The Walking Dead Creators Explain Rick's Breakthrough

[Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live episode 4.] Ever the good soldier, Rick Grimes was willing to sacrifice his life for the mission. But his wife, Michonne, was not. Sunday's episode of The Ones Who Live, "What We," began with Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) at an impasse while holed up in the high-rise building where their helicopter crashed after Michonne's mid-air attempt to escape the CRM. The intimate, emotional episode penned by Gurira saw the couple work to mend their broken relationship as they tried to save the other — albeit with dramatically different mindsets about how they'd keep each other alive.

Rick, convinced that he must stay behind to change the CRM and ensure their family's safety, and Michonne, unwilling to let Rick sacrifice their life together for Okafor's (Craig Tate) mission, spent the episode in a deadlock. The couple's crossroads brought to light revelations — Rick finally learned he has an almost eight-year-old son, Rick Jr. — and deep-buried traumas, with Michonne connecting with Rick to get him to open up about how the CRM changed him. "What did they do to you?" she asked. "What did they take from you?"

"Carl. They took Carl. I lost him again. When I got taken, I fought and I fought, and I tried to get away," Rick said. "I'd meet up with Carl in my dreams. And that's how I survived in here. It kept me alive. And then one day, he was just gone. He just left. But then I started dreaming of you. And there you were. You and I fell in love in different ways, and it kept me going. And then you were gone, too. 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. And I figured out how to do that. I know how to be dead and live now. You can't just come back here, make me come alive again if I don't know if I won't lose you again. What if I lose you, and I can't figure out how to die all over again? I need to get ahead of it, Michonne. I can't. When I saw you, I got so scared, and... I needed to get ahead of it. I had to. 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. Seeing that loss? I can't. I won't survive that, Michonne. I just won't."

"Rick's behavior is so erratic, and bizarre, and uncharacteristic, and hurtful, that I think she has no other alternative but to pull him out of a helicopter," Lincoln explained on TWD: The Ones Who Live Episode Insider. "She realizes that this trauma that's happened to him has changed him, irrevocably, and turned him into someone that she doesn't recognize. And he acknowledges that."

Added Gurira, who wrote the episode, "At the core of it is that she has to become the right vessel to help him to his healing, and she's not there yet. Because she had an expectation about what their reunion would be, and he is not meeting that expectation. So she has to get through the hurt of that, and she has to get through taking that personally."

Though there was never any love lost between Rick and Michonne, he had already accepted that he'd never see her again when he gave himself to Okafor's mission. Showrunner Scott M. Gimple noted that Rick lost Michonne — and then lost himself. "He's lost a certain perspective and an ability to go into things with a certain fearlessness that maybe he doesn't possess currently, for all the things he's lost," Gimple said. "Because he's seeing this thing that he let go, his everything. She's right in front of him and he's with her, and this means he'll lose her, and that screws him up. We start with anger, but in seeing the fear and the trauma, she realizes, 'You aren't who you were. But I can remind you, and I can lead you back there.'"

Michonne reminding Rick with memories of Carl was the ultimate breakthrough. The episode ended with the couple, confident that the CRM would think they died in the helicopter crash, setting out together to return home to their children. "What's most important is they need to get to their truth with one another. That's who they are," Gurira said. "And it's that type of crazy love that they have for each other that causes that moment to come to life, and allows him to finally break through the walls of his own imprisonment that he's been in because of this trauma and because of this captivity."

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.