Summary
You’ve got to give “What We” credit for trying to do something genuinely different in an episode of The Walking Dead, but in execution, almost nothing about it — other than the performances — really worked for me.
Episode 4 of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live turns into Marriage Story for a while. After inexplicably surviving falling from a helicopter in the middle of a storm, Rick and Michonne take shelter in a swanky apartment and argue. She tells him about RJ. He tells her about Jadis. All the while, an Alexa-style home-help system keeps chiming in, like the whole thing’s a Black Mirror-style technological farce.
This pseudo-domesticity doesn’t last long, but it’s grating the whole time it does. Michonne is full of ideas. She thinks they can run, but Rick says the CRM will use Jadis’s kompromat to hunt them down. She says they can return to the CRM, destroy Jadis’s evidence, and kill her. Rick nixes that idea too. Even when they look out of the window and see the helicopter they jumped out of has crashed and been destroyed, giving them a way to feasibly fake their deaths, Rick still wants to return.
What’s the deal here? Does Rick have Stockholm Syndrome? To a certain extent, it seems like he does. His repeated failed attempts to escape the CRM have driven him half-mad, bleeding hope out of him. He earnestly doesn’t believe that they can escape, but he has also created a slightly fanciful mission for himself where he’s secretly taking down the enemy from within.
Michonne calls bullsh*t on this, and she’s right since Rick hasn’t really done much working against the enemy the whole time he has been there. He settled into the routine and embraced being a soldier (all the funniest lines in “What We” are Michonne poking fun at his use of military lingo. He is defeated. All of Michonne and RJ’s mythologizing of him as “The Brave Man” isn’t holding true.
Almost nothing about this works
Another CRM helicopter arrives and starts firing missiles at the apartment building, forcing Rick and Michonne to relocate to another part of the building and resume their disagreement there. The whole episode’s like this, just bickering punctuated by brief action sequences. Eventually, they find another apartment with another post-apocAlexa, and spend the night there. They have sex and then the same conversation again, more tenderly this time. Rick reveals that his reticence really stems from fear, that the dreams of Carl and then Michonne kept him going, and that when they stopped, he gave up. Gave in.
On the one hand, I get what “What We” is going for here. On the other hand, I don’t think it works. The tone is all over the place. The arguments in the apartments are serious, backed up by solid acting and emotion, but the bickering in the hallways has the petty tone of Marvel movie banter. And the whole thing is one-sided. I cannot imagine a single person agreeing with Rick here. We know the CRM is evil, we know that the best course of action is to flee and to try and reunite with the kids. And he’s pushing back this strongly because he had some dreams, and then stopped having some dreams?
How does The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Season 1 Episode 4 end?
This is all resolved, more or less, by Rick and Michonne having sex. There’s more to it than that, obviously, but everyone’s suddenly much more understanding after getting laid. And I get that The Walking Dead is historically a sexless show and it’s nice to have a bit of tenderness, it isn’t a good way to resolve a deep-seated dispute like this. In the fuzzy morning-after glow — I thought the building was collapsing? — Rick and Michonne do decide to run away together, and they’re so excited about it that they keep stopping during action scenes to passionately kiss, and then have a “funny” back-and-forth about electric cars.
People will like this, and I know they will. Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira give exceptional performances and the depth of feeling between the characters is palpable. There’s a lot of history to unpack — sometimes this is done in an artless way, with Michonne just recounting events of previous shows and seasons outright to fill Rick in — that does make this a crucial turning point in their relationship. I just wish it was better presented and that Rick’s years of torture and trauma weren’t handily healed by Michonne’s magic… well, you get the idea.
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