The Walking Dead: Lauren Cohan Explains Maggie's Lie on Dead City

[This story contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: Dead City season 1 episode 5, "Stories We Tell Ourselves."] It's true that the Croat (Željko Ivanek) took Maggie's (Lauren Cohan) son, Hershel (Logan Kim). And it's true that Maggie needs Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to get him back. But what isn't true is the story that Maggie told Negan and, eventually, Ginny (Mahina Napoleon). Maggie claimed that the Croat and his Burazi stole their grain with plans to return for more, taking Hershel hostage to coerce the Bricks into handing over their harvest. But Maggie lied. All along, the Croat wanted to trade Hershel for Negan and hand him over to the Dama (Lisa Emery). 

The truth came out in a flashback to the night Ginny ran away from the Bricks. She discovered that the grain Maggie said was stolen was, in fact, not stolen. As Maggie was overcome by the methane in the tunnels beneath the Croat's New Sanctuary, she flashed back to what really happened the night he took Hershel: as the Burazi took Maggie's son away, the Croat handed her Negan's wanted poster. She tracked down Negan knowing that the only way to save her son was to give up the man who killed his father. 

So what does Cohan make of this wrinkle not painting Maggie in the most heroic light? "I was so glad when [showrunner Eli Jorné] came with this story and that this was the twist," Cohan told EW. "It was something I just didn't see coming and couldn't have seen coming."

The penultimate episode posed a question to audiences, who may have an allegiance to either Maggie or Negan: "It's like, what would you do? If somebody said to you, here's this person and he may have changed, but you may need to say these things, what would you do?"

As New Babylon Marshal Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) comes to understand, the answer is perhaps not so black and white. "Is it really so black and white? You'd asked me back then, I would've said yes. But now? I don't know. Is it gray? Is it something else?" the lawman told the fugitive Negan, who twice saved the life of the man trying to haul him in to be executed by the New Babylon Federation. "Tranquillitas ordinis." The tranquility of order. "What if it's just stories we tell ourselves to sleep easier?"

"Is there capacity to change?" Cohan said of Negan and Maggie, who is haunted by nightmares about what her enemy-turned-ally did to her husband, Glenn (Steven Yeun). "Can you allow yourself to still honor the love that you had for your husband and know that they wouldn't have wanted you to live forever in the grief and the resentment and the rage against the person who did this? And ultimately, as humans, can we look at the most heinous act and say it's possible we can change? The jury's still out for her, but all the things that are happening along the way are as interesting to me as to whether or not she would forgive him."

The Walking Dead: Dead City airs its "Doma Smo" season finale Sunday, July 23rd, on AMC.

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