Dead City’ season 2 finale ending explained

This article contains spoilers about The Walking Dead: Dead City season 2 finale, “If History Were a Conflagration.”

What’s old is new again. That’s because The Walking Dead: Dead City brought back the most infamous moment in franchise history when Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) assembled a two-man lineup to play another deadly round of eeny-meeny-miny-moe in the season 2 finale.

This time, it was Kim Coates‘ Bruegel and Gaius Charles’ Armstrong down on their knees as Negan decided whom to kill. Even though his bat landed on the latter with moe, the former Sanctuary leader decided he wanted to kill Bruegel first. And Negan made it even more brutal by stuffing Bruegel full of methane and watching him burn from the inside before finishing the job with Lucille.

Worried that Armstrong would eventually endanger Ginny (Mahina Napoleon), Negan tried to then finish off the New Babylon marshal-turned-colonel, but was stabbed in the back (literally) by Lauren Cohan’s Maggie — who had promised her son Hershel (Logan Kim) she would finally end the man who murdered her husband. But once the group noticed that Ginny had already died and turned to a zombie, Maggie could not finish the job, and instead handed her knife to Negan to finish off the young girl.

With a second wave of New Babylon forces marching through Manhattan, Maggie, Negan, and Armstrong holed up in apartment and ended the season with a joint proclamation. “The truth is there is only one way forward, one way to move on. We got to work through what was, to get to what will be,” Maggie and Negan said, alternating lines as flashes of their journey over the past two seasons appeared on screen. “We help each other up and the path becomes much clearer now. We move on, together. And we get there.”

Ah, but where is there? Entertainment Weekly spoke with Walking Dead chief content officer and Dead City executive producer Scott M. Gimple about what went down in the finale, and what that big ending speech means moving forward.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Tell me about going back to the eeny-meeny-miny-moe scene and giving Negan another lineup with Bruegel and Armstrong.

SCOTT M. GIMPLE: The biggest thing in The Walking Dead is change. If you look at Rick Grimes when he started, and you look when he ended, you’re haunted by who you were, those ghosts. And Negan is especially haunted by that. I mean, he was told to become that again. He is like, “I don’t want to become that again.” And yet, here we are. He resisted it, but here we are.

What about putting the twist on it where he lands on Armstrong but then kills Bruegel instead?

Well, I guess maybe that does represent change. The relationships between those two characters in Armstrong and Negan, even with everything, they’re pretty good. I mean, Armstrong did him a major solid. Bruegel is charming and funny, but there were no solids given.

Whose idea was it to do another Negan lineup? Was that showrunner Eli Jorné and the writers?

There are things I go to all of the shows with, whether they’re little ideas or whether they’re universe things, but this was the twisted mind of Eli, and I think it was brilliant. We’ve seen a whole lot of methane on this show, but not used that way. And I remember Kim Coates being like, “How is this going to work?” And I remember Greg Nicotero being like, “Oh, I know exactly how this is going to work!”

I thought it was one of the more incredible gags we’ve seen in a while. And I hate to see Bruegel go. I think with The Walking Dead at its best, you’re always hating to see the character go because you’re like: I want that. I want to keep seeing that. I got to know Kim throughout this whole thing, and he’s a remarkable dude. And one of the funniest, most sneakily charismatic dudes I’ve met.

He’s so good. If the Emmys actually honored shows like this, just hand him the Emmy now. He’s so good in this role.  

Oh, I would bang that drum. Listen, if it’s not at the Saturn Awards, I am going to flip out. It’s a fantastic world. It’s a crazy situation. Yet his portrayal of the character surmounts all of that. You know what I mean? We’re in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and there’s insane walker fights, and even the twists that we have on the walker fight, there’s crazy stuff going on, but it’s just like, “Oh no, that’s a real person. That’s a real, magnetic person.” And that’s the thing that grounds these fantastic worlds into reality for the audience.

The reason for me why replaying the lineup act works here is the fact that Maggie has to watch it again. That’s sort of the real impact of her having to go through that again. Talk a little bit about her role in that scene.

There’s a lot going on there with Maggie. She’s bringing some major baggage into that. And I’m not just saying of the past, I’m saying of the last hour, and it’s a tribute to Lauren to play all those different levels. Reacting to things is some of the hardest acting there is. You could say a line, you have this thing to do, but to play an expression, to play a feeling, not an easy thing. I don’t worry about it with Lauren.

Here’s the question for me: If Negan was not about to bash Armstrong’s head in, do you think Maggie goes and stabs Negan in the back? If she doesn’t have to go at that second to save Armstrong, does she go through with it and stab him?

That is a fantastic question. I mean, I can answer it. I’ve told you this many times: I totally can answer that question, but I’m not right in as much as that the audience is right. And, of course, same thing with anybody who works on it. Once it goes to the audience, it’s theirs. So I can tell you what I believe. I think she would’ve anyways. From where she’s at, and considering what shook her from finishing the job with Ginny — yeah, it’s my opinion that she would’ve, because she hadn’t yet changed.

What can you say about closing the season on this speech that Armstrong starts and then Maggie and Negan kind of lob back and forth on?

I always advocate on these shows, especially these short order shows, for real conclusion, and the network and the showrunners can take it where they want. I advocate for it. If I ruled with some kind of iron fist, I would have conclusion, but I was in the role and I want people to express themselves as they must.

That said, this bit felt like a very important emotional conclusion, that real change had finally been achieved between these two characters. That Maggie had gone to the very brink of extinguishing Negan. She didn’t. Negan had gone through a journey where he was forced to become something he really didn’t want to be. And I think there’s been a big, big change between the two of them and then within themselves, which I like quite a bit.

Does that mean moving forward that they’re not going to be ping-ponging as much in terms of like, “Alright, we’re working together, but now we’re not”? Are you saying that they’re sort of forming more of a — I don’t want to call them a cohesive unit, which would be sort of a weird term for these two….

I would use the word détente.

Okay, that works.

I think they’ll forever be in a better place. Whether or not it’s like, “Okay, I’m not going to kill you” — I mean, that’s a big achievement. Whether or not it extends far beyond that, we’re all just going to have to wait and see. I don’t think they’re going to be fist-bumping anytime soon, but I think I see at the end, they have to have this reconciliation.

It is such a funny thing because it’s been so many years since that happened, and when I say so many years, I’m saying in our world watching the show — anybody who that happened to would be completely justified for the rest of their lives to completely and utterly hate the person who did that to them. There’s no doubt about it. But in this story, you can see how corrosive that hate or that anger can be to the person who is hating. And I think it’s been a long road for the audience and a long road for the character. And it seems that this is the beginning of another way.

You are indicating that there is more story to tell, so does the immediate story after this include a fight against New Babylon? Is that what the next chapter in this story appears to be? They’re marching on the island. We see the second wave coming in. Is that what our protagonists are going to be up against?

I don’t like saying one way or another, but I will say we’ve surprised you in the past as far as, it seems like they’re going to be a Terminus forever, or it seems like this or it seems like that. You never know.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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