[This city contains major spoilers from the Walking Dead: Dead City season three finale, “Tenebrae.”]

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There’s an energy zipping around New York City these days. Everyone can feel it. And here’s a great thing about it: that energy’s zipping around real-life and fake-life New Yorkers alike.

For our purposes, let’s focus on the fake-lifers — the undead, in some cases — populating The Walking Dead: Dead City, the AMC zombie franchise’s Manhattan-based spinoff starring old foes Maggie and Negan (Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan). After a decade of on-screen rivalry, and without fully healing the wounds that incited the rivalry in the first place, The Walking Dead spent its third and recently concluded Dead City season rehabilitating the relationship between Maggie and Negan — and somehow, they pulled it off.

“I had so much fun,” Morgan tells The Hollywood Reporter about filming season three, which ended on Sunday night. “Lauren and I got to do scenes together we’ve never done before. It was very new, so it was very fun.

“That’s what we wanted to have people experience,” adds Cohan. “So much of what we did this year has never been done in any of the spinoffs, or even the mothership. That’s not even getting into the character part of it. It was just so much fun.”

It wasn’t easy, though, getting to a place where fun was possible within the world of Dead City — and it began with a big task of clearing out the past. The effort to exorcise the demons surrounding Negan and Maggie required clearing out two different characters: the Dama and the Croat, the show’s two main villains through the first two seasons. By the end of the first two episodes this season, however, both were dead, sent off with juicy final showcases for actors Lisa Emery and Zeljko Ivanek. For Ivanek, it was particularly personal, given how much of his own life he lent to the work.

“My dad passed away about a year before we started Dead City,” says Ivanek, who THR previously named the best new character in the Walking Dead spinoffs. “The Croat’s accent is basically my dad’s accent. Literally scene after scene, I was hearing my father’s voice in my head. So to keep him going kind of meant a lot to me.”

With old threats gone, even older threats found new room to evolve. The season then followed Maggie’s attempt to not only turn New York into a thriving safe haven, but to turn herself into a thriving person as well. Her son Hershel (Logan Kim) stepped further into the spotlight. Maggie even started catching feelings for Luis (Raúl Castillo), a doctor with a broken heart of his own. As Cohan tells it, the entire Walking Dead team was very aware of how folks might feel about Maggie moving on from Glenn (Steven Yeun) — which isn’t even the right way to look at it, according to Cohan.

“This season is the first time we’ve even acknowledge that these things have not existed for her for so long,” says Cohan. “There’s a self-awareness that this whole neighborhood, in the heart and the mind, have not even seen the sun. For me, it was really interesting to see Maggie begin to imagine [a love life], or even in that moment, to be having enough fun to dance, the freedom to be embarrassed, and to be girlish and silly.”

If Maggie’s arc was about reclaiming joy for herself, Negan’s was about faking it until you either make it, or make a huge mess. As usual, it was the latter. The final episodes of the season were defined by Negan making a bad choice to kill the wrong person, and worse, the wrong zombie. In doing so, he launched his new best friend Dillard (Jimmi Simpson) into a psychotic break that ended with several deaths, Dillard’s included.

“I knew the arc from the beginning,” says Simpson, who enjoyed his turn as Dillard as much as the fandom loved him, scars and all. “I love a character arc, and Dillard’s is so complete. And not only is the arc complete, the resolution at the end was kind of poetic.”

Dillard’s ending, last seen walking with walkers through the city, was so good that it even stopped Morgan, Simpson’s friend, from advocating for the character to survive the season. “I remember reading the script and that image of him being in his happy place was the happy ending, kind of this moment I wanted to see,” Morgan says. “So as much as I didn’t want him to leave the show, I thought, what a perfect fucking ending for this character and this season to have him meandering down the road in the spot that probably he was most comfortable being in.”

Right before the Dillard downfall, and right in the midst of his very bad decisions, there’s an episode where Negan finds time to fantasize about a world where he and Maggie met under better, less gruesome circumstances, in New York of all places.

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We see this fantasy unfold in an alternate universe where there are no zombies, and no zombie casualties. It also sees the return of Emily Kinney, reprising her role as Beth, who died during the flagship’s fifth season. Kinney, a singer-songwriter whose upcoming EP “I Cried When You Died” takes its inspiration directly from Walking Dead, tells THR her return to Beth felt like the perfect homecoming at the perfect time, though in truth: “She’s never far away from me.”

“It was so great having Emily back,” says Cohan. “It was one of my favorite episodes of The Walking Dead I’ve ever done.”

For both actors, the experimental episode served the season’s greater mission of bringing Maggie and Negan closer together. By the end of the season, Maggie tells Negan that he’s family now, which is hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t watched the show since Glenn’s death. But, in a sick way, it’s sort of Glenn’s death that forges the family to begin with.

“Please put that in your article,” Morgan says with a big laugh. “You’re right — in a very sick way. I love it. There is truth to that. We were fucking welded together in kind of unholy matrimony when that bat came down on Glenn’s head.”

“The thing is, Maggie sees Negan for who he is,” says Cohan. “He’s hurt, he’s purposeless… still making jokes, but she’s the one who gets to say: ‘I freaking know you, dude.’ And he gets to be the same mirror for her. It’s this very brother-sister aspect, where you want to shake the other sometimes, but they also just know each other so well now.

“We played a lot of the same scenes over the past 10 years,” says Morgan. “But we needed all of that backstory to make this feel real. It had to be there for us to get to the place we got to this year.”

After five seasons of the flagship and three seasons of Dead City itself, The Walking Dead finally found a way to make an alliance between Negan and Maggie not only believable, but root-worthy to boot, just in time for the story to end. While AMC has yet to confirm the show’s future, the Dead City season three finale certainly feels like a series finale.

But even if it’s time to say goodbye to New York, it’s far from time to say goodbye to Maggie, Negan or The Walking Dead writ large.

“Lauren and I have talked about how much life this has breathed not only into these characters, but this franchise,” says Morgan, when asked if he feels there’s more life in Negan now after Dead City season three. “There are places to go we haven’t been before. I really thought I’d done all there was to do with this character. Now, I’m reinvigorated.”

For her part, Cohan is even cagier about the future.

When asked if she has theories about the secret mission Maggie gives to Negan at the end of the season, Cohan goes quiet.

When asked if she already knows, but just doesn’t want the rest of us to know, she answers: “I don’t want you to know yet. There’s a future where what’s possible changes even the boundaries of where it’s possible.”

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The Walking Dead: Dead City season three is now streaming all episodes on AMC+.