The Walking Dead’s Danai Gurira-Penned Episode Is for Richonne Shippers

“We’ll always be together, even when we’re apart,” Michonne wrote in a letter to her children on The Walking Dead series finale. “We’re love, and love is endless.” That enduring and endless love between Danai Gurira’s Michonne and Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes is at the heart of new Walking Dead spinoff series The Ones Who Live, which Gurira and Lincoln co-created with showrunner Scott M. Gimple. But it’s episode 4, written by Tony Award-nominated playwright and executive producer Gurira herself, that was crafted with love for the most diehard Richonne shippers.

“The episode Danai wrote is pretty incredible,” co-star Lesley-Ann Brandt, who plays CRM Sgt. Maj. Pearl Thorne, told ComicBook. “I think it’s just for the purists. It’s for the hardcore ‘Richonners.’ That episode is for them.”

Brandt described the episode, titled “What We,” as “the climax of their love.” We can’t reveal what that means for Rick and Michonne, but ComicBook‘s review of the first four (of six) episodes called the Gurira-penned episode 4 “an emotionally-charged masterwork that encapsulates what The Ones Who Live is about.”

First announced as a trilogy of Rick Grimes movies, Gurira worked with Lincoln and Gimple to redevelop the planned features into the six-episode event series premiering Feb. 25 on AMC and AMC+. Gurira took creative point on “What We,” the culmination of years of unresolved storylines left up in the air after Rick was helicoptered away from The Walking Dead in season 9 and Michonne made it her mission to find him in season 10.

“[Writing episode 4] was a lot of work, and of course, it was going on simultaneously withall the other work that one has to do in this show,” Gurira told ComicBook. “We had already arcedthe series, the three of us, so we knew what this episode needed to be.And of course, there’s a process of getting the episode to where youwant it to be. And Gimple was like, ‘She’s the showrunner of thatepisode, don’t come to talk to me.’”

“And so I was the point person forthe episode, which allowed me to have a vision on it, but it was verycollaborative,” Gurira continued. “They were reading every draft, they were giving theirthoughts, their notes. And also, the episode before it was being tweaked,and as that tweaks, I have to tweak, because they have to work together.So ultimately it was a process, but I loved what it came to be.”

Gurira also oversaw post-production on the episode helmed by Breaking Bad director of photography turned director Michael Slovis, who was behind the camera on The Walking Dead episodes “Thank You,” “Something They Need,” and “Worth.”

“Theamazing Michael Slovis was the director, and he did an incredible job,” Gurira said.”It’s such a familiar story, but I wasexplaining a very different chapter of it to people, in a way that wehadn’t explored these narratives as a whole for the series. And thisepisode was definitely part of that. It was great, it was verycollaborative. It was also very solitary, and very little sleep.”

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live premieres February 25 and airs Sundays on AMC and AMC+.