The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Series Premiere Recap: “Years”

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, AMC’s new Walking Dead spinoff, begins with Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) about to die by suicide. “I tried. Please know I tried,” a despairing Rick intones in voice over. In one hand: an old cell phone etched with a drawing of his wife, Michonne (Danai Gurira). In the other hand: a piece of broken glass he presses against his neck. On Rick’s television, a Civic Republic news anchor recounts a city falling to a walker incursion. He sighs, scoffs, and… he’ll keep trying. Rick Grimes lives.

A flashback to FIVE YEARS AFTER THE BRIDGE. Consignee Grimes is tethered by the wrist to a black-clad soldier of the Civic Republic Military. Against the backdrop of a fleet of CRM helicopters and glowing red lights, Rick and other leashed CRM consignees wearing jackets with the three-ring symbol are on a voluntary assignment to handle a level-three hazardous event. By eliminating the advance of ignited “delts” — walkers set ablaze by a fire — they’re protecting crops and food stores for the more than 200,000 people living in the C.R.P.: the Civic Republic of Philadelphia. 

Rick runs as far as the tether allows him before he’s yanked to the ground. Rick undoes his belt, wraps it around his arm as a tourniquet, readies his ax, and tells himself: “This is how.” Then Rick chops off his left hand and makes a run for it into the zombie-filled woods. “Consignee Grimes is breaking protocol,” a CRM soldier yells out, chasing after the fleeing amputee. Bleeding out, Rick stabs his ax into a delt’s brain and shoves his bloody stump into its smoldering corpse to cauterize his wound. And he almost gets away… until the CRM soldier shoots Rick with a taser that incapacitates his charge.

As he drifts in and out of consciousness, hazy memories flood his mind. Burning crops. Wind turbines that turn into the whirring blades of a helicopter. Alexandria’s jail cell. A farm house lit by the glow of flames. Rick and Michonne yell out to each other as the bridge filled with walkers explodes. In another lifetime, Rick and Michonne meet as strangers on a park bench. He’s lost, so she points him in the right direction. “You’ll get there,” she tells him. “I believe in you.” Rick asks the friendly stranger dressed in a purple business suit if she works in the area. “It’s not where I want to be,” she replies. “Are you where you wanna be?”

Rick wakes up. Back in this lifetime, Rick writes a letter to Michonne. “I always thought I would wait to tell you everything when we were finally back together, that it’d just be a story on the porch after the sun went down, when we could barely see each other, but I have to tell you now. Not everything. I can’t face everything. This is most of it, but all of it… it was always about getting back to you.” Inside Rick’s bag are old cell phones with drawings of Michonne and Judith on the glass.

“What happened on the bridge, I didn’t think I’d survive. And I woke up in a military hospital. An army found me, a force of thousands, protecting a working, hidden city of hundreds of thousands. Security and secrecy above all. That’s the army’s code. So no one can leave ever. The city governs itself, completely separate from the military. But it follows that one rule, that law from outside the walls. The people they rescue, they work in the outskirts, killing walkers for energy or growing food or managing the water, the waste.”

In post-apocalyptic Philadelphia, Consignee Grimes spends his years clearing delts for the CRM. “After six years of it, they get into the city, away from the army, from the outskirts. They’re called consignees. And I was one of them, but I was never gonna go in. I was gonna get away. I was gonna get back to you. God damn it, I was.” Consignee Grimes is the charge of CRM Lt. Col. Donald Okafor (Craig Tate), who reminds Rick: “I lobby the head of what is most likely the most powerful military of the planet on your behalf. I am possibly the best friend you ever had.”

Okafor spoke with Major General Beale about Rick moving up the ranks, but Rick thinks slumming it out in the outskirts gives him a better chance at escape. “It doesn’t,” Okafor says. “It just gives you another chance to die.” Okafor, his face scarred after an encounter with someone like Rick, believes Consignee Grimes is better suited for his program.

“First time I tried, the army didn’t know what to do with me. Because no one tries to escape. No one wants to. Would they put me in jail? Kill me? A lieutenant colonel named Okafor, he convinced them to keep me a consignee, and I kept trying to escape. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get back to you. I kept trying to get away. So they put me on a leash when we went out into the world. I couldn’t get away. I couldn’t get back to you. I was trapped. Okafor protected me because he said he saw something in me. He wanted me to join his program, to join their army, to use my life for them.”

