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The Walking Dead: Dead City has brought to the audience many multi-layered dynamics and relationships, but nothing comes close to feeling the unsettling relationship unfold between Maggie and her own son, Hershel.
As Season 2 comes undone, it becomes more and more evidently clear that the emotional ties holding them both together are slowly unraveling. And while a whole lot of Maggie’s past traumatic events have been heavily tied to Negan, I am truly starting to think that the real danger in The Walking Dead: Dead City might be hitting closer to home—Hershel himself.
The Dama sees potential—Hershel sees purpose in The Walking Dead: Dead City
This version of Hershel Rhee isn’t the tiny tot we last saw in TWD. In The Walking Dead: Dead City, he’s now grown up to be a teenager with scars that go way beyond the surface level.
While his mother, Maggie, defied hell to save him from the clutches of the Croat, his confinement wasn’t just merely a trial—it was more like a transformation.
The Dama, a calm-headed but daunting presence, did not merely just hold Hershel in confinement. She saw him. She offered him the most praise, reassurance, and one of the most important things for Hershel, i.e., validation.
She did not just provide him with shelter, but she instilled in him some sense of purpose that he never seemed to have before.
To most of the survivors, the city is a place of ruin, a tomb for them. But for Hershel? Well, all thanks to Dama, the city has become a safe space. He can very well imagine the future he can paint on its wreckage.
The Dama recognizes his emotional side and all of his vulnerability, and she nurtures it—not out of being kind to him but to eventually turn him into some kind of a weapon, to turn him into something useful to her.
In The Walking Dead: Dead City, this relationship that builds between the Dama and Hershel feels like a mentorship, an extremely calculated one at that.
The elevator ride to the rooftop wasn’t just symbolism or allegory; it was more of a visual turning point. Hershel is able to view the world in a different light, something he could not before.
He now views himself not as someone who is a survivor but as someone who has enough potential to be a leader, and this worldview is not something that he received from Maggie but from the Dama.
Maggie's love might not be enough to pull Hershel back
It's heartbreaking to think of, really. Maggie’s fight has always and at all times been fought to keep Hershel safe, but in The Walking Dead: Dead City, her motherly love feels like it goes up against the Dama and her influence and hold that she has on Herschel.
Maggie’s son isn’t the kid she remembered him to be—he’s now a person who seems to be conflicted, maybe even resentful. The Dama is the one who listens, while Maggie is the protector. Maggie talks constantly about Negan, Glenn, her pain, and past grievances but rarely about her son.
Her fixation on the past blinds her to the person her son is turning out to be in her present time.
And now, it's crystal clear that he’s not just drifting apart—he’s acting. He burned down a tire only as a warning. That’s not being a passive character. The Walking Dead: Dead City teases us with flashbacks of Hershel’s connections with the Dama, but in his time spent with Maggie is where the distance between them is much more evident.
He views NY as a place that has hope in opposition to Maggie, who views the place to be a city of ruin. And the scariest bit? The Dama does not need to feed in any more ideas or control him anymore. He now believes that this is his very own idea.
In The Walking Dead: Dead City, the most heartbreaking betrayal might not come from Negan, as most believe, or any other enemy who is on the outside. It could very possibly come from the child Maggie fought to save.
Hershel isn’t just under the influence of the Dama – he might just truly believe in her vision without any forceful measures being taken against him. And this is exactly what makes him, heartbreakingly, one of the most dangerous persons in Maggie’s life.
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