Dead City’ Made a Huge Mistake Killing [SPOILER]

Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of The Walking Dead: Dead City.

Among the many villains of The Walking Dead, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) easily takes the crown, especially due to the sheer brutality of his bat-swinging, leather-jacket-clad entrance, which took the lives of two major characters in the flagship show. However, in his spin-off show, The Walking Dead: Dead City, with Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Negan has a run for his money as a new, equally vicious and quick-witted villain waltzes in. Bruegel (Kim Coates) is one of the Manhattan community leaders, who quickly becomes striking for his elegant costumes and eccentric manner, and rivaled Negan for the franchise’s most memorable villain. However, in the Dead City Season 2 finale, Negan re-creates his iconic line-up scene and Bruegel ends up being on the receiving end of it, which proves to be Season 2’s biggest mistake.

‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Wasted So Much Potential by Killing Bruegel

Bruegel truly stepped into the story in Season 2, Episode 4, when Negan, the Dama (Lisa Emery), and the Croat (Željko Ivanek) meet Bruegel on his territory in hopes of recruiting him for the defense of Manhattan and the methane against New Babylon. Initially, he just seemed like an eclectic, manipulative and self-serving businessman who cared more about art as relics of the old world than his people’s lives. But we find out he was cheating during the walker fights by chaining up a human from his past, revealing a sadistic streak that rendered him a fresh update on the witty, sinister Negan. As such, he had bountiful potential to become a bigger villain than he actually was, potential that was abruptly cut off by his untimely demise.

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In the closing scenes of Episode 4, Bruegel demonstrates his potential by making a dark promise to himself: he still had a few tricks up his sleeve to destroy Negan. Seeing him quietly challenge Negan was such a refreshing and exciting move, but the second half of the series became a letdown in this regard. All Bruegel ended up doing was making a tentative secret treaty with Maggie and the New Babylon army, which he was going to use in the season finale to go up against Negan. However, the latter decimated the army almost effortlessly by inviting them to dinner, sending a bunch of walkers after them and shooting them with flamethrowers. The cherry on top was Negan forcing Bruegel to his knees and burning him from the inside using methane: a sickening visual, yet one that was used wrongly on Bruegel.

After Bruegel’s promise, his lackluster actions were disappointing, made even more so because he was only in a handful of scenes since his proper debut in Episode 4. All the potential that Bruegel had panned out with a whimper. At the very least, he could have proven to be more of a challenge to Negan. Dead City wasted Bruegel’s potential and all the groundwork they laid out for him in his first episode, and it was clear, as the conniving villain tried to deceive his way out of the situation until the very end, that Bruegel still had more to give.

Negan Should’ve Killed the Croat in ‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Season 2 Finale

Aside from the fact that the initially mesmerizing character of Bruegel was killed too soon, choosing Bruegel to be in Negan’s nostalgic Lucille line-up was a missed opportunity. Sure, Bruegel was shaping up to become a major antagonist, but he and Negan had only really just met, lessening the shocking impact of Negan’s regression and the overall scene. A better candidate for Negan’s wrath would have been the Croat,who was someone he had a shared history with, who was by his side during his most wicked days, and who catalyzed his transformation back into the old Negan. Who better to experience the repercussions of his regression than the Croat?

It may have also been a more satisfying end to the Croat’s arc, which stopped abruptly in the penultimate episode. After admitting to Maggie that he doesn’t have a reason to want to live anymore and even trying to goad Maggie into killing him, he simply shakes her hand and walks away into the darkness. We have no idea if he died by suicide or is expected to make a comeback in the show. If the Croat has no intention of returning to the spin-off, then a more satisfying resolution would be dying at Negan’s hands, or rather, methane. Even the involvement of methane in his death would have more of a poetic, sordid irony to it than Bruegel’s, since the Croat, on behalf of the Dama, controlled its supply and distribution.

Not choosing the Croat for this transformative and jaw-dropping scene was a missed opportunity for Dead City, one that would reverberate far more strongly than Bruegel’s death did. Bruegel should never have been in that scene to begin with. There was another option, lurking in the shadows, that would have had a more shocking impact and Bruegel had far too much potential as an antagonist. He just needed another season, one that included him in a more meaningful way and allowed him to paint his masterpiece of villainy.

The Walking Dead: Dead City

Release Date

June 18, 2023

Network

AMC

Directors

Kevin Dowling, Loren Yaconelli

Writers

Brenna Kouf

Franchise(s)

The Walking Dead