Rick and Michonne Reunite on The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live

[Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live episode 2.] Rick and Michonne may be the ones who live, but as Okafor warned: “There’s no escape for the living.” After the series premiere of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live ended with Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) setting sight on each other for the first time in years, Sunday’s episode revealed the events that led up to the long-awaited meeting before picking up where the Richonne reunion left off. The episode then ended on another cliffhanger: with Rick and Michonne trapped together, plotting an escape from the Civic Republic Military.

Eight years after a CRM helicopter airlifted Rick up and away from an exploding bridge on The Walking Dead, it was an exploding CRM helicopter that brought him back to Michonne on The Ones Who Live. As it turns out, it was Michonne’s companion Nat (Matthew August Jeffers) who fired the rocket that killed Okafor (Craig Tate) and shot down the helicopter co-piloted by Rick.

It was retaliation for another CRM chopper wiping out Michonne and Nat’s caravan group with chlorine gas — an attack that killed their friends, expecting couple Aiden (Breeda Wool) and Bailey (Andrew Bachelor), and one that left Michonne and Nat recuperating for an entire year. Just moments after Michonne found Rick, a CRM soldier who survived the crash and Michonne’s sword shot and killed Nat. (One death begets another: the two people closest to Rick and Michonne since they were separated died only moments apart.) Rick then killed that soldier and told Michonne: “I’m not with them.”

But with another CRM helicopter en route to the crash site, Rick told Michonne they were going to be separated — again — and promised to find her. He confiscated anything that could link them — including Rick’s boots and phone that Michonne found on Bloodsworth Island — and instructed her to lie about who she is, where she’s from, and why she’s at the crash site. Rick staged the scene to make it look like Nat alone killed the soldiers, and had Michonne put her hands up so the CRM could see Rick with his gun on her. “We will get away,” Rick promised, just before the pretend strangers were shuttled away aboard a helicopter.

While in designation intake at a base on the outskirts of the C.R.P. (the Civic Republic of Philadelphia), Michonne told a CRM council that her name was “Dana” and that she was with a group of 40 people in Georgia before their community fell. She pretended to be a “B” — not an “A” — and was admitted into consignment, which offers a path to citizenship after six years. 

In secret, Rick told Michonne that they can’t stop the Civic Republic’s army and that they’d never get away. Enforcing this is Rick’s superior: CRM Warrant Officer Jadis Stokes (Pollyanna McIntosh), the only other person who knows Consignee Dana Bethune is really Rick’s wife. “She found you. If anyone could, she could,” Jadis told Rick. “You have to know that if you try to escape with her, I will make sure that all those people that you love die, including a few that I like very much. You have to know that. I’m certain that you do. I’ve had to do things like that. My hands are already covered in blood. They can’t get any bloodier.”

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.