The Walking Dead: Dead City Will Finally Address The Dead Glenn In The Room

"The Walking Dead: Dead City" has a major hurdle to overcome in terms of presenting a story audiences will believe. It's not the zombie apocalypse that'll be hard for people to buy into, but something even less likely — a team-up between flagship series fan favorite Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and the man who brutally killed her husband: Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).

Viewers who tuned out of "The Walking Dead" before the long-running AMC show said farewell last year were surprised to read the logline of the new spin-off, which is set to follow Maggie and Negan as they travel through a zombie-infested New York City. The pair have shared screen time since Negan took a baseball bat to Glenn's (Steven Yeun) head, sure, but despite Negan's relative redemption, they never fully hashed out the unforgivable act that defined their relationship.

In an interview with SFX magazine, Cohan, Morgan, and spinoff creator Eli Jorné all addressed the blood puddle in the middle of the room, explaining that the path to reconciliation between the pair will still be anything but easy. Morgan admitted that mostly-reformed Negan has "gone backwards a little bit" at the start of the new series, as Maggie refuses to move their relationship beyond one of tentative allies. He explained:

"I also think there's some frustration that he has, like, 'I've tried to apologize. I have tried to do the best I can for the last 10 years, and we've gotten nowhere. And I still think if I close my eyes, you're gonna put a shank through my head.'"

For her part, Cohan doesn't think true forgiveness is really on the table for the pair, no matter what comes next. "I wouldn't even use the word forgiveness," the actress told SFX. "It's way too impossible. But what I think was really exciting, definitely for me to do, was just to say, 'Have we ever really talked about this?'" After being spared by Rick (Andrew Lincoln), Negan did some time behind bars and upped his karma points by saving Judith's life, killing Alpha (Samantha Morton), and generally not being as much of a dirtbag as everyone expected. Despite all that, he's never able to mend fences with Maggie.

As Cohan sees it, though, enough time has passed for her character to start asking herself some tough questions. "At the end of the day, it's been 15 years into the end of the world," she said. "There have been other generations trying to rebuild lives. But when you try to rebuild a life and you're so defined by such traumatic things, who are you? What are you? How do you behave?" Perhaps most importantly: "How do you interact with anybody, let alone somebody who you have a lot of beef with?"

Personally, though I'm a lapsed fan of the franchise, hearing about this Maggie and Negan-centric show always makes me inexplicably terrified that if it runs on long enough, the pair will end up pushed together romantically. It's a move that would be shocking but off-putting for fans who still love Glenn — so much so that they still yell at Morgan on the street about him. Luckily, Jorné seems more interested in an exploration of grief from all angles than he is in cheap shock value.

"When Glenn was killed, that was hard, obviously, when it's a beloved character who dies," he admitted. "But to me, the flip side of that was that this universe is going to tell the story of what happens when you lose someone that way." Specifically, he's interested in the outcome of that loss, "not just for the person who lost him, but the person who did it."

If "The Walking Dead: Dead City" ends up being a fictional exercise in restorative justice, the criminal justice model that allows for victims to attempt to heal by facing perpetrators, it could turn out to be a pretty meaningful show. "[Their history] is not something that I was scared of, or that I felt like I was saddled with," Jorné shared. He also said that audiences will have to get used to the idea of the pair's uneasy alliance — just like they will. "When you shine a light on these two characters, the audience and they are going to, little by little, have to realize that the only path out of this is through each other," he said.

The show takes place in Manhattan, and its creator joked that the closed-off setting will force the two to finally hash out their differences. "Then you put them on an island, where they really can't get away from it," Jorné told SFX. Like Morgan said, that sounds like a recipe for a shank through the head, but maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised.

"The Walking Dead: Dead City" premieres on AMC and AMC+ on June 18, 2023.