The Walking Dead’s “A” and “B” Meaning Revealed

[Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for the series premiere of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live.] It’s a mystery that spanned three Walking Dead shows: what are “A’s” and “B’s”? Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) was involved with trafficking people to the three-ring group that helicoptered Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) off The Walking Dead, who we later learned are the Civic Republic Military. It was under this binary classification system that Rick, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) were all captured and designated as “A’s,” only for Jadis to radio a CRM helicopter that she had a “B”: an injured Rick.

The CRM helicopter pilot told Jadis she would need an “A” for extraction from her junkyard to the Civic Republic, a hidden city of 200,000 survivors in Philadelphia. Jadis initially said she had an “A” ready for transport, but after Rick blew up a bridge filled with walkers and washed up on a riverbank, Jadis reached the pilot and told him: “I have a ‘B.’ Not an ‘A.’ I never had an ‘A.’ He’s hurt, but he’s strong.” Jadis saved Rick’s life, but then traded him to the Civic Republic’s army as her price of admission into the secret civilization where Rick has been trapped for the past eight years.

The “Years” series premiere of The Ones Who Live reveals that Rick spent the first six years after the bridge on consignment as the charge of CRM Lt. Col. Donald Okafor (Craig Tate), who recruited Rick into the military ranks despite his four failed escape attempts. Rick spent the next two years moving up the CRM ranks as a helicopter pilot and soldier with fellow former consignee Pearl Thorne (Lesley-Ann Brandt) as part of Okafor’s secret program.

“The CRM designates people they find as A’s and B’s,” Okafor explains. “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 and Thorne are “A’s,” but Okafor convinced CRM Major General Beale (Terry O’Quinn) to allow them into consignment and then the army. Okafor needs strong leaders to move up the ranks and change the CRM from the inside, but without Beale and the army’s knowledge — a Trojan horse. “I believe A’s who become soldiers, who become leaders, are the only thing that could possibly change the CRM,” Okafor tells his trusted Sergeant Majors.

The Walking Dead: World Beyond revealed the fate of “A’s”: test subjects for the CRM’s zombie experiments. Beale and former CRM Lt. Col. Elizabeth Kublek (Julia Ormond) founded Project Votus — a study of live test subjects through death to further the CRM’s research on reanimation — but it was CR Research Facility scientist Dr. Lyla Belshaw (Natalie Gold) who conducted the classified experiments. 

“A’s” are suffocated with a green liquid chlorine gas and then the victim is studied as they turn. Through this research, the CRM aims to figure out what makes the dead turn, what keeps them animated, what slows their decomposition rates, and what feeds their appetities. If the CRM can “turn off those triggers,” as Belshaw put it, humanity could “eliminate the dead as a threat and eradicate them from the earth.” Essentially, a potential cure for the zombie virus.

New episodes of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live premiere Sundays on AMC and AMC+. Stay tuned to ComicBook/TWD and follow on Facebook for more TWD Universe coverage.