Summary
The second episode of The Ones Who Live tries to cheaply build emotion through characters we don’t know and rushes the reunion of Rick and Michonne at the expense of logic.
Episode 2 of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live isn’t very good. The Season 1 premiere wasn’t great either, to be fair, but it was a bit more daring in its structure and felt a little bolder in its storytelling. “Gone” is mostly a little dumb.
It’s full of tropes, too. It tries to build drama through the deaths of characters we’ve never met, and there are not one but two profound deathbed conversations with these complete strangers that are rendered ultimately meaningless by the end of the episode. Michonne looks pretty cool in her more signature old-school look, but it’s mostly reminiscent of a show that was old-school good, which this one doesn’t seem to be.
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Season 1 Episode 2 Recap
This episode mimics the structure of the first by showing us what Michonne has been up to after departing the main show in search of Rick. The action picks up with her trying to request a horse from a community under ludicrously bad leadership – how these communities have survived this long is a point that constantly goes unaddressed – and meeting three new characters with whom she quickly becomes firm and immediate friends.
Nat, Aiden, and Bailey
In a string of scenes, Michonne earns the respect of churlish maker-nerd Nat, brother of the woman in charge Aiden, and his pregnant girlfriend Bailey. Within about ten minutes, all three of them pledge their lives to helping Michonne, who they’ve just met, find Rick.
It’s lightly implied that these three take to Michonne so strongly because they were unhappy with their terrible circumstances prior, which is fair enough but is still handled in a weirdly rapid way. They’re completely new characters with no connection to anyone or anything we’ve seen before, but “Gone” tries to cheaply use their deaths for an emotional gut-punch that isn’t earned.
Aiden and Bailey die first. The CRM fly overheard and drop chlorine bombs on everyone, which fatally scorches their lungs. Michonne and Nat are also affected, but they survive and eventually return to full health. Out for revenge, and to find Rick and go off to Alexandria, the two of them attack the CRM in what turns out to be the ambush that downed Rick’s chopper and killed Okafor in Episode 1.
The Reunion
Michonne and Rick are romantically reunited. Rick is adamant that he isn’t really with the CRM, and Michonne just… believes him?
This is so dumb it beggars belief because Rick is with the CRM. As per his episode, he stopped searching for Michonne years ago and has done nothing but work for the CRM since. And the CRM just recently dropped chlorine bombs on Michonne and her friends and barbecued their respiratory systems. This is surely a conversation that should happen between them, but it just doesn’t.
During this, Nat is shot. He has a tearful farewell with Michonne in which he’s satisfied that Michonne has been reunited with her lost love – he doesn’t think to ask about the bombing either – and then he dies. I feel like I’m nitpicking, and perhaps I am, but it doesn’t feel right how Michonne’s personal crusade became the focal point of everyone’s life in half an episode. She barely knows these people.
What is Rick’s plan?
With the CRM already on the way, Rick very quickly instructs Michonne to pretend to be someone else, though crucially not someone who would qualify as a competent leader, since we know what the CRM does with “A”s. We also know that Hell would break loose if the CRM was to find out how Michonne is connected to Rick, so they decide to keep up the ruse so she can integrate herself and become a consignee.
When they get a chance, Rick and Michonne sneak around and smooch. He just wants to escape together, but Michonne is getting the idea of taking down the CRM from within, which is going to be the angle that the show takes.
How does The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Season 1 Episode 2 end?
The second episode ends by reintroducing an old friend – Jadis, who took Rick away with the CRM in the first place.
Rick returns to his quarters to find Jadis waiting for him. She makes it clear that they have had some kind of longstanding arrangement, and she also makes it clear that she won’t be afraid to throw around Michonne’s real identity to cause trouble for Rick if she so chooses. Having already reunited its leads, The Ones Who Live seems to be setting up an intriguing subterfuge plot that should hopefully have a bit more sense and tension than what we’ve seen thus far.
What did you think of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Season 1 Episode 2? Let us know in the comments.
