to begin reacting with disgust and panic like normal human beings. Then one of them accidentally stirs up an entire swarm of roaches who had been festering in a covered horse carcass. Negan sums it up with a big, fat, "NOPE".
  • The fifth episode sees the group come upon a colossal, slimy pile of human fat left over from countless bodies being dumped in the sewer by the Croat. It’s so huge it takes up almost the entire tunnel and it’s just another cherry on top of the stinking sewer.
  • The Walker King. In the fifth episode inside the sewer, Maggie discovers a large Walker variant which is made up of multiple Walker bodies, legs and arms fused together. It's pretty gross and disturbing, but even though Maggie ends up killing the Walker King, you definitely feel like you need a shower afterwards.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Walker King quickly stole the show during its' brief appearance. It's an impressive display of digital effects and animatronics, as well as the show's trademark gore and slime, and is hands down one of the most memorable walkers of the franchise.
• Tearjerker:
  • The first episode establishes that Maggie was not being hyperbolic when she said she still has constant flashbacks to Glenn's horrific death, largely triggered whenever she sees Negan. She wakes up from a nightmare about it, only to be immediately faced with Negan, whose own face is pretty close due to him being in the back of her truck.
  • Negan's despair when retelling the Croat's actions against a young girl from the Kingdom is sobering. He can't even finish the story and weakly laments that "she was just a kid". We later find out the girl was tortured to death.
  • Negan reveals that even though he, Annie, and their new son Joshua settled down to a happy life outside of the Coalition, they were hit with more horrors when New Babylon officers attacked Annie when she was on her own. Negan all but says they raped her, and this caused Negan to take action against the officers which led to him sending Annie and Joshua far away so they could escape the ensuing wrath of New Babylon.
  • Even when Maggie finally gets Hershel back, their reunion is not a big happy one like Maggie seemed to believe. Hershel is instead repulsed that Maggie sold out Negan to the Croat in exchange for him, is rude and caustic towards his mother, and scoffs at what he believes is a gift from her. It's heartbreaking to watch Maggie's soft joy at having her son back be repaid in one of the worst ways possible as he repeatedly kicks her while she's down, and even tells him that he felt safer behind bars than at home, and that he's felt neglected since he was born due to Maggie's vendetta against Negan.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: After surviving the mass herd at Madison Square Garden, and Tommaso's treachery by making a deal with the Croat was revealed, many feel that Tommaso and Amaia could have been kept around longer instead of being very anti-climactically killed by walkers in the penultimate episode of Season 1.