Summary
Those Who Lived debuts with a few almost fan-fiction flourishes, but it’s nonetheless nice to see Rick and Michonne back on our screens.
Ever since Rick Grimes made a rather grandiose exit from The Walking Dead, fans have wanted nothing more than to see his haunted face again, mourning the loss of another loved one. The franchise’s latest spin-off, The Ones Who Live, is tailor-made for those people since it finds Rick at his lowest ebb yet. Episode 1 features little of Michonne until the very end, but the surprisingly arty premiere is just what the doctor ordered.
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Season 1 Episode 1 Recap
The first images of Rick, after all this time, are close-ups of him contemplating suicide. A bit later, he tries to escape captivity (more on this shortly) by severing his hand to escape a leash and then cauterizing the stump on a flaming zombie. It’s like Wattpad fan-fiction, but you can get away with it with Rick since an almost superhuman resistance to physical and emotional trauma are basically his calling cards.
Remember the CRM?
We already knew this through various clues in other corners of the canon, but Rick has spent the last several years as a “guest” of the CRM, or Civic Republic Military, a large organized force recognizable by its three-ring logo.
The CRM was first teased in The Walking Dead, was a bit more fleshed out in Fear the Walking Dead, and was the entire focus of World Beyond, the YA-focused spin-off that nobody watched or liked. Like all other organizations in this universe, it’s deeply shady and involved in all manner of dodgy practices, as we’ll continue to see.
Rick hates the CRM and through plot-convenient letters that he writes to Michonne and reads aloud in voiceover, we learn that he has tried to escape multiple times. The leash was a punishment for his previous attempt. Even sans hand, he’s forced to work on “consignment” as the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a laborer, clearing out zombies and gathering supplies in the hopes of serving a six-year term and being granted “citizenship” in a secret city.
What is Rick’s plan?
Rick has few allies in the CRM. One of them is Esteban, a peer until he serves his time and is granted a middle-management position in the city. The other is Lieutenant Colonel Donald Okafor, though the word “ally” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. He’s Rick’s superior, but singles out Rick and a terminally irritated woman named Pearl as what the CRM considers to be “A”s, free-thinking people suited to leadership and thus rebellion. The CRM likes to do away with As and stick with safer “B”s, who are more pliant. Okafor wants to change this and wants Rick’s help to do it in secret from within.
Rick agrees to help, but he’s playing a long game to try and get back to his family. He gets his missing hand replaced with a prosthetic knife hand – see what I mean about the fan fiction? – and rises through the ranks of the CRM over the years, protecting Okafor’s secret from Major-General Beale, who is played by Terry O’Quinn and thus simply cannot be a good guy.
Rick’s next escape attempt involves faking his death and escaping through a tunnel with the help of Esteban, but it also goes wrong. There’s no wonder he’s fed up. By the time he has failed to kill Okafor, seen on the news that the CRM’s Omaha community has been destroyed – this, we know from World Beyond, was intentional – and fallen out with Pearl, Rick’s quite ready to open his neck with a shard of glass and just have done with it.
He doesn’t, though, and decides to bury himself in the work instead. Years pass. He dreams of Michonne (see below). He becomes a hardened military man, a cold and emotionless one-handed zombie-skewering soldier who has given up hope of ever being reunited with his family. Until he is.
How does The Walking Dead: Those Who Lived Season 1 Episode 1 end?
At the end of the episode, Rick and Okafor are out on a mission, when their helicopter is suddenly taken down by anti-air ordnance fired from nearby woodland. Okafor dies in the crash, but Rick survives and flees. He’s eventually caught and pinned down by one of their attackers who turns out to be… Michonne!
Bonus Meet-Cuting
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Michonne throughout the episode, since in Rick’s dreams he has imagined meeting her by chance on a park bench in an idyllic zombie-free alternate universe. These scenes are unashamedly a rom-com meet-cute and it’s hilariously self-indulgent that they’re here at all. I hated them, obviously, but Richonne fans will love the flight of fantasy before this relationship inevitably becomes extremely stressful.
What did you think of The Walking Dead: Those Who Lived Season 1 Episode 1? Let us know in the comments.
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