The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Episode 4 Recap: “What We”

“I’m comin’ home, I’ve done my time. Now I’ve got to know what is and isn’t mine. If you received my letter telling you I’d soon be free, then you’ll know just what to do. If you still want me, tie a yellow ribbon ’round the ole oak tree. It’s been three long years, do you still want me? If I don’t see a ribbon round the ole oak tree, I’ll stay on the bus, forget about us. Put the blame on me if I don’t see a yellow ribbon ’round the ole oak tree. Bus driver, please look for me. ‘Cause I couldn’t bear to see what I might see. I’m really still in prison and my love, she holds the key.”

Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” plays as Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) emerge from the stormy waters where they leapt free from a CRM helicopter mid-air. The couple take a “time out” in an automated apartment with working electricity and evidence that someone lives (lived?) here. Michonne, furious about Rick’s attempt to get her to escape the Civic Republic Military without him, presses him to write another letter — this one addressed to his children. Children, plural.

“I’m not gonna be the one to tell them that I found their father and he sent me away and chose not to come home to them,” she says as Rick’s realization sets in: Children? Michonne tells Rick that they have a son, named Rick Jr., and that she was pregnant when the bridge happened. RJ is nearly eight years old now, and he’s never met his father. Rather than ask about their children, Rick asks Michonne to hand over the PRB to alert the Civic Republic’s army to their location. This infuriates Michonne, who doesn’t recognize this black-clad Rick, soldier of the CRM, who told his wife that “everything we had is broken” and “it’s over.” 

“I am trying to keep you and them alive,” Rick explains. “You have no idea who we’re dealing with.” They’re dealing with Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) and a military force so secret that they leave no trace of their existence. Jadis warned him: if Rick and Michonne escape together, the CRM will hunt them down, erase them, kill their loved ones, and destroy their home at Alexandria. Michonne’s actions risk exposing them, thwarting Rick’s efforts to keep her alive. The couple is at an impasse, each trying to save the other.

“I don’t like who you are with them.What they make you,” Michonne says, her face contorting in contempt. “It isn’t you.” He shoots back: “You think I want this?” Before she can answer, he again asks her to hand over the PRB. But for Michonne, pressing the PRB is game over — the CRM wins. “Look at me,” Rick says, submitting to a fate he had no choice but to accept. “They won a long time ago. They won the day Jadis brought me here.” Rick tells Michonne how Jadis was working with the CRM when she was running away from Alexandria, and how she found him half dead on the riverbank after the bridge. “She will destroy our home if I try to leave,” a desperate Rick explains. He was making Jadis let Michonne go when she torpedoed those plans. Rick was willing to sacrifice himself if it meant Michonne got away… but it’s not a sacrifice that Michonne is willing to make.

“You want me to go?” Michonne asks, almost afraid of the answer. “I want you to live,” Rick replies. “She’s threatened by us because, together, you and me, she thinks we can do anything.” Michonne believes — she knows — they can stop her. But it has to be them together, and only together. Rick reminds her what the CRM did to Nat (Matthew August Jeffers) and her friends, a fate he wants to spare happening to everyone they know at Alexandria. Even if they make it home in time, what happens next? Michonne suggests they kill Jadis, so Rick informs her about Jadis’ contingency plan: if Jadis dies, she’s made it so that the CRM can find them. There’s no escape.

If Rick can’t leave with Michonne, and if Michonne won’t leave without Rick, she suggests they go back to the CRM — together — find her evidence, kill Jadis, and then go home. Together. “Do you think we can do anything?” she asks her husband. “Because I do. What did they do to you?” Rick doesn’t answer. He says they need to go back. She asks him again: “And after that? Do you still love me?” Rick tells his wife, “Always. I’ve never stopped loving you.”

Roaring thunder and a flash of lightning reveals their crashed helicopter embedded in the side of the building. Michonne saved their lives, and she’s still trying to save their lives. “It’s gone. So we’re gone,” Michonne realizes. “We can go home.” She believes that Jadis and the CRM will think Rick and Michonne died in the crash, but Rick isn’t pulling the ripcord just yet. “I’m not going home,” he tells her.

