The Walking Dead Reveals Secrets About Jadis and the CRM

[Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live episode 3.] When Jadis/Anne (Pollyanna McIntosh) disappeared with Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) aboard a CRM helicopter on season 9 of The Walking Dead, it left viewers with questions. Questions like: What happened to Rick? Where did Jadis take him? And why was Jadis snatching and then trading people to the helicopter group? Some of those burning questions were answered on The Walking Dead. Others went unanswered until Jadis returned (sans Rick) on The Walking Dead: World Beyond. And other questions were answered on Sunday’s episode of The Ones Who Live, titled “Bye.”

The episode began with a flashback to “years ago,” shortly after Rick’s former foe turned friend found him on the riverbed where he washed up after blowing up a bridge to save his loved ones from a walker herd. Rick, now a consignee clad in a jacket bearing the Civic Republic Military’s three-ring symbol, stepped foot for the first time into the Civic Republic of Philadelphia: the hidden city he’d spend the next eight years trying to escape.

Jadis, dressed as a civilian with long hair, approached Rick and told him how she traded people to the CRM in exchange for supplies when she was leader of the Scavengers. “My people and I, when I had people, we were approached by one of them. They proposed a resource exchange,” Jadis explained. “If we came across lost souls who needed saving, we would hold them and give them to the CRM. And if we found a threat, we’d give them to the CRM, too. In exchange, we got supplies.”

The Walking Dead revealed that Jadis trafficked people to the then-unnamed helicopter group, including the missing Heath (Corey Hawkins). Jadis’ junkyard was littered with clues: a hidden helipad among the heaps, a holding container marked with an “A,” and canned applesauce marked with the CRM symbol.

Jadis initially classified Rick as the “A” she needed to trade for extraction out of Virginia, only to tell the CRM helicopter pilot that she instead had a “B.” “I could have chosen to let you die on the riverbed, or I could have told them you were a threat,” Jadis said. “The CRM doesn’t take chances, but I did. Because I owed you.” Jadis saved Rick’s life, repaying him for saving her from the Heaps, but brought him to a place so secret that he could never leave.

Rick realized that Jadis wasn’t working consignment culling walkers because she traded him to the Civic Republic’s army. (On World Beyond, Jadis disclosed that she gave the CRM something “very valuable” in exchange for her “new life” at the Civic Republic.) 

Jadis then told Rick her plan to enlist in the CRM and move up the ranks. “This place has a 500-year plan to recreate the world as it was. Better than it was,” she said. “Remaking civilization, finally besting the dead — that seems like a perfectly fine way to spend one’s life.”

As revealed on World Beyond, Jadis trained under CRM Staff Sergeant Jennifer “Huck” Mallick (Annet Mahendru) and spent six years working her way up to rank of CRM Warrant Officer Jadis Stokes (a name taken from her former boyfriend, Seth Gilliam’s Gabriel Stokes). Under her superior officers, Lt. Col. Elizabeth Kublek (Julia Ormond) and Major General Beale (Terry O’Quinn), Jadis became a true believer tasked with investigating “corruption, ineptitude, and betrayal” within the Civic Republic Military… and carrying out the army’s clandestine “tactical military operations” that eliminated the Omaha Safe-Zone and Nebraska’s Campus Colony with zombie hordes and chlorine gas. 

Rick’s superior officer threatened him that should he escape with Michonne (Danai Gurira), Alexandria would suffer a similar fate: the CRM would hunt them down and kill their loved ones to cover up knowledge of the secret Civic Republic and their forces. As Okafor warned him: “There’s no escape for the living.” 

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