Danai Gurira on Michonne's surprising “The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live” entrance

Shooting down your husband's helicopter is a choice.

Warning: This article contains spoilers about the premiere of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, “Years.”

Well, that didn’t take long. Walking Dead fans were understandably worried that a Rick and Michonne series would take a while to actually get Rick and Michonne together. But those fears got shot down like a military aircraft when the couple made contact at the very end of Sunday’s premiere episode of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live on AMC.

While the characters shared screen time on a bench in few dream sequences earlier in the episode, they also finally found each other for real — with Danai Gurira’s Michonne almost accidentally killing her husband in the process.

The scene began with Andrew Lincoln’s Rick in a Civic Republic Military helicopter finally telling his superior officer Okafor (Craig Tate) that he was all in on his new mission to help remake the CRM. Naturally, Okafor then immediately died, as their chopper was hit in mid-air by some sort of rocket. Rick was able to crash-land the plane, but then he and the other soldiers on the ground were immediately attacked by an assailant. And that assailant almost sliced Rick’s throat — until she tore off his helmet and realized it was her husband. Yes, Michonne almost killed Rick.

So why bring the long-lost pair together so quickly? “I think it made sense,” Gurira tells EW. “Because we had to get into the meat of the story, which is: What happens when these two people who obviously have been changed by all this time apart come back together? What does that look like with this massive barrier and obstacle of the CRM being between them? How do they get through that? What is it going to be? We can't do that until we connect them.”

Co-creator Scott M. Gimple notes that while the two may have found each other, they are still finding themselves and what their relationship might be after all that time apart. “They look like two different people,” says Gimple. “They are two different people. And I don't mean from each other, I'm saying from themselves. They're different than when the audience last saw them and when they last saw each other. They're completely different people than who they were.”

And now that the pair has connected, the journey begins to see if and how they are able to reconnect. In the meantime, Gurira, Gimple, and Lincoln have taken particular delight in seeing the shocked expressions from fans at premiere screenings who did not expect the pair to link up so soon. “I love that the audience gets thrown by the fact that BOOM — there she is!” says Gurira. “Just as they think Rick is settling and accepting the fact that Rick is basically broken and going to stay here and not fight it anymore — just as they feel like they've lost him, he's found. In my mind, that's good drama. So I think that was what was behind the decision.”

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