The Walking Dead has been a staple of prestige television for the better part of two decades. Credited with ushering in the age of big-budget prestige television, the walkers and the characters trying to not join them are very much embedded in pop culture in a similar – but arguably more expansive – way to the world of Westeros.

AMC has indulged almost every whim of the showrunner, Scott Gimple, green-lighting an absurd slate of spin-offs from mini-series featuring one-shot tales to multi-season runs. While some see the setting as somewhat tired now, the finale to what is said to be the penultimate season of Dead City has seemingly brought TWD back to its best.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead!

A Seemingly Impossible Success

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Starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan, The Walking Dead: Dead City was always going to be a bit of a hard sell conceptually. In the mainline show, the two are mortal enemies, with Negan having brutally taken out Maggie’s husband just to prove a point. It was a shocking moment that injected a huge boost into the show.

As the unequivocal villain from the main group’s perspective, viewers came to like Negan. After all, it takes a good villain to bring out the best in your heroes. It was very much Morgan’s charisma, and the journey Cohen’s Maggie was going on, that set them up as fan-favorites, which helped to sell the Dead City pitch.

Over three seasons, it’s been somewhat hit and miss, carried by its stars through a mixed bag of writing decisions and coherence. The third season quickly set the story straight, though, and followed it to what fans and critics hail as a well-earned, once-impossible conclusion where Maggie and Negan have one another’s trust.

It tees up a fourth and final season rather well. Negan looks to be Maggie’s head of security now, seemingly tasked with also finding a way to reach the other boroughs beyond Manhattan. This path would seemingly set up another conflict quite naturally and perhaps give Negan a fitting full-circle end by sacrificing himself for Maggie at some point.

Even More Walkers Stumbling This Way

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The end of Dead City’s third season isn’t the last of The Walking Dead in the near future. The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon will conclude next year, and the brand continues to branch out across entertainment. In online gaming, the hit slot series that includes The Walking Dead Cash Collect has now expanded into instant win games.

Found among the collection of slots and games, The Walking Dead Scratchcard is an AMC-licensed, official game from the TV show, featuring instant-win mechanics and plenty of walkers to scratch through. Rick, Michonne, and Daryl also feature in a new arcade-style release that replays the All Out War storyline from the comics.

A sprawling franchise to be sure, many have wondered when The Walking Dead will run out of steam. The reception of Dead City this year has certainly given it a hefty shot in the arm, so the fourth and final season will almost certainly be announced in the near future. After that, they looked primed to slow down a bit.

According to Gimple, it’s now a “different time” in Hollywood, with the “urgency and the speed” once seen in the development of their many shows likely being dialed down. More projects are in development at the studio, he notes, but how quickly they’re put into production and released isn’t yet known.

Dead City’s finale will keep audiences hungry for more for at least another couple of years, giving Gimple and AMC ample time to work out the next steps of their still-walking series.