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This review contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 Episode 3, “Emigrants”
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Well, Maggie and Renata lit up Lady Liberty’s lamp, and the poor, huddled masses certainly came, but of course they had beef because things are hardly ever easy—or what they seem—on The Walking Dead, and this week, Dead City’s third season delivered an episode that felt almost eerily hopeful until its final moments, when everything got suuuuuper disturbing very quickly. We simply can’t have nice things.
But before Dillard showed us all his stomach-churning bedroom secret (more on that in a bit), it did at least feel like the hospital’s growth plan was working out pretty well, all things considered. To be sure, the arrival of two feuding, rival communities left Maggie, Renata, and Negan with some difficult choices. After hitting each other hard, their collective injuries flooded the hospital, and their leaders couldn’t just let bygones be bygones. Yet this dangerous, precarious situation gave us some fantastic scenes that played out like an episode of The Pitt or ER if those shows were set during a zombie apocalypse, which made for a really tense and thrilling watch.
Hershel has also finally been coming into his own as a character this season, helping Luis save wounded patients with his new medical training and adding to the taut action. As random patients died of their injuries and immediately roared to life as walkers, the infected got a new lease of life too as the scariest things on the show, in a way they haven’t for a while. Hershel and Luis’ determination to save everyone they could, regardless of faction, gave both Maggie’s son and our new hospital gang a vital, immediate sense of purpose. Hershel even had to deal with the classic medical show trope of a low-priority patient dying anyway. Maggie watched on proudly, as well she might: imagine Dr. Robby trying to intubate while a raging zombie snaps at him! Hell yeah, Hershel is definitely starting to live up to being the son of two of our all-time favorite Walking Dead characters, and I’m hyped to see more ways he’ll rise to the occasion as this season goes on.
Surprisingly, Maggie and Renata’s plan to plough Central Park also started to come to fruition in this episode against all odds, with the rival communities putting aside their differences to help build the farm, and Negan ultimately proved wrong about their chances of success.
It’s not the only surprise Negan’s got coming, as we soon discovered. Having pushed Dillard to rid his bar of his walker friends, whom he said he could talk to and understand, perhaps I should have sensed that there might be more to his disillusionment, or even one walker he couldn’t quite part with, but I didn’t see the final reveal of the episode coming at all and sat here feeling quite icky for a while afterwards. Negan and Dillard’s interactions leading up to the reveal were so fun, and that misdirection definitely worked on me. From their “Ride of the Valkyries” singsong as they got ready to confront the masses to Dillard playing along with Negan’s fake-out game of human piñata, I found myself regularly thinking, “Love these two!”
Even toward the end, when Negan was happily chatting to Dillard about finding someone to make them a never-ending supply of booze and giving him pep talks so he’d keep socializing with real people instead of walkers, I was still very pro-Dillard. Jimmi Simpson’s addition to the cast has been great; he’s brought some terrific energy to the group’s dynamic, and the bar has been a fun new location for the show. I certainly wasn’t expecting to scream “Dillard, no!” in the episode’s final moments, but that is indeed what happened after The Walking Dead brought us one of the franchise’s most disturbing moments ever.
There are no two ways about it: Dillard is keeping a female walker tied up in his room. He believes he can communicate with her, and it’s heavily implied that he believes he’s in a romantic relationship with her. The implications of this are nauseating. For the first time, we hear what he hears when he looks at walkers. He hears this female walker desperately ask him to stay and be with her, and it’s awful.
We don’t know if there’s any key context to this twisted revelation yet. Did Dillard know this woman before she turned, or has he just picked up a walker to…keep him company? Either way, it’s super gross, problematic at best, and has been largely a taboo subject in The Walking Dead until now.
Negan may think everything’s going great with his new hang-time bestie, but as infuriated as he is by Dillard’s bar walkers, he ain’t seen nothing yet. Dillard is truly unwell, and since we’re the only ones who know just how unwell he is, we’ll be seeing all his scenes with fresh eyes from now on.
New episodes of The Walking Dead: Dead City season 3 premiere Sundays on AMC.
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