“I keep on telling you: for people like us, there’s no escape for the living,” Okafor reminds Rick, telling him it’s time to accept things for what they are. “It cost your hand last time. Next time, it’s your life. Do something with it.” As Rick looks overhead and watches a CRM helicopter armed with bombs fly away, Consignee Pearl Thorne (Lesley-Ann Brandt) throws a glass at Rick and takes a swig from a half-full bottle of whiskey. It’s her way of thanking him: “You showed me I can’t get away.”

The outskirts of the C.R.P. are a lonely place for Rick Grimes. His only friend is fellow consignee Esteban (Frankie Quinones), a joker who spent two years getting Rick to talk. On a bench facing the Civic Republic across the water, Esteban likens the hidden city to the good life, and the outskirts are Alcatraz. It’s Esteban’s last day working utilities in the outskirts: starting tomorrow, he’ll be inside the Civic Republic’s air-conditioned walls with a promotion to Deputy Manager of Water and Power of Ward 3. After six long years, his consignment is over. Rick congratulates Esteban on his citizenship and thanks him “for whatever the hell this is.” With Okafor attempting to recruit Rick into the CRM, Esteban suggests he enlist and then make his next move when he’s outside the walls.

Rick is fitted with an all-black prosthetic hand that matches his all-black CRM gear. He trains in hand-to-hand combat with his fellow soldier-in-training, Thorne, and trains as a helicopter pilot operating a flight simulator. It’s all under the watchful eye of CRM Major General Beale (Terry O’Quinn), who receives a salute from Sergeant Majors Rick Grimes. In a CRM helicopter, Rick is Okafor’s co-pilot. “Is this the end of it and the start of something else?” Okafor asks. “It’s the end,” Rick replies, “and the start.”

In the ruins of a stadium, Okafor conspires with Sgt. Maj. Grimes and Sgt. Maj. Thorne. It’s been a year since Thorne and Rick enlisted with the CRM, but Okafor’s secret program isn’t about Thorne and Rick becoming soldiers. “It’s about you two becoming leaders,” he explains, and he’s going to help them become part of CRM force command. “I tried to escape four times,” Rick reminds him. “I tried to kill you,” adds Thorne of Okafor’s facial scar. And that’s why they can help him change the CRM from the inside.

Thorne believes in the operational security of the CRM — the city runs itself, and the military runs the world outside. It may be civilization, Rick argues, but people can’t leave. They’re not free. Okafor declassifies the “A” and “B” classification system: “The CRM designates people they find as A’s and B’s. A’s have a strength. A’s will die for what they believe in. People follow A’s. The people we cross in the world, the few we bring in, they’re classified as B’s. Everyday people who are just trying to survive. B’s get in. A’s are sent away and killed, except you two.” Rick was an “A” before Jadis/Anne (Pollyanna McIntosh) branded him a “B” when she fished him out of the riverbank back at the bridge.

Okafor needs strong leaders like Rick and Thorne. “A’s” who become soldiers, who become leaders, are the only thing that can change the CRM from the inside. “Being the monster to fight the monsters, that can’t last,” says Okafor, who carried out the bombings of Atlanta and Los Angeles as part of the U.S. military’s sunset protocols and Operation Cobalt. They’ll learn the rest of the CRM secrets when they move up the ranks and receive the Echelon Briefing: “The whys, the things 90% of our force doesn’t know about and 100% of our city doesn’t.” When Rick questions why he’d go along with Okafor’s secret briefings if he’s an “A,” his superior answers: “Because I believe if either one of you had a chance to save the world, you would.”

“He wanted to change things, change the army without them even knowing it,” Rick writes in his letter to Michonne. “And he wanted my help to do it. I’d play along, but it wasn’t my fight.” Thorne threatens to kill Rick if he risks her future with the CRM, revealing she was a submarine worker in the South African Navy when Okafor fished her out of the Atlantic Ocean. Thorne fired the shot that grazed Okafor’s face when he ruined her attempt to get home, but she’s come to accept she’ll never see her “someone” ever again. Rick refuses to believe that the people they want to get back to are gone, including his wife. “She’s not. They aren’t,” Thorne says through gritted teeth. “We are.”

