The Walking Dead Midseason Premiere: Who Are Michonne's Pets?

This week, Michonne once again took on (albeit briefly) a pair of "pet" walkers--stripped of their arms and jaws, the helpless ghouls were tied together and carried along with Michonne to help steep her in the smell of rotting zombie and thus keep her off the radar of more offensively-capable walkers. The episode also revisited, a bit, the question of just who her original pet walkers were before she had to decapitate them (when they were making too much noise while she and Andrea were trying to hide from The Governor). The comic books and the TV series appeared, until now, to have had a different backstory for the pets, but it seems as though that's been changed. In the early stages of the zombie apocalypse, the comic books revealed that Michonne's boyfriend Mike was bitten, but she did not realize he was infected. After returning from a supply run, she returns home to find that both Mike and his friend Terry have turned into walkers. She's able to lock the two away, but her house becomes surrounded by walkers and she's trapped. Because she notices that walkers don't attack each other, she hacks off Mike and Terry's arms and lower jaws and chains them up in order to escape her home. Having success with that, she kept them around to serve that purpose until she hooked up with Rick and his group and had more articulate sources of protection.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Danai Gurira revealed that her pets on the TV series were connected to Michonne's past, but she didn't go into detail as to whether they had the same back story as in the comics. Shortly thereafter, in an episode of the TV series, Michonne told Andrea that the men who became her pet walkers deserved what they got because "they weren't human to begin with." Many fans wondered whether this meant Mike and Terry were no longer the pets; there was never any indication in the comics that she had a particularly strained relationship with the pair. Since Michonne continued to talk with the zombified Mike after he was dead--and later talk to him in her head after she had to get rid of the pets--to help her cope with her situation, it can be inferred they had a stable relationship and cared for each other. So what's the verdict? This week it seems pretty clear that Mike and Terry are the ones who got turned into Michonne's pets--so what is this whole "not even human" thing? Well, here's where there's a bit of a tweak: In the comics, Michonne has two daughters, from whom she's separated early in the outbreak. She's never seen them since. In the TV series, it seems as though her son is still with them when Mike is very clearly starting to unravel. Reading between the lines, in fact, it seems that what happened is that Mike may have killed Michonne's son--he thinks as a mercy killing, because there is no hope in the world and everyone is likely to die in a terrible way. You can imagine, knowing Michonne as we do now, that the guys who killed her son--no matter how well-intentioned--wouldn't be long for the world, and why they would fall into the "not even human" category. Side note: On tonight's episode of Talking Dead, actress Danai Gurira revealed that Michonne chose her new pets (who lasted only part of the episode) because they were members of The Governor's invasion team who had been killed by Rick's people during the attack.