“We don’t die. We’re the ones who live.” – Michonne, The Walking Dead season 8
(SPOILER WARNING!)
I used to love The Walking Dead.
Sure, it had a shaky start. A fairly assured first season of an economic six episodes was followed by a draggy second of thirteen, in which the characters stood around arguing on a farm and occasionally a zombie showed up. But by the third and fourth seasons, with the group ensconced in the prison and at war with David Morrissey’s charismatic Governor, the show had truly found its feet and was compulsive viewing.
Trouble is, there’s really only so many stories you can do in a zombie apocalypse setting, and by season six, it was really starting to drag. The characters were still compelling, but there’s only so many weeks you can watch them trudging wearily through rural Georgia, and only so many seemingly nice Communities With a Dark Secret they can encounter before it starts to get a bit stale.
The All-Out War storyline was where it truly hit its nadir, with viewers deserting the show in droves. Yes, Jeffrey Dean Morgan was a superb antagonist as Negan, but a storyline that could have been done in half a season took two and a half years to unfold. The show had become a reflection of its own Walkers, staggering mindlessly on while decomposing. I used to blog it, ep by ep, but by this point even I lost interest and gave up. It wasn’t that it was actually bad – but it wasn’t good anymore either.
But even with the increasing exodus of viewers, AMC refused to let its cash cow die. The show did pick up with the arrival of new showrunner Angela Kang, but with the comic it was based on coming to an end, the channel turned its hopes to an increasing number of spinoffs. Fear the Walking Dead, its awkwardly titled first companion piece, was wildly inconsistent, often seeming like a different show from season to season, but at its best outpaced the original it ran alongside for imagination. The plotline of a doomsday cult launching nuclear weapons from a beached submarine and irradiating large chunks of the Midwest was particularly notable for doing something new with the whole zombie apocalypse scenario.
Fear has now come to an end itself, having also become repetitive and formulaic. But AMC has kept the franchise going with yet more spinoffs. Anthology show Tales of the Walking Dead was a good series of self-contained stories, only one episode having a direct connection to the parent show by giving Alpha, leader of the Whisperers, a good origin story. Then there was Walking Dead: World Beyond, in which an irritating group of teenagers dealt with the Walker-infested world they’d grown up in; this too had one character from the original, Pollyanna MacIntosh’s Jadis/Anne, now an acolyte for a military dictatorship in Philadelphia.
Both had the benefit of shorter seasons than TWD or Fear, avoiding the risk of tedious filler that plagued the original in its later years. Recently, we’ve had two more: Walking Dead: Dead City took us into the showier location of New York City, with old hands Maggie and Negan still squabbling and on-off trying to kill each other; while Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon took its fan favourite title character even further afield, to explore the effects of the zombie apocalypse on France.
Your mileage may vary on the quality of these spinoffs, but both have been successful enough to be granted second seasons. Their appeal lies not just in the continuing apocalypse, but franchise honcho Scott Gimple’s canny decision to focus on the most popular of the show’s original characters (Carol too showed up in France in the season finale of Daryl Dixon). However dull the original TWD might have become, it always had the benefit of well-crafted, well-played characters.
And now, the two most iconic have returned for the latest spinoff, Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live. Well, we always knew they’d be back, after the coda for Rick’s Big Farewell Episode in season 9 undercut its hero’s dramatic self-sacrifice to reveal him alive and well(ish) in a helicopter on his way to who-knows-where; while Michonne, who departed to search for him, was shown still searching at the end of the very final TWD.
The Ones Who Live (its title derived from a throwaway line spoken by Michonne in season 8 of TWD) has had a troubled gestation lasting some years. First, it was going to be a theatrical feature film; then a trilogy of TV movies. By the time it’s finally shown up, we’ve had three more spinoffs thrown into the mix.
The continuity of all those shows, in a shared universe a la Marvel, is both a blessing and a curse. The Ones Who Live focuses on the Civic Republic and its black-clad, not-at-all fascistic Military, a large, well-equipped community of survivors hidden away in the centre of the otherwise ruined Philadelphia. The CR , a non-comics based original TV creation, has been seeded throughout all the shows for years now, starting with those mysterious black helicopters Jadis kept frantically signalling to from season 8 of TWD, followed up by the recurring appearances of enigmatic CRM helicopter pilot Isabelle through several seasons of Fear, until they finally came out of the shadows to be revealed as the main antagonists of World Beyond.
Along the way, the dedicated viewer has learned quite a bit about the Civic Republic, its secretive and sinister military, its unsuspecting civilian population, and its ruthless plans for the world (well, America). The casual viewer, however, coming into The Ones Who Live without all this detailed knowledge could be forgiven for being utterly baffled as to what’s going on.
This necessitates a lengthy clipshow prologue and a great deal of unwieldy exposition, some of it in title card, but most of it in a lengthy voiceover narrative by Rick (later revealed to be letters he’s writing to Michonne). So, it’s “Five Years After the Bridge” (according to a title card) as the show begins, following which this opening episode takes us through what appears to be about a year of Rick’s further travails as unwilling servant, then recruit, then would-be dictator-toppling conspirator, of the Civic Republic Military. If I’ve done my sums right, that puts it roughly contemporaneous with the end of TWD, bringing all the shows into the same timeline.