“Early on, the army had found two other cities, Portland and Omaha. Not as big, not as sophisticated, and not keeping themselves secret. All three cities became an alliance, even though two don’t know where the third is. The world is so much bigger than we knew, Michonne, so much better, and so much worse.”

Rick meets with Beale, who reveals that the CRM was once the Pennsylvania National Guard. Okafor was with the Air Force when the military bombed Atlanta with napalm and went AWOL rather than carry out orders to bomb Philadelphia. Okafor switched sides, bombing 4,000 Marines at Lincoln Financial Field. Beale then tells Rick that he and Thorne would never have been allowed into the CRM if not for Okafor, who vouched for them to be let into consignment and then the army. When Beale asks if Okafor is up to anything he should know about, Rick lies: No. “You tried to escape four times. Why are you here?” Beale asks. “Do you want to kill? To die? Or is all this just another attempt to escape?” Rick has Beale look into his eyes… and has his answer.

“Everything was about secrets. The army kept the city a secret at all costs. Everything the army did was secret to the city. And then there were the soldiers with those blood-red stripes keeping what they did a secret to the whole force. Secrets on secrets. And the only thing I cared about was holding onto mine.”

After another secret meeting with Okafor and Thorne, Rick keeps his own secret: he’s studying blue prints for Civic Republic water lines and sewage access tunnels. Rick refuses to stop trying to get home. Esteban, now Ward 3 Water Manager, tips him off to a tunnel that will take Rick due east to a junction about a mile out and provides the code to a padlocked gate. “I have to keep trying. I won’t stop,” Rick says. “I’m getting there. I’m getting home, or I’m dying. That’s it.”

It’s during a CRM resource run to the Gen-Klor Chemicals plant with Thorne that Rick makes another escape attempt. Rick takes a walker body, cuts off its hand, and leaves it to burn with his dog tags to make it look like Rick died at the abandoned chemical plant. “‘There’s no escape for the living,’ so I had to make sure they thought I was dead.” Ruining Rick’s plan is a little girl (Alexis Rae Forlenza), whose family were turned into undead delts taken out by the CRM. Rick saves the girl from walkers, but he’s forced to abandon his escape attempt when Thorne locates the evacuee. Rick asks Thorne for her help, and she gives it: “He would have found you, and whoever you’re running to. He knows about you, Grimes.” The resource extraction complete, the CRM rolls out… with Sgt. Maj. Grimes in tow.

Back at base, Rick sneaks into Okafor’s room and presses a blade to his throat. He interrogates the Lt. Col. and finds out that Okafor confiscated the message in a bottle that Rick tossed into the water on Rat Island during his third escape (in The Walking Dead series finale). “‘I think of the dead all the time,’” Okafor begins, revealing he learned Michonne’s name from the note. “Who f—ing knows?” Rick growls. Okafor answers, “Michonne is an unusual name. Not many people out there, but if you start the search around where we picked you up… that’s potent information.”

Okafor tells Rick that if he escaped the CRM, they would send him to clean up his mess and finally erase Rick. “You are my charge. I’m the one who’d have to kill you and Michonne and anyone else you ran into out there. Just knowing about this—” before Okafor can say anymore, Rick kicks him in the face. He doesn’t care why Okafor’s red-striped soldiers come back covered in blood or why the helicopters go out with bombs that don’t come back. He doesn’t care about the Civic Republic or its people. He cares about his wife, and his daughter, and making his own choices that will get him home. Okafor tells Rick he lost everything, including his wife: she was one of the 4,000 Marines who died when Okafor refused to “liquidate” Philly. When Okafor gets the upper hand, Rick urges Okafor to let him go. That doesn’t work, so Rick puts Okafor’s gun to his head. “Do it. Please.” But Okafor won’t pull the trigger. Rick Grimes lives another day.

Rick is moved to Logistics with Thorne, where he’ll spend the next 12 months converting a college in the Cascades into a forward operating base for the CRM Frontliners. In one year, all of the military’s top commanders will convene at a summit there to open the base. Okafor calls it Rick’s path to the higher echelons of power, but Rick doesn’t want power. “That’s the thing,” Okafor says. “You already have it.”

