The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Episode 3 Recap: “Bye”

YEARS AGO. “Bye” begins with a flashback showing consignee Rick Grimes’ (Andrew Lincoln) orientation day at the Civic Republic of Philadelphia, where he encounters Anne/Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) shortly after she had a CRM helicopter airlift him away from The Walking Dead season 9. Jadis tells Rick that the Civic Republic Military approached her about a resource exchange when she was leader of the Scavengers, explaining that she traded people for supplies. She gave Rick to the CRM as her admission into the hidden city, saving his life at the cost of trapping him in purgatory: “You brought me somewhere I can’t leave,” Rick says, telling her he’s going home.

HOURS AGO. Eight years later, Rick returns to the Civic Republic army’s base after his superior officer Okafor (Craig Tate) was KIA. Rick tells fellow consignee-turned-soldier Pearl Thorne (Lesley-Ann Brandt) that he would have met the same fate if not for a woman in designation intake: Michonne (Danai Gurira). Pretending to be strangers, Rick tells Thorne that Michonne is an “A,” and he doesn’t want them to send her away. Okafor lives on in them, Rick says, convincing Thorne to vouch for Michonne the way Okafor lobbied for them. “You helped me. I’m here,” Rick says. “She should be, too.”

NOW. Rick’s superior, CRM Warrant Officer Jadis Stokes, is investigating the new consignee. Jadis is the only other person who knows that consignee Dana Bethune — a “B” with a fabricated backstory — is secretly Rick’s wife. Jadis agrees to keep Rick’s secret between them, but reminds him what will happen if he tries to escape with Michonne: she’ll have their loved ones back at Alexandria killed. Rick threatens to kill Jadis, so she tells him her contingency plan: in the event of her untimely demise, a file will expose everything the CRM needs to know about Rick and Michonne. If Rick and Michonne escape, a CRM Reclamation team will find them, kill them, and then, “Everyone back home dies.” When Rick says that Jadis didn’t threatenthe people he loves before, she says it’s because she knew he couldn’t get away. But Rick and Michonne, together? “You can do anything.” 

Michonne/”Dana” is suspected to be an “A,” but Thorne took her as her charge. Michonne, put to work culling walkers, confirms what Jadis suspects: The CRM has stopped Rick again and again, but they can’t stop Rick and Michonne. She’s sure they’ll get away — together. Michonne tries to hide that she’s an “A,” but she’s extremely proficient at putting down delts with her killstick.

At Okafor’s funeral, CRM Major General Beale (Terry O’Quinn) eulogizes the former Air Force pilot who carried out Operation Cobalt for the U.S. military but refused to bomb Philadelphia, thus “ending everything he was.” From that sacrifice, like a phoenix from the ashes, the Pennsylvania National Guard became the Civic Republic Military, the “last light of the world.” Later, Thorne reminds Rick of her loyalty to Okafor: he saved her when she was adrift in the Atlantic Ocean. He classified Thorne as an “A,” but recruited her to the CRM with Rick to change the Civic Republic’s force from the inside. Beale approaches Sgt. Maj. Grimes and Thorne to tell them that Okafor saw their potential as leaders in the CRM. Beale believed they weren’t worth the trouble, but Okafor made it his mission to prove them wrong.

Beale tells Rick that his perspective is still changing, but he recalls the Ancient Greek word “pharmakon.” It means both “poison” and “the cure,” and it’s the word that comes to mind when he thinks of Sgt. Maj. Grimes. He’s still unsure about Rick, but more trusting of Thorne: she’s promoted to Command Sergeant Major Thorne. She tells Rick that Beale gave her The Echelon Briefing, which contains the most top-secret of classified information. Her first order is for Rick to take over logistics at Cascadia Forward Operating Base, where CRM commanders — every senior officer, every decision maker, and the entire Frontliner force — will soon convene for the opening summit. Thorne also tells Rick that Consignee Bethune is on his radar, and reminds him that her charge now reflects on her. She’s moving up, and she can’t have Bethune pull her down. “You didn’t hear what I heard. You didn’t see what I saw,” she says. “You will.” 

In private, Rick plots an escape with a cache of maps and blueprints. The next day, he secretly passes a note to Michonne with directions that will get her out of the building, under the base, and away to freedom. But first, he’s left her something hidden in a locker: her sword. Under cover of darkness, Michonne follows Rick’s instructions to the letter through the sewers, making her way to the rendezvous point on the outskirts of the base. Rick stashed a canoe and a bag, and put a consignee jacket on a mangled corpse in the water. There’s no Rick. Just a note: “I’m not coming. And if you don’t go, you’ll never get away, and we both die here. 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.”

The next day, Rick tells Jadis that Michonne is gone, “And you’re helping me make her stay gone.” Jadis doubts that Michonne left without Rick, but he says she didn’t know she was escaping without him. He made it look like Consignee Bethune died trying to escape and Jadis, as the investigating officer, must make sure the cover up is solid. Jadis says she’ll be on point when “Dana” is discovered dead, but she’s on a new assignment: the first security audit at the Cascadia Base. If Rick wants to kill her before she leaves, Jadis reminds him, “I already left them all the answers you don’t want them to have.”

Thorne summons Rick to the Harvest Point, where he’s surprised to see Michonne back on the wall clearing walkers with fire in her eyes. She risks blowing her cover, and Thorne is suspicious that her charge is so effective at killing the dead. Rick sneaks Michonne into an alley to talk, but she doesn’t say a word as he explains himself. “All these years, the only way I wasn’t killed was one man saving my life over and over. The only way you get away is if someone is here making sure,” Rick says. “It’s taken me years to know I can’t go anymore. I asked for help, I didn’t get it. To get away, you need someone on the inside. I’m that for you. I said that if you loved me… you’d go.” Michonne looks at him, and without a word… she goes.

