Walking Dead: Dead City was sewer walker a variant, or something worse?

The penultimate episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City was a wild ride full of betrayals, lies, deaths, and a sewer walker straight out of a nightmare. But was that walker a variant or something altogether different?

This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Dead City, episode 5, “Stories We Tell Ourselves.” 

The most recent episode of Dead City found Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Ginny (Mahina Napoleon), and the Tribespeople descending into the sewers of Manhattan. There they battled methane exposure and a lot of walkers. Sadly, Tommaso (Jonathan Higginbotham) and Amaia (Karina Ortiz) lost their lives to the walkers, leaving Maggie and Ginny alone.

Ginny, still mute from the trauma she has experienced, knows a secret about Maggie. While at The Bricks, Maggie’s new home, Ginny discovered that the grain Maggie said was stolen by The Croat (Željko Ivanek) was safe inside the grain bin. Already planning to leave The Bricks to find Negan, this information gave her more reason than ever to find Negan and inform him of the lie.

In episode 5, Maggie and Ginny climb through a massive amount of dead walkers through the methane haze. As they come into a clearing, Maggie hears low growls; when she locates the source, she tells Ginny to run. Then out of the pile comes a huge gruesome mutated walker. Maggie is able to kill it, but what is this monstrosity?

The Walking Dead: Dead City – variant walker?

While the walker featured in this episode was like nothing viewers have seen in TWDU, this wasn’t a variant.

Showrunner Eli Jorné explains this walker in the Episode Insider. The sewers contain a massive amount of walkers, which The Croat uses for this methane production. In a previous life, The Croat was a scientist, and his knowledge has become instrumental in the apocalypse. He has discovered a way to make fuel from the dead bodies. Tommaso said that the bodies in the sewers were fresh deposits to The Croat’s methane bank, what he called “Feeding the beast.” This mutant walker has formed in the depths of the sewers where bodies have accumulated.

Jorné said that the idea of a Walker King was something he thought of years ago.

"What if a walker kind of stepped through one walker, and then another walker stuck its head through that walker, and they got all, like, tangled that way, and they had to start to kind of move together?"

While walking through the sewers, the group came upon a huge pile of goo, which Tommaso explained was fat from a pile of bodies that melted into one giant glob in the hot and methane gas-filled sewer. This Walker King is the beginning of such a pile, but this melted group still had their heads intact, meaning it could still be mobile and dangerous.

Dead City creators did an amazing job of bringing a brand new type of undead into the mix—this is one reason this series is the best spinoff in TWDU.

The Walking Dead: Dead City returns to AMC on July 23 at 9 p.m. ET with the season finale episode “Dom Smo,” which means “We are home” in Croatian. AMC+ subscribers can watch this episode on July 20.

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