In Rick’s apartment, Thorne turns on the television to the news broadcast from the beginning of the episode. It’s reported that the Alliance of Three is now an alliance of two: Omaha has fallen, and nearly 90,000 people are dead (events that happened on The Walking Dead: World Beyond). Thorne believes that Omaha fell because the safe-zone wasn’t a secret, reaffirming her believe that what the CR is doing is right. She then tells Rick that the little girl they saved at the chemical plant was the last survivor of her family. The girl hid from the delts for two days before stepping out to die when they found her.

“You and me and that girl, we all want to be somewhere else, with someone else, but we got stuck in the right place. We did,” Thorne says. “And you are gonna see that someday. I’m not sorry I stopped you. I’m not sorry I saved your life, even when you didn’t want it to be saved.” Before she leaves, she drinks to there being “one more good man in this world. One more good man to try and save the world… whether he wants to or not.” Rick considers suicide — after all, there’s no escape for the living — but writes one last letter to Michonne.

“I thought about ending it, just stopping it all. But then — then it would just be nothing, wouldn’t it? All of it, for nothing. I couldn’t do it, but I still decided to die. I’ve been writing you letters the whole time, reaching out, to feel something, writing just to imagine you could read them. This is my last one. The last letter I write to you that you’ll never see. I love you. I don’t see the dead anymore, or the ones I lost, or the sun, the sky, or the water. I don’t see you anymore. I just see what’s ahead. Metal rotors and gun oil and blood. What I have to do, what I can do to help save the world, even if you don’t know I ever did that.”

Another year passes as Rick and Thorne convert the old college in the Cascades into an operational CRM base. “I love you so much. I love you so, so much. I tried. Please just know I tried.” Rick holds his letter, and his phones with drawings of Michonne and Judith, and throws them into the fire inside an oil drum. Burning away his old life. “I tried… but I failed.”

Rick’s dreams of Michonne throughout the episode culminate in that other life where he’s stuck at a dead-end job who has lunchtime rendezvous with Michonne. “You’re not stuck anywhere,” she tells him, admitting she’s not where she wants to be, either. “But I’m not stuck. We can make this whole damn world ours if we want to.” They kiss… and then this happy dream is consumed by flames, spinning wind turbines, the whirring of helicopter blades, and burning crops.

NOW. Sgt. Maj. Rick Grimes co-pilots a helicopter with Lt. Col. Okafor, who mentions that Rick hardly talks anymore. “I’ve been thinking about this night when I was a kid. 7 years old. I was thirsty, couldn’t sleep, so I went to get some water. Old house, squeaky floorboards, trying not to wake my family,” Rick recalls, explaining his recurring nightmare of the burning farmhouse. “I was on the stairs… and I saw a light in the kitchen. It was orange. The crops were burning. I was so scared, I couldn’t move. Then, my dad was there.He looked like a monster. Half his body was burnt, but he was there to get me out. He said I didn’t need to be scared, that it was just the burning, that the flames were protecting the plants for the next harvest. He said, ‘It may look like the end of the world, but it’s only just the beginning.’ He was so certain, so steady, and… it made me calm. I believed him.”

Rick’s father survived, and the Grimes’ got a new barn and a new house. “Next year, the harvest was the best it ever was. Years later, after my dad died, my mother told me… that it wasn’t lightning. That he lit the fire. That the farm was gonna fail… and what he did saved it. He saved us,” Rick says. “And it just rocked me. I thought he was the most honest man I knew. My mother said what he did wasn’t right. She said that the scars and the pain, it just reminded him… that he saved us. I’m in.”

Okafor knows that Rick is the right thing for his plan — no more “A’s and B’s, no more Omahas.” He then tells Rick, “When you get to that point, swear on the sword. Don’t let it take. You’ll know.” Just then, Okafor is KIA by a whooshing projectile that penetrates the helicopter and impales him. Another explosion rocks the blood-covered chopper, sending it crashing to the ground. Rick radios the base and the soldiers hit their PRBs to send an alert to the downed helicopter, but their attacker is on them.

Another missile takes out two of Rick’s soldiers. Then another projectile sends the CRM soldiers flying. A helmeted woman with a sword approaches the soldiers, removing their helmets and slitting their throats. Rick goes for his gun, but the helmeted samurai kicks it out of his hand and swings her sword. The blow is deflected by Rick’s gauntlet, and the fight ends with the sword to Rick’s throat. The samurai removes the CRM soldier’s helmet… revealing the face of the man she lost eight years ago. It’s Michonne, in the flesh. Not a dream.

She found him.

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