LOS ANGELES, NEW YORK: With the third episode of the new 'The Walking Dead' spin-off 'Dead City,' the Walkers return to give us more deadly secrets. As we dive deeper into the dirt and grime of rotting Manhattan, our main characters Maggie and Negan must learn how to survive again.
Our other new lead, Pearlie Armstrong, gives us a whole new insight into the growing empire of The Croat after being kidnapped by them in the last episode. The revelations are even more horrifying than one might imagine about the motivations and goals of our antagonist. We know that The Croat is on the side of evil, but what he seems to be brewing with his army could pose a bigger threat to what's left of humanity than the undead.
The Croat is Walking Dead's new crazy scientist
It is always someone with access to the secrets of science and technology and a fair amount of madness that turns out to be the bane of people's very existence. The Croat, in his strange conversation with Pearlie, turned out to be one of those mad scientists researching alternative energies. And what is the alternative he discovered for cold and dead New York? Dead human bodies.
The antagonist and his followers have made corpses a "resource" because the world around them is full of them. The Croat has developed a system for producing fuel, i.e. methane gas, that uses the decomposition of the dead to produce energy from them. We get our first glimpse of his lair outside the place where he had held Maggie's son Hershel hostage, and it is quite different from any human facility we have seen so far, as it is equipped with everything that could consume energy.
The Croat gets his own backstory
Of course, the characters of 'The Walking Dead' universe have already experienced a lot of suffering in the present, regardless of their morality. This also applies to the cruel and visibly heartless Croat. We learn how he lost his family, what his motivations are, and how he arrived at a mindset that sees the only future for the new world in the use of once-living humans as an energy resource.
After a fight show between the freshly methane-treated Pearlie and the thrown-in zombies, The Croat says, "I don't enjoy such barbarism, but it had to be done." The backstory then follows but is told more or less in passing. The writers did not seem too concerned with making the audience feel sympathy for him in any way, which is a good approach to making the limits of morality in this complicated universe without laws more clear.
Is 'TWD' doing anything new?
The spin-off brings many new things to the table, and especially the setting is one of the most popular. Taking a city like the Big Apple after the infection spreads shows how the writers tried to be creative with this long-standing universe. However, the show seems to be an exaggerated trope pitting two groups of people against each other.
Granted, that much further into the apocalypse, zombies are more of an inconvenience than a major obstacle to survival, and other enemies should grow to show a clash of worldviews. But as Maggie and Negan reminded us, they have done this before and are sure to come out victorious, and that's probably how the spin-off will end. It largely depends on The Croat and Pearlie to make things interesting for us, since we are already halfway through.
‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Episode 3 is available to stream on AMC and AMC+.
