Fasten your seatbelts. Like a CRM helicopter flying through a lightning storm, the otherwise unshakable Richonne relationship hit some turbulence on Sunday’s episode of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live. The heart-wrenching episode, titled “Bye,” saw newly-reunited couple Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) pretending to be strangers as they plotted their escape from the Civic Republic Military, only for Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) to throw a wrench into those plans. Enforcing the army’s code of “security and secrecy above all,” Jadis reminded Rick that there’s no escape for the living.
After Rick persuaded Sgt. Maj. Pearl Thorne (Lesley-Ann Brandt) to convince the CRM that its newest consignee was a “B” rather than an “A,” Jadis revealed that she was the officer investigating Michonne’s fabricated backstory. Rick’s former foe turned friend turned foe again told him what would happen if Rick and Michonne escaped together: a CRM reclamation team would find them, erase them, and then kill their loved ones back home at Alexandria to ensure that the Civic Republic and their military force remained secret.
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Despite the threat, it appeared that Rick and Michonne made their escape, albeit separately and at different times. However, it turned out that Rick planned for his wife to get away alone with a boat — without Michonne knowing she was, in fact, leaving without her husband. “I’m not coming. And if you don’t go, you’ll never get away, and we both die here,” read Rick’s note left at a scene staged to make it look like Michonne died during the attempt. “The only way to get you back to Judith is that I stay here to make sure. I love you forever. If you love me… you’ll go.”
But Michonne didn’t go. Rick and Michonne were deployed together to the CRM’s Cascades base with the Frontliner corps and the newly-promoted Command Sergeant Major Thorne, who dismissed her charge when Michonne went AWOL during a mission. Thorne remanded Michonne into Rick’s custody and ordered him to escort the consignee on the cross-country helicopter trip back to the Civic Republic’s army base, and then told him to report to Major General Beale (Terry O’Quinn) for post-mission debriefing.
“I belong here, you don’t, and you will never change that. It’s over,” Rick told Michonne in a brutally emotional exchange. “Everything we had is broken.” But while en route to Philadelphia, the couple’s choppy copter ride ended dramatically mid-air when Michonne, refusing to let Rick go, held onto her husband and then jumped to freedom — or their doom — into stormy waters.
“He’s hoping against hope that she goes. He’s done everything he could to get her to go,” showrunner and series co-creator Scott M. Gimple explained on The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Episode Insider. “Michonne sees that boat [without Rick] and [her reaction is] expletives and just bewilderment, because this is Rick Grimes, this is the man she loves.”
“She faces him and starts to see his position in this army and how he seems to be embedded in it in a way that he’s not able, or willing, to leave,” added co-creator Gurira. “That’s when [Michonne] sees there’s a lot going on here.”
For Rick, who sacrificed himself for his loved ones eight years ago at the bridge, staying behind so Michonne can escape is another act of self-sacrifice. “Essentially, everything he’s been doing for the whole of the first episodes is in order to save her life and sacrifice his own,” co-creator Lincoln said. Rick and Michonne may be the ones who live, but according to Jadis and Okafor, there’s no escape for the living.
“Rick is trying to push Michonne away in any way he can, because he truly believes she is in danger,” Gimple said. “And she is, so he doesn’t care. He’ll break her heart.” As for Rick telling Michonne that Richonne is “over,” Lincoln added, “Never say that to Michonne, ’cause she pulls you out of a helicopter. Which, frankly, is one of my favorite ends of any episode we’ve ever done. It made me so happy. I just thought, ‘This is absolutely bonkers, but we’re doing it.’”
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.