Michonne has come to see things more clearly in the light of day. She remembers what Nat said to her: “I know how it ends.” She seethes how Rick’s son — “The one you haven’t asked anything about” — calls himself “Little Brave Man” and recounts the tale of “The Brave Man.” She recites Nat’s words again: “I know how it ends.” She reminds him that his people killed her friend, but Rick makes a point to say they’re not his people. “He said that to me once when I said I had to keep looking for you.He knew how it ended, but he still had my back.I was so sure he was wrong, but he wasn’t,” Michonne says. “‘Cause here I am.I found you.But I didn’t.”

She can’t understand Rick’s mentality. They just found their way out. The CRM thinks they’re dead. “And you want to stay with an army that kept you against your will for years?” Rick doesn’t want to… he has to, to make sure she’s protected. To make sure they don’t come for their home — their children. Rick sacrificing himself and staying behind is the only way to make sure that doesn’t happen. Rick’s been looking the other way as the soldiers with the blood-red stripes killed innocent people, so staying with the CRM is how he makes sure Judith and RJ are protected. It was Okafor (Craig Tate) who saved Rick’s life, and it’s Okafor who wanted Rick to become part of the CRM, move up, and change it from the inside. Rick had just given up on ever seeing his family again, and with nothing left, gave himself to Okafor’s mission… and then Michonne crashed into the life he thought was over.

Michonne asks if Rick remembers the life they built. The life they had. She tells him how what they were building kept people alive. She tells him how she saw Rick as a prisoner of this army and knew they had to escape. She tells him that you don’t choose to stay in prison. When the doors open, you leave. The life they had was one where they were crawling around in the dirt and losing people they love, Rick counters, and the CRM “felt like a way or a chance to stop that. Not to surrender to it — to fight, for everyone.”

“This place is not your responsibility,” Michonne tells Rick. “You have a family.” Okafor is gone, and Thorne (Lesley-Ann Brandt) is “one of them now,” so Rick is the only one left to continue his mission. Michonne counters that was Okafor’s mission — not Rick’s. He’s trying to keep his family safe by maybe changing the CRM, who might come after their home and put them in danger? For those uncertainties, Michonne asks him, “You won’t come home with me, to your life? Your kids?” For Rick, it’s not a choice. “I don’t want to do this,” Rick reminds her. “I have to.”

Michonne believed a little bit longer, but Rick’s rejection forces her to leave — to go home to her kids without him. “You’re lying, and you’ll see it, and it’ll be too late,” Michonne says, shutting the door on her and Rick’s relationship as she leaves broken-hearted and empty-handed. Like Nat said, you gotta know when to go… and it’s time to go. Rick remains behind in the apartment, stood at the threshold of the biggest decision of his life. The door opens, and Rick chases Michonne.

The whirring blades of another CRM helicopter and the groans and growls of the dead are the soundtrack to Rick and Michonne’s escape as they fight their way through a horde of the dead to reach the ground floor. The helicopter fires a missile at the crash site, covering up any and all evidence of their existence… and nearly bringing the building down with it. The explosion causes the building to buckle, forcing Rick and Michonne past a wall of walkers and into the lower levels of the building. 

Rick and Michonne come across a stronghold. Inside the room is a letter left by the corpse of Lakshmi Patel, the building’s last-living tenant. The letter reveals that the building belongs to Greenwood, a self-sustaining community of like-minded innovators living off the grid to create a new and hopeful tomorrow. Greenwood’s motto, “Progress and Redemption Through Innovation,” became a “sick joke,” Lakshmi’s letter reads, so she took her own life. “I cannot go another day continuing to watch our mission die.I am sorry.Let me be remembered as one who refused to leave the world the same way Ifound it.”

Michonne sees Greenwood as an example of what happens when people try to save the world their own way. Rick assures Michonne he’ll find a way to stop the CRM from killing innocent people, and she still doesn’t get it. “This is about ending the enemy,” he says, disputing Michonne’s claim that this isn’t him. He’d give everything — his hand, his life — for her. “That’s not me? This is what I need to do to keep you safe!” To that, Michonne says, gently: “The only time I feel safe is when I’m with you.We don’t have to be afraid, Rick.” But he is, and they do. “I’m not the Brave Man,” he responds. “You shouldn’t have come.”

