SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the newest episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City Last year, The Walking Dead came to its end after eleven seasons, but the franchise is living on with its various spinoffs. Currently, fans are four episodes into the spinoff The Walking Dead: Dead City, which follows Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) in the ruins of Manhattan. While the spinoff will mostly be following new characters introduced alongside Negan and Maggie, appearances from older Walking Dead characters — even dead ones — are still possible.
This is what happened in the fourth episode of Dead City. The episode featured a flashback sequence that delved back into Negan’s past before the battle between the Saviors and Rick’s group. Mostly, the flashback was written to provide some more context for the relationship between Negan and the Croat (Željko Ivanek), but going back in time provided the opportunity for characters who were around back then to appear. Enter Simon, Negan’s former right-hand man played by Steven Ogg. Per ScreenRant, the scene saw Simon stepping up as Negan’s most trusted lieutenant after clashing with the Croat over the killing of a child.
Dead characters returning for special appearances isn’t unusual in the Walking Dead franchise. Even in the main series, it was something that we’d see happen on occasion through both flashbacks and hallucinations. Continuing to feature such special appearances in the spinoffs teases that anyone from years past is potentially bound to pop up next in a similar manner. It’s worth noting that Ogg’s Simon character was originally killed off in season 8 of The Walking Dead.
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Who Else Will Turn Back Up in the World of The Walking Dead?
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Watching dead characters return provides a whole new meaning to the name The Walking Dead. There will be other opportunities to bring back characters in the franchise beyond showing up in Dead City as well. Reportedly, a Tales of the Walking Dead follow-up is in the planning stages, and the anthology series spinoff could bring back characters from years past for standalone prequel stories.
“I will say that for Tales of the Walking Dead, my plan was to have a lot more of the old characters on there,” franchise boss Scott M. Gimple told AMC last year. “I hope we get to do that eventually and I really, really do want to get into these other characters and other mythologies and other situations, so I’m hoping these are the first.”
He added, “More Tales episodes or limited series or spinoffs. I have a lot of dreams of doing more. Right now, we’re concentrating on these, but give us a little while and I hope that we can jump into other characters. In some ways, we are working on some, but we’re not urgently working on them. We want to get these shows up on their feet and then start widening out the world again.”
You can stream The Walking Dead: Dead City on AMC+.
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