It’s Michonne’s turn for orientation inside the walls of the C.R.P., and in voiceover, she talks to Judith. “Someone told me I had to know when to go. I had a chance to go home, but I couldn’t do it without the brave man. Maybe I should have. Just when I wondered if he could have been drawn in by the ambition and the hope of this place, that it could’ve replaced us, I found something.” Among booths of goods and services, she finds a humble stall surrounded by old televisions and cellphones converted into canvases for handmade artwork: Benjiro’s Portraiture and Art. She recognizes the etched white lines as the same drawings on the phone she found in Rick’s belongings — including the “rick” phone marked with a portrait of Michonne and Judith, and Japanese lettering that Nat (Matthew August Jeffers) translated to mean “Believe a little bit longer.” 

Benjiro (Julian Cihi) recognizes Michonne as the woman that Rick had him draw. He tells her that Rick would come every few months asking for another portrait, but there was a boy he could never get right. “His name was Carl,” Michonne says through tears. She’s more open than Rick ever was; Benjiro tells her that it took Rick three years before he’d say names. “He said he wanted the drawings for until he saw you again. Here you are. He knew he’d see you. He knew it,” Benjiro says. But Rick stopped talking like that, so he told him: Believe a little bit longer. “He found you,” Benjiro says. Michonne, emotional, replies: “Now I’m looking for him.”

When Thorne calls Michonne to the burned-out stadium where they had their secret meeting with Okafor, she asks Michonne a question: “Who are you?” She questions why Dana, a survivor who sought safety in numbers, would risk her life saving a CRM soldier. Thorne attempts to suss out Michonne, letting her in on a secret: “You are here because of me. People like you, they’re not let in. You’re a leader, what we call an ‘A.’ If you are allowed to live in the city, you won’t work, farm, shop, read. No. You’ll look for answers.” Thorne grips the knife behind her back. Rick, looking to Michonne, unsheathes his gun. Thorne offers a proposition: “You’ll ask what happened here and why and to whom, and you’ll seek justice based on a feeling in your gut, a feeling you can’t name. But what if I told you that there is only one way to get those answers, those secrets, only one way to understand the whole picture? Would you take it?”

The answer is yes, so Thorne tells her soldier to prepare Consignee Bethune for clearing operations at Cascadia Base. One cross-country helicopter flight later, Rick, Michonne, and Thorne fly over the foggy Cascade Range. They’re en route to Cascadia Forward Operating Base, the former university that Rick and Thorne spent a year converting into “a center of power.” They’re the only infantry who have seen the base, other than Frontline. When Michonne asks why the CRM has a remote mountain base, Thorne explains it’s protecting “the security of the Civic Republic” with expanded resources and intel operations along the West Coast. “The future.”

Thorne’s troops have been deployed to protect Cascadia from an imminent threat: the perimeter has been breached by a horde of 200-plus delts. Helicopter flybys and dispersion charges failed to break up the herd, so Thorne’s squad are to clear the dead. They’re days away from the summit of all CRM brass and the entirety of the Frontliner corps arriving at the Cascadia Forward Operating Base, but if the delts pile through the breach, the project goes back to zero. One soldier will push the R-DIM through the breach, to the horde and beyond it, to 100 paces past the horde’s exit edge, where a flyby will shoot charges to create a dispersional sound. The Frontliners will be out in front, Rick and Thorne will take up the back, and Consignee Bethune is off the line cleaning up no-kills.

But when Thorne struggles to push the R-DIM through the herd, Michonne takes over and rams through the delts with Rick’s help. The couple are far enough into the fog-covered woods that Michonne urges Rick to make a run for it, but they can’t. “They’ll find us. They will,” Rick tells his wife. She assures her husband, “We’ll make it so they can’t.” But they can’t. “Not like this,” Rick says, so the couple pretending to be strangers return to the frontlines. As Michonne clears delts with her killstick, she doesn’t notice that Thorne has the consignee in her sights… but Rick does. He puts himself in Thorne’s line of fire as the troops finish off the delts.

That night, Thorne justifies her actions: Consignee Bethune broke protocol, which made Rick break protocol. If they don’t follow the chain of command, order fails. Bethune broke her trust, so Thorne orders her sent back to the Harvest Point. Worse, she regrets sticking her neck out for Bethune — and for Rick. She orders Rick to escort Thorne’s charge back to the army’s base and then report to Beale for a briefing. “You’re moving up,” Thorne tells the Sgt. Maj. “Rick, you better understand.”

On a CRM aircraft carrier, Jadis informs Rick that she’s headquartered there through the summit and beyond. Michonne notices Jadis, but before she can ask any questions, Rick tears her away in anger. She’s going back to base, even if he has to knock her out and put her on the boat himself. “I belong here, you don’t, and you will never change that. It’s over,” Rick tells Michonne. “Everything we had is broken.”

The mood is just as turbulent in the air. As a CRM helicopter flies Rick and Michonne back to base through stormy skies, Michonne’s mind is on Judith. “Shoto, it’s Daito. I’m sorry,” she says in voiceover, unbuckling and then grabbing onto Rick. “I don’t know if we’ll be back.” Michonne rips open the helicopter door, holds onto Rick… and the pair disappears together into the storm.

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.