She unloads on Rick for choosing the CRM over her and their family. She doesn’t know who Rick is anymore. But when the collapsing building starts to come crashing down on them, Rick refuses to leave Michonne as she’s pinned between debris and walkers. The couple are trapped by the mass of dead, so they retreat upstairs to the half of the building not yet buckling beneath the weight of the world coming down around them. Back in the safety of Lakshmi’s apartment, the near-death experience has shown Michonne that she knows who Rick is. He’s the man she’s loved and lost, then lost and loved again. Rick and Michonne fall into bed together and embrace that love for the first time in years.

The next scene is postcoital, with Rick and Michonne cuddled up in bed as he asks about his son. She tells him he’s stubborn, “just like his daddy,” to which Rick replies, “just like his mama.” Most of all, she says, RJ has his father’s good, kind heart, and that’s what most reminds her of Rick. Talk turns to the fate of the Greenwood community — the walkers being so thin suggests that they starved. Even if they had crops, Rick says, crops fail. Recalling the story about his father’s farm, “One bad harvest… something has to burn to bring it back.” If he can change the CRM — burn down the bad to bring back the good — there’s a real chance for future generations to grow out of that.

Michonne shares her own piece of history: the “X” scar on her back that happened when she was seven months pregnant with their son. She tells him how she eventually stopped looking for Rick’s body after the bridge, and how she kept believing that he wasn’t gone forever. She still believes that. Looking at Rick’s amputated hand, it’s proof of what Rick was willing to do to try and get away… to get home to her. He’s still trying. But he’s not there yet. He could have pressed the button, but he didn’t. “You say you can’t go home, but I don’t think you can go back,” Michonne tells him.”I’m sorry for what they did to you.”

The building begins to give way, so Rick says it’s time to leave. “Nat used to say, ‘You got to know when to go,’” Michonne tells him, and it’s not time to go. They’re not going anywhere until they decide: what’s next? She asks him to tell her why he went after her when she left. She needs to hear him say it. “You’re the love of my life,” Rick tells Michonne. “I couldn’t just let you go.It felt like my heart ripped itself out of my chest and walked out the door.” So why, then, can’t he come home with her? Why can’t they be together?

She confesses that she hasn’t spoken to Judith in a long time. She was out of range and then holed up in a mall healing with Nat for an entire year after a CRM helicopter bombed them with chlorine gas. “They’ve taken so much from us,” Michonne says. “Why give them any more?” His hope in the CRM, Rick’s sacrifice — “It’s not real. We, your family, are real. I’m real,” she tells him. “Our love? This? It doesn’t get denied.” What Rick is doing is hurting her. He’s hurting her. “This is not how you love. What did they do to you? What did they take from you?”

 Rick’s despair is over Carl. “They took Carl. I lost him again,” he confesses. Rick dreamed of his son. He dreamed of the walks he would take with Carl to the Ross’ farm when his son was three years old. “I’d meet up with Carl in my dreams, and that’s how I survived in here,” Rick says. It kept him alive. Rick fought to get away, again and again, but he couldn’t escape. And then Carl was gone. Rick started dreaming of Michonne. They would fall in love in different ways, and it kept him going… and then she was gone, too, burned away by the CRM. “I couldn’t see your face anymore, just like I couldn’t see Carl’s.I can’t live without you.Without you, I die,” Rick tells Michonne. “And I figured out how to do that.I know how to be dead and live now.” But if Rick loses Michonne again, he won’t be able to “figure out how to die all over again.”

“At least if I think you will live on longer than me without knowing if you do, I can just believe that it’s true,” Rick sobs. But seeing that loss, losing Michonne? “I won’t survive that,” he says. “I just won’t.” Michonne gives Rick a phone with Carl’s portrait and asks him what Carl would want for his father. “Despite all the odds, all the years, I found you, Rick.I came here through the hell that we have both been through to take you home.You think that’s all for nothing?For us to just go our separate ways?No,” Michonne tells him, softly.”We go home, Rick, and we figure out how to protect it together.That’s how we make it all make sense.We love on each other, as hard as we can, while we can.”

That love doesn’t get denied. Rick and Michonne escape the building as it crumbles, burning away as their love burns anew. The couple comes across one last gift from Greenwood — a hybrid electric car with enough tanks of ethanol to get home — and hop in. “Clearly, they thought they could do anything,” Michonne says of the community of innovators that is now ash and rubble. “But we can,” replies Rick, quoting something Michonne told him in his dreams: “‘We can make this world damn world ours if we want to.’”

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.