Rick, as you might expect, has not had a good six years. Well, his main function as a character has always been to suffer, so nothing new there (“Shut up about your misery,” Dream-Michonne tells him at one point). Five minutes into the ep, and he’s already cut off his own hand in a doomed escape attempt (this is a nice nod to the original comics, where he had his hand chopped off by the Governor long before this point). We see him contemplating suicide, using a shard of glass – another callback, to the improvised weapon he used to slash Negan’s throat at the end of the All-Out War. I found it blackly amusing that (in a first) AMC gave similarly-inclined viewers a suicide helpline number to call, given how bleakly depressing the franchise has always been.
Andrew Lincoln steps easily back into the role like he’s never been away, his American accent now so familiar that it’s a shock to hear him using his real, British, one in the ‘Episode Insider’ that follows. But for a show that was, at one point, due to be called Rick and Michonne, there’s precious little of Danai Gurira to be seen in this opener. Our only sight of her (till the ending) is in a series of dream sequences, in which Rick seems to be imagining the pair of them in a 90s romcom, having a meet-cute on a park bench, flirting and sharing a pizza as though the world never ended.
That’s obviously intentional. This first episode is clearly Rick’s story, and the one that follows will be Michonne’s, catching us up on how they got to where they are now. After which, presumably, the plot proper can get going. This show, like Dead City and Daryl Dixon has a six episode season, which should allow for brisker storytelling than the often draggy sixteen episode seasons of the original show. It’s also, unlike the other two, intended to be a limited series, which means it needs to have a proper ending.
To be fair, we do have inklings of a plot even here. CRM Lt Col Okafor (a nicely intense Craig Tate) is haunted by memories of his bombings of Atlanta and Los Angeles (represented by the relevant clips from TWD and Fear), and wants to topple what is clearly a totalitarian military dictatorship. To that end, he’s recruiting recidivist prisoners like Rick and South African sailor Thorne to the ‘higher echelon’ of the CRM, in what’s clearly a Stauffenberg-like plot to assassinate the Republic’s own Hitler, Major General Beale. Beale, who was mentioned frequently but never actually seen in World Beyond, is incarnated here by veteran character actor Terry O’Quinn, a standard go-to for this kind of role. O’Quinn, still fondly remembered for his charismatic turn as Locke in Lost, is as good as ever in his one meaty scene, obliquely threatening Rick as they sit tensely together on a bench overlooking the river.
Joining Okafor and Beale as (presumably) recurring characters are Lesley-Ann Brandt (Lucifer’s Mazikeen) as Thorne, and Frankie Quinones as Rick’s comic relief buddy Esteban. Brandt, as the hard as nails South African, is a perfect foil for Rick, her desire to get back to her son a mirror of his to get back to Michonne and Judith. The snag of course being that her son is miles away across an ocean – but then, with Daryl now in France, that doesn’t seem such an insurmountable obstacle. Obviously international travel is back on this many years after the apocalypse.
That said, you may wonder how, at this late stage, the Civic Republic is quite so well-equipped, in terms of vehicles, fuel, food and so on. The answer, of course, is that they aren’t – but you’d have to remember the plot of World Beyond to remember that at this stage, which is emblematic of the difficulty in sharing continuity between series. World Beyond established that, as well as doing ghoulish scientific experiments on Walkers to defeat them, the CR is actually running quite short of resources. Those who’ve watched World Beyond will be well aware that the ‘mysterious’ destruction of Omaha was actually down to the CR itself, so as to lengthen the lifespan of their provisions. The end of that show saw its protagonists off to warn Portland that they were about to suffer a similar fate.
Given all of that, The Ones Who Live is presumably taking place in the same timeframe as season 2 of World Beyond, and will logically resolve its hanging plotlines. But to do that, it’ll either have to assume viewers have watched both shows, or tediously retread ground that’s already been covered there. I’m interested to see how franchise honcho (and scripter here) Scott Gimple pulls that off.
Still, it’s early days. Rick is still Rick – only plot necessity has kept him captive for six years, where the man we knew previously would have been out in a fraction of that time. To avoid the show having to CG a stump onto Andrew Lincoln’s arm every time we see him, the CR has equipped him with a black fist that looks very much like a disturbing rubber sex toy I once saw in the window of a Soho adult shop. Rick’s one, though, has a handy switchblade built in – I hope the sex toy didn’t have one of those!
The Civic Republic itself, civilised though it may seem, is in essence the show’s standard Community With a Dark Secret writ large, but an organised military dictatorship is at least more interesting than yet another bunch of Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic thugs. And Terry O’Quinn’s Major Beale has the potential to be a villain of a different stripe to the Governor or Negan; somewhat more urbane, but with a black-clad fascist army, every bit as dangerous.
The ep’s ending set up an interesting potential conflict – Rick, having yet again succumbed to his messianic urge to save the world, is now all in with Okafor’s plan to topple Beale and civilise the CR. Until Okafor himself is killed, and the helicopter itself downed – by none other than Michonne. How’s Rick going to take that? Will he run off with her, or stay to fight evil? Well, what do you think? 😊
With next week telling us Michonne’s story prior to their reunion, there’s still a lot to pack in here. But this was a satisfying enough opener, with Lincoln and Gurira slipping back into their beloved roles with aplomb. It didn’t blow me away, but after years of building up to it, resolving the issue of the Civic Republic and its Military is obviously the point here. With the other shows recommissioned, The Ones Who Live can do that. It won’t end the Walking Dead universe – we’ve still got that issue of the ‘super-zombies’ in France to deal with, after all – but it looks like it will be Rick and Michonne’s swansong. Will they live happily ever after, or go out in a blaze of glory? We have five more episodes to find out…
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