By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 18, 2024 |
By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 18, 2024 |
Episode four (of six) of the Rick and Michonne spin-off, The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, is an interesting one for the way it departs from what we’re mostly used to seeing in The Walking Dead: Walking, grunting, killing, walking, grunting, and occasionally dying. This episode is not quite a bottle episode, but it’s close, and as written by Danai Gurira herself, it mostly entails two people talking to each other about the state of their relationship.
At the end of last week’s episode, Michonne pulls Rick out of a helicopter and into a body of water. They recuperate inside a building that still has some modern amenities, thanks to a community recently wiped out that existed within it. That’s hardly the point, except that it does provide the jarring sound of an Alexa-type device providing constant updates on the temperature of the room Rick and Michonne are in.
That room is where Michonne repeatedly calls Rick out for trying to get rid of her. Rick believes that he and Michonne cannot escape the CRM together without jeopardizing their entire community back home, but he has been trying to engineer Michonne’s escape so that she can go back to Alexandra and raise their children. The problem is that Michonne refuses to leave without Rick, who insists on staying to protect her from the CRM. He also claims to believe that he can change the CRM from within. Michonne rightfully believes this is bullshit. She thinks they should kill Jadis, erase whatever evidence Jadis has of their connection, and run back home.
So, they fight, and then they fight some more. Michonne is extra angry at Rick because the helicopter that they jumped out of crashed into the building they are currently occupying, which theoretically gives Rick an out. He and Michonne can escape, and everyone will believe they died in the crash. Another CRM helicopter comes along later to bomb the building and erase all evidence of the CRM’s existence there, though mostly just to give the episode a few moments of action (in addition to outrunning zombies, Rick and Michonne have to get out before the building buckles and collapses).
They fight, and fight, and fight, and then Michonne storms off, and Rick briefly lets her go before chasing after her. He catches up with her, and the two fight off a lot of zombies. Then, they go back to their room and have a lot of make-up sex. Romantic sex is also a rarity on The Walking Dead. It is not unwelcome.
That said, the dialogue—written by Gurira, a Tony Award-winning playwright—is repetitive, sometimes cheesy, and frequently staged like a play. It also shoehorns memories of Carl via Rick’s recurring dreams. It’s not bad, and while the episode doesn’t advance the plot much, the little advancement that it makes is crucial: Michonne finally convinces Rick to escape with her—or at least take on the CRM together. They’re a unit now, as they embark on the final two episodes.
If this is a limited, one-season spin-off that ends with the destruction of the CRM, however, I worry that there’s not enough time to do it adequately. On the other hand, if the series is designed for future seasons, I worry a cliffhanger-like finale will be anticlimactic and frustrating. After a burst of dialogue, however, I am also looking forward to next week’s episode return to grunting and walking.