While I’m getting a little sick of repeating myself about the fact that The Walking Dead has suddenly erupted back into life, that doesn’t make it any less true.
With every passing episode of The Ones Who Live, you can almost see the strength returning to atrophied muscles and tired bones as the show builds on the great work done by the Daryl Dixon miniseries and moves toward a possible new golden age for the franchise. While such long lost attributes as intriguing character arcs and exciting set pieces no longer seem like such a luxury, the latest episode, Bye, manages to pump some genuine tension back into the twitching husk as a sizable battle of wills erupts between two major characters. However, this time, Rick’s ironclad determination isn’t pitted against a rival community or a cruel despot – no, this time he’s locking horns with Michonne herself and it’s all in the name of love.
Before we finally get into the ramifications of Michonne finally seeking out Rick, there’s still one more duck we have to get in line and that’s the person who has technically caused this entire mess in the first place: Jadis.
For those of you who are a bit fuzzy about where she came from, we get a super quick refresher from her time ruling the community known as the Scavengers with a bowl haircut and faked broken English, but once we’re up to date, we find that handing a wounded Rick over to the CRM all those years ago proved to be pretty beneficial to her. We find that she’s somewhat obsessed with Grimes and has been trying her luck with him periodically as she gradually rises through the ranks of the CRM, but once she finds out that Michonne has infiltrated the tiered infrastructure of Philadelphia, she decides to turn on the heat. Telling Rick that she’s stored all her knowledge of Rick and Michonne’s past in a safe place, she states that if either of them try to leave, she’ll be forced to lead the CRM to everyone he loves and exterminate them for security.
Meanwhile, Michonne is doing a predictably shit job of trying to pass as someone who lacks leadership skills as she wipes out Walkers during her clean up detail like the warrior woman she so obviously is. With Jadis already suspicious as hell and a recently promoted Thorne noticing that something (other than the moldering zombies) stinks, Rick has to resort to extreme methods to try and smuggle his wife out of Philadelphia before the ruse falls apart.
However, Michonne isn’t so easily put off by Rick’s attempts at emotional blackmail, and as her repeated, heroic deeds start to make everyone nervous, she enacts a desperate plan that not even Rick could see coming.
So far, the best thing about The Ones Who Live is how neatly compartmentalised the episodes have been while simultaneously telling a coherent story. While the first episode was solely devoted to getting us reaquainted with Rick Grimes and the second was to catch up with Michonne after she left the main series, the third continues to keep things nice and simple by focusing mostly on exactly how hard it’s going to be keeping Michonne’s warrior women tendencies under wraps. As a result, the first half of the series has resulted in a trio of episodes that have all been noticably different from one another while telling the same story. Needless to say, this has been somewhat refreshing considering that one of the major gripes of The Walking Dead in the past has been that it often got pretty repetitive and there’s a real sense that the showrunners are really putting the effort in to avoid old complaints.
One of those changes that works especially well is the fact that the inhuman determination so often displayed by both Rick and Michonne is now focused on each other as one is trying to get his partner to leave while the other is equally set on staying put. In many ways it’s the ultimate battle of a glass half full mindset with one that’s decidedly more glass half empty as Michonne’s overwheming optimism butts awkwardly against Rick’s more resigned nature.
It also raises questions about who is actually right. Has Rick been truly broken after all those years of failed escape attempts and is hopelessly overestimating the CRN, or is Michonne simply not accepting that they’ve both met their match? Considering that both characters have repeatedly been championed as people who instinctively know the right path, watching them foil each others plans for each other is a great, new twist for charscters who have been around for around a decade and the more Rick tries to play it safe, the more Michonne’s heroic nature glows like a lighthouse.
Thankfully, after two episodes of impressively cruel, shock deaths, we get to spend more time with the other, major players of this game with Pollyanna McIntosh’s hissable Jadis seemingly slowly turning into a Nazi as she rises up the ranks (no, seriously – just look at her uniform near the end of the episode) and Lesley-Ann Brandt’s Thorne utterly determined not to put up with any of Rick’s shit. Their very proximity to Rick and Michonne means that the pressure cooker tension builds nicely until a split decision by Thorne to maybe assassinate a troublesome Michonne actually has to believe for a fleeting moment that one of its core characters is in actual mortal danger.
We also get a little more time with Terry O’Quinn’s Major General Beale who still remains something of an enigma despite the series already reaching its halfway point – will he rise up to be a major antagonist or will the show hold off for some larger plan in the distant future, I have no idea; but to deploy him as an active problem now would surely diffuse the twin threats of Jadis’ plotting and Thorne’s mistrust.
However, as if to further cement that this new era of The Walking Dead is dedicated to throwing the odd narrative curve ball, the episode ends with a cliffhanger that turns the entire miniseries on its head when Michonne seemingly pulls an impressive checkmate on her husband and drags them both out of a speeding helicopter as they return to Philadelphia from a mission and achieves in mere seconds what Rick failed to manage in over five years.
Now that zombiedom’s premier power couple now have all the privacy they need to air their grievances, I expect the next episode to be loaded with drama, but if that means the show has now suddenly switched to an “on the run” episode, it ought to be a cracker. Oh, and Rick’s devastating put down of Jadis’ bowl cut may be the most savage moment in Walking Dead history. Hands down.
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