Caution: spoilers ahead for The Walking Dead: Dead City episode 5.While The Walking Dead's elusive variants. The Walking Dead: Dead City episode 5 concludes with Lauren Cohan's Maggie Rhee and Mahina Napoleon's Ginny taking a tense walk through the zombie-infested sewers of Manhattan, and their journey ends with the surprise appearance of a creature unlike any seen previously. Boasting a cacophony of flailing arms and numerous protruding heads, this sewer-dweller would look more at home in Alien than the zombie apocalypse.
The natural assumption upon witnessing such a grotesque and unique sight would be that this zombie is one of The Walking Dead's variants. Introduced in The Walking Dead: World Beyond and The Walking Dead season 11's ending, zombies are developing new traits - speed, strength, intelligence, dexterity, etc. It's no huge leap to imagine The Walking Dead: Dead City's sewer zombie could be another variant mutation. While Maggie doesn't stop to confirm for sure, this wild zombie has a simpler, much more disgusting, explanation than simply being a variant.
Dead City's Zombie Monster Is Numerous Individual Zombies Melted Together
The Walking Dead: Dead City previously explained how the army trapped Manhattan's dead in the sewers. Those thousands of decaying corpses generate methane, which the Croat uses to power his community, periodically adding extra zombies to top up his fuel. Amaia crudely, but accurately, describes this process as "hotboxing dead people," and Tommaso encounters a huge mountain of melted fat that was once human bodies. With its many arms and faces, the zombie monster Maggie kills is probably what happens when individual zombies in Manhattan's "hotbox" sewer begin melting, but haven't yet become one big, anonymous pile of goop. Individual zombies melt into each other, but can still move around and chase prey.
However iffy the science behind The Walking Dead: Dead City episode 5's mutant-looking zombie may be, the reanimated chimera at least makes sense within Maggie and Negan's fictional universe. The Walking Dead has always maintained that zombies will remain animated so long as the head is intact. By that logic, it follows that if one zombie's body was to somehow melt into the torso of another, both undead partners would be able to writhe around seeking food, despite being ed together by their flesh.
Dead City's Melted Zombie Proves Walking Dead Doesn't Need New Variants
When The Walking Dead first debuted variants, the fresh gimmick made zombies more interesting for audiences and more dangerous to characters after 10 years of watching the same gormless corpses trudging around rural Georgia. Having said that, the concept also raised a slew of difficult questions over exactly why, when, and how zombies were changing - not to mention where they had been for most of The Walking Dead's timeline. The Manhattan sewer hotbox in The Walking Dead: Dead City manages the best of both worlds: a new and exciting zombie that doesn't require wholesale lore rewrites to explain.
Future The Walking Dead spinoffs can follow that precedent by finding other semi-scientific ways to explain unusual and unique zombies that pose bigger threats than your average flesh-munchers. Even so, The Walking Dead must still address zombie variants sooner rather than later. The evolved undead became increasingly common during season 11's Commonwealth arc, but despite both The Walking Dead: Dead City and Fear The Walking Dead season 8 featuring massive hordes containing thousands of zombies, variants have been inexplicably notable by their absence.
The Walking Dead: Dead City continues Sunday on AMC.