Summary
The Ones Who Live bids farewell to a longstanding character of little importance, but it’s a more coherent outing than some of the others have been.
A longstanding supporting character in The Walking Dead dies in Episode 5 of The Ones Who Live, which is better news than you’d think. I’m not sure how many fans Jadis had, but her death makes sense in this context. Thus far, Season 1 of this ambitious but ultimately confounding spin-off has been toothless, afraid to commit to any of its better ideas. Killing off Jadis is a step in the right direction – if only all her meaningful characterization hadn’t occurred five minutes before she snuffed it, someone might have cared.
But don’t get the wrong idea. I liked this episode and I haven’t cared for the previous ones, so things are improving. Roping in Father Gabriel for flashback cameos is very on-brand for a franchise that can’t seem to go a week without leaning against that particular gimmick, but I didn’t even mind their modest implementation here either. It made sense. Jadis got an arc and she died as she lived – in service to the characters people are actually interested in.
“Become” reveals immediately that it hasn’t quite shrugged off the shackles of the previous episode’s ending. Everyone seemed to love “What We”, but I thought it was very silly, and the opening portion of this penultimate outing is too. Rick and Michonne are roaming around collecting supplies, bantering, and choosing gifts to take back home to Alexandria – Rick even finds a pendant that he removes all the letters from, leaving only an “M” behind.
Rick and Michonne Are Not Serious
Even when the two of them stumble upon a group of survivors fending off some stony walkers, the light-hearted tone continues. In our Episode 5 preview, we theorized that perhaps these walkers were an exciting new variant, but they’re not – they’re just regular ones that have developed a rock-solid outer layer because of exposure to steam vents or some such. It isn’t very clear.
Anyway, Rick and Michonne help the survivors, give them some instant noodles, and then take the noodles back when the group’s leader, Red, tries to hold them at gunpoint for more goodies. It’s the typical Walking Dead routine rendered completely uninteresting thanks to Rick and Michonne not taking the situation seriously. I feared for the rest of the episode.
Luckily, things take a positive turn when Jadis wakes the two of them up the next morning at gunpoint.
Forgive Me Father
Jadis and Gabriel in The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Episode 5
The arrival of Jadis brings the structural gimmick of “Become” into focus. Several flashbacks cut to Jadis’s annual secret meetings with Father Gabriel. The two of them met in the woods three, two, and one year ago, on the same day each time. Jadis was with the CRM by this point. Gabriel was struggling to survive at Alexandria, quietly resenting the supply hoarding of her mysterious new group.
Jadis’s whole thing is that “Jadis” is really a fiction. At her core, she’s still Anne, a struggling artist. She and Gabriel are the only ones who know this. He’s the only one who can still see Anne, still knows she’s in there, despite all the things Jadis has done at the CRM’s behest. The intention of these flashbacks is to show us that she never quite committed to those things. She knew they were terrible, and she carried them with her, the Anne persona getting further and further away all the while. The annual meetings with Gabriel were reminders not that she used to be someone else, but that she still had the potential of becoming that person again.
Of course, we know that Jadis chose the CRM, which is exemplified in the flashbacks by her holding Gabriel at gunpoint, calling him a “loose end” and trying to talk herself into killing him. But her arc takes on an additional emotional contour with the knowledge that it wasn’t as easy for her as it seemed. It’s just typical of The Walking Dead to only indulge in this arc two minutes before she’s killed, rendering the whole thing pointless.
The Death of Jadis
Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) in The Ones Who Live Episode 5
Even after getting the drop on Rick and Michonne, Jadis is badly wounded. She tries to get away in a car and fails, and she tries to recruit Red and his gang to help capture her prey, which also backfires. The whole thing’s a mess from start to finish, but at least Rick and Michonne don’t spend the whole thing having tedious patter and stopping every couple of minutes to kiss. Instead, they argue about whether to kill Jadis or not.
The reticence on Rick’s part is that Jadis still has a dossier revealing Rick and Michonne’s relationship and the existence of Alexandria, which imperils everyone there, including their kids. Michonne, meanwhile, is adamant about just killing Jadis and taking their chances.
I will readily admit that I was convinced the outcome of this was going to be that Jadis didn’t really have a dossier, but she apparently does, and it’s in her room at Cascadia Forward Operating Base. What this means is that Rick and Michonne have to return to the CRM anyway, both to destroy the evidence and, according to Michonne, to destroy the CRM.
In the end, though, it’s not Michonne who kills Jadis, but Rick. She’s bitten during the fight at a warehouse she lured Rick and Michonne to, and she asks Rick to finally put her out of her misery. Thanks to the flashbacks, we know that her misery has been going on since long before these final moments, which almost lends a pang of legitimate sadness to the whole thing. And then it’s over.
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Episode 5 ends with Rick and Michonne returning to the CRM
With Jadis dead, that just leaves the small matter of the dossier and the CRM to attend to. Jadis had revealed to Rick earlier that Beale was due to give him the Echelon Briefing, which will reveal the scope of the CRM’s plans for rebuilding the world. He and Michonne intend to return to the CRM, learn what they’re hiding through the briefing, destroy Jadis’s dossier, and take down the CRM from the inside.
That sounds like a lot for just one remaining episode to get through, doesn’t it? Expect the finale to end on a cliffhanger. Nevertheless, I told you that a summit full of the top brass would be important.
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