What happened to Hershel in Dead City? Logan Kim says the character "can't go back" from what he's seen
Hershel Rhee — Glenn and Maggie's son, played by Logan Kim — has spent three seasons of The Walking Dead: Dead City being kidnapped, recruited, and pulled between his mother and the people who took him. With season 3 airing on AMC from 26 July to 13 September 2026, Kim has explained where the character now stands and why the past seasons still shape him. Here's Hershel's full arc so far, plus the detail about his grandfather's pocket watch.
Hershel Rhee has one of the stranger CVs in The Walking Dead universe: born after Negan beat his father Glenn to death, kidnapped as a teenager, and then courted for two seasons by a Manhattan cult leader with excellent manners and homemade peanut brittle. Logan Kim, who plays him, summed up the cumulative effect in an August 2026 interview with CBR — and it's the closest thing the character has to a thesis.
Season 1: the kidnapping
Dead City opened in 2023 with Hershel already gone — snatched by the Croat (Željko Ivanek) and taken to walker-infested Manhattan, partly as bait to draw in Negan. Maggie (Lauren Cohan) recruited her husband's killer for the rescue, then traded Negan to the Dama (Lisa Emery) to get her son back. Hershel returned home furious with his mother's obsessions — and carrying a sketchbook full of drawings of a woman Maggie had never met.
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Season 2: the Dama's project
Season 2 (4 May to 22 June 2025) filled in what those drawings meant. Flashbacks showed the Dama's recruitment method in full: she untied him, apologised for his treatment, fed him, gave him her own coat, and lifted him above the city to sell a vision of Manhattan rebuilt — with Hershel as its designer. It worked. Across the season he:
- Tipped off the Croat about New Babylon's ferry crossing, enabling a firebombing that killed around 50 soldiers.
- Sided with the Dama openly, telling Maggie her fixation on Negan had defined his entire life.
- Set the finale's terms — the family could only move on, he told his mother, if she finally killed Negan. She stabbed him in the closing minutes.
The Dama, meanwhile, faked her own death in a fire using a walker as a body double — she let it, in her words in the finale, "burn until she got nice and crispy".
Season 3: the apprenticeship
Season 3 premiered on 26 July 2026 and runs to 13 September, with franchise veteran Seth Hoffman replacing Eli Jorné as showrunner and Maggie and Negan attempting to build Manhattan's first real community. Hershel has made his way back to his mother's side and taken up a medical apprenticeship under Luis (Raúl Castillo) — and the two Rhees have been talking about his grandfather's pocket watch, the one Hershel Greene gave Glenn back on the farm. The boy carries the name of the franchise's most beloved country doctor and is now training in medicine. Subtle, this show is not.
What Kim says about him now
Asked whether the character has shed what seasons 1 and 2 did to him, Kim told CBR:
"He can't go back from that." Hershel has seen too much for a clean reset, Kim explained — what's changed is that he recognises it now, and has matured around it.
Worth noting for the timeline-keepers: Dead City sits five to six years after the flagship show's finale, which makes Hershel roughly the same age Carl Grimes never got to reach.
Whether the Dama's investment in her protégé is actually spent remains season 3's open question. She went to considerable trouble to fake one death already.
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