“Let’s face it, the ending is all that matters.” Taken at face value, this line from the penultimate episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City, “Stories We Tell Ourselves,” might suggest a certain cynicism on the part of creator Eli Jorné for his own genre. And indeed, given the pacing of this episode, and the lack of narrative energy in the show thus far, one hopes that the finale next week might go some way to salvaging an otherwise frustratingly stodgy series.

For much of “Stories We Tell Ourselves,” nothing really happens. People walk around - limping, tiptoeing, lurching - and they also run. Two characters we’ve had no reason to care about are lost. Another character we don’t care about tells, unprompted, a personal story to Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), because, one assumes, Jorné couldn’t be bothered to find a more organic way to make the character sympathetic. Regrettably, this unexpected overshare still fails to make us care about him.

The episode deals, at a thematic level, with the “stories we tell ourselves to sleep easier,” as Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) describes them. Those stories, he implies, are essentially falsehoods, and we are prompted to consider the ways in which each character lies to themselves. The Croat (Željko Ivanek)’s lie - to us and to himself - is that he is a villainous mastermind, when in fact he is a fawning, subservient lackey to the Dama (Lisa Emery). Maggie (Lauren Cohan)’s lie appears to be that Negan is a monster who deserves to have his life traded to the Croat for Hershel (Logan Kim)’s, as her real plan is revealed in the closing moments of the episode. Armstrong’s lie is that his work for the Babylon Federation is noble and just: “tranquility and order” are worth achieving at any cost. Tommaso (Jonathan Higginbotham) deceives himself with the belief that betraying his people to the Croat was for their own good. And the lie Negan tells himself? There doesn’t seem to be one, because Negan 2.0 is intended to be a self-aware and emotionally intelligent man who is unafraid to confront his weaknesses. Dead City should try to emulate those qualities if it gets a second season.