‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Season 3: New Clip Officially Reveals Jimmi Simpson’s Role!! Check It Out!!

San Diego Comic-Con is now in full swing, which means AMC‘s The Walking Dead universe has once again shambled into the San Diego Convention Center to share what’s next for its remaining survivors. This year, however, there’s a bit of a break with tradition. Although The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon was expected to debut its fourth and final season sometime in the near future, the Norman Reedus-led spin-off is skipping out on this year’s convention, leaving a bit of uncertainty surrounding Daryl and Carol’s final ride. However, The Walking Dead: Dead City still made the trip just in time to preview its third season, premiering this weekend on AMC.

Season 2 ended on a major cliffhanger, with New Babylon’s forces marching through the streets and Hershel (Logan Kim) storming out after Maggie (Lauren Cohan) decided against killing Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) after all. With Season 3 of Dead City, the two have once again decided their best course of action is to put the past behind them and work together to move forward. They’re now focused on bringing people together in Manhattan to rebuild, aiming to create the first thriving community the borough has seen in the post-apocalypse. Yet, as chaos rises around them, their old wounds and ways will make them question whether they’ve actually healed, or if their pasts will doom the people of New York all over again.

Morgan and Cohan joined their co-stars Aimee Garcia and Raúl Castillo, as well as showrunner Seth Hoffman and The Walking Dead chief content officer Scott M. Gimple for one final tease of what’s to come in the unlikely duo’s latest team-up. That included a sneak preview of the premiere episode launching this weekend. In it, Westworld alum Jimmi Simpson makes his Walking Dead debut, playing an odd survivor named Dillard, who has somehow managed to stay alive by hiding in plain sight. He’s chatting with Negan at a bar with a walker seated right next to him, laughing along as he translates the growls into a game of bang, marry, kill. Even Negan is curious what planet this man is from and, more importantly, how he’s stuck around this long, to which he credits his upstairs loft. Dillard has successfully built his own food chain to stay alive without anyone’s aid, using the bodies of walkers as food for maggots, which are in turn eaten by frogs, fed to turkeys, and so on. It’s a slightly silly, yet intuitive showcase of how the people of New York have stayed resilient through the apocalypse.

‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Season 3 Comes as ‘Daryl Dixon’ Gets Bad News

Additionally, the panel also shared a behind-the-scenes look into Season 3 with the help of Garcia, exploring the extensive work done on set to create Dead City‘s gnarly effects and tense scenes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all good news and gore from SDCC. Gimple also confirmed that, despite expectations that Daryl Dixon would premiere this fall, that will not be the case. Instead, Reedus and Melissa McBride will close things out with Season 4 sometime next year, which explains why the series skipped the convention hall this time around.

Perhaps the biggest change for Season 3 of Dead City is having Hoffman take over as showrunner from Dead City creator Eli Jorné. At least with critics, his reign over a walker-infested Manhattan is off to a rip-roaring start, with Season 3 debuting to a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, albeit with just five reviews posted. Collider‘s Shawn Van Horn hailed it as a massive improvement in his 8/10 review, writing, “If the series ends here, it’s a fitting conclusion, but if it returns, Season 3 confirms the right path forward, moving away from tired formulas and trying something different while also refocusing on the best traits of its leads.” Rounding out the cast are Gaius Charles, Željko Ivanek, Lisa Emery, and Keir Gilchrist.