The Walking Dead Ignoring Variants In 2025 Is Making A Long-Running Zombie Problem Worse

Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for The Walking Dead: Dead City season 2, episode 5, "The Bird Always Knows".

Over the past few years, The Walking Dead has put heavy emphasis on making variants more important to the franchise, but Dead City completely ignoring these types of zombies continues an ongoing problem regarding the undead. While The Walking Dead has always been more about characters and human nature than it has zombies, the series still needs walkers to create a constant sense of danger. Understandably, the survivors slowly learned how to deal with the infected as time went on, hence why The Walking Dead introduced different types of zombie variants, successfully creating more conflict in recent projects.

Most of the franchise's drama still revolves around human-on-human disputes, which Dead City has highlighted, but variants have been used in shows like Daryl Dixon alongside The Walking Dead season 11's ending to increase the stakes for survivors. Fortunately, this decision proved to be effective, making Dead City's decision to snub variants in 2025 all the more surprising. The spinoff show has still provided plenty of entertainment throughout its second season, but the lack of unique zombie types has been extremely noticeable, and perhaps more worryingly, the absence of variants continues a disappointing trend for the franchise.

Dead City's Lack Of Zombies Prove Just How Obsolete The Walking Dead's Regular Walkers Are

Dead City's Central Characters Are Able To Deal With Regular Walkers Without Any Real Trouble

With The Walking Dead's main characters adapting to the post-apocalyptic world, they have made dealing with walkers look easy, and Dead City's lack of variants exposes just how harmless regular zombies have become. When the original show first started, the sight of a single infected was enough to terrify viewers, with hordes feeling almost impossible to overcome. Fast-forward to Dead City and these standard zombies have become completely obsolete. The spinoff's tall grass scene showed that the undead can still be dangerous under certain circumstances, but it takes an amateur survivor to even find themselves in such a situation.

The only reason a character like Maggie wound up crossing through the grass is because she was at the mercy of New Babylon, and even still, she and the other central survivors made it out unscathed. Furthermore, very few Walking Dead veterans are ever troubled by regular walkers these days, even when they're in hordes. During New Babylon's attempted public execution of Maggie, a horde disrupted the event, and while there was some fear that Ginny may have been bitten during Dead City season 2's chaotic scene, only the villains wound up dying at the hands of these zombies.

Unfortunately, this has become a common trend with The Walking Dead in recent years. It's very rare that a main character actually dies due to a bite, with Rosita being the last major survivor in recent memory to lose her life because of a walker. Even then, this only happened because she put herself in harm's way to save her baby, meaning she probably would have been fine otherwise. Only under very specific circumstances do normal zombies actually cause competent survivors any significant problems, making them useless without the presence of variants.

Why The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 Really Needs Variants

Variants Would Completely Raise The Stakes For The Upcoming War In Manhattan

With Dead City season 2 heading into its final few episodes, tensions will continue to rise, and variants would help further raise the stakes. Alongside having several menacing villains still around, Dead City has also teased a bear causing problems in the final few episodes, suggesting there will be plenty of drama to come. However, variants would add even more jeopardy to the upcoming power struggle in Manhattan. With New Babylon seemingly out of the equation, the battle for control is mainly between the Croat and Bruegel, but Maggie and Negan will undoubtedly be caught in the crossfire.

Having all these parties feuding will undoubtedly be interesting, but when the action actually commences, the addition of variants would introduce a whole new dynamic to the fight. It would make resources less important and put an emphasis on survival instinct, meaning only the strongest characters would survive. Add in the potential of Ginny, Hershel, and Negan's family also being in danger, and variants have the potential to really spice up the remaining conflict.

For the most part, Dead City season 2's danger has come solely from humans, with Narvaez being the only significant character to die via zombies. As a result, forcing the protagonists to deal with variants alongside the show's main villains would make escaping the island extremely difficult, suggesting it would be a real struggle to bring peace to Manhattan. Therefore, variants are by far the best way to give Dead City season 2's conclusion as much jeopardy as possible while also making zombies feel important again in 2025.