The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live ending explained
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Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, the Rick and Michonne spinoff, spoilers follow.
The Ones Who Live has finally come to an end, and honestly, they could have just stayed dead for what it's worth.
With so much hype going into this series, which promised not just the return of Michonne and Rick Grimes but also answers to the big CRM mystery, their spinoff has had a lot riding on it. Yet now we're riding off into the sunset with a whimper, not a bang, which is not what these characters — or the fans — ultimately deserved.
But first, some context. At the end of the previous episode, Rick's not-so-great friend Jadis died in a confrontation with him and Michonne. Hold the balloons just a minute though. In the case of her untimely death, Jadis had hidden a written confession explaining Alexandria's whereabouts, assuring that community's doom at the hands of the CRM.
While Michonne sets off to destroy the note, Rick meets with Major General Beale to finally discover the truth about the CRM and what the "Echelon Briefing" really means.
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live ending explained
Sitting alone with Rick, the Major finally spills — Mama, kudos for saying that — and reveals the two secrets contained within this almost mythical Echelon Briefing. It's a speech the Major has apparently given 2, 533 times already because The Walking Dead is a nonsense show, and if you don't accept that by now, you never will.
The first secret is a bit of a whopper, admittedly. According to the CRM's scientific modelling, their greatest minds predict that humanity only has around 14 years left before the walkers wipe them out in what we can only presume would be the largest buffet this world has ever seen.
The reasoning for this is a bit more haphazard. Basically, CRM helicopters have discovered herds of zombies that number millions. No matter how many they kill, it never seems to be enough, and so eventually, humanity will be overwhelmed by these sheer numbers, not to mention other struggles like disease and the greatest villain of all, "Man".
It's not really a Walking Dead article if you don't point that out at least once.
That all leads to the second big secret, which we've actually known for quite some time... That the CRM has been destroying allied communities to steal their resources and become stronger longterm in the face of extinction. Portland is next on the chopping block, and as seen in the World Beyond spinoff, these exterminations are ruthless and all-consuming.
Major Beale offers Rick a chance to bring his family into the CRM after the Portland massacre, which means Alexandria can be saved — yay! — but at the cost of many other innocent lives — boo!
Rick being Rick obviously doesn't take the bait, and not just because the idea of zombie hordes still numbering in the millions sounds a bit absurd this far into the apocalypse. No, Rick is always gonna Rick, so he does exactly that by killing Beale with a ceremonial sword. And so goes the Big Bad of the season who was decidedly more "bad" than "big" in the grand scheme of things.
Meanwhile, Michonne reached Jadis's room with almost zero stress, which is kind of wild when you think about it. Instead of burning the papers, she simply ripped them up into little pieces and keeps them in her pocket. A memento of this fun occasion, perhaps.
A CRM henchman did show up at one point but she garroted him to death pretty quick in classic Michonne fashion.
Bizarrely enough, Michonne ends up hearing the Echelon Briefing too at the exact same time as Rick, but through a Child Evacuation Protocol meeting that she ends up crashing.
It turns out that the CRM are big old blabbermouths when it comes to spilling their most prized secrets. Kudos, indeed.
Rick and Michonne reunite and with their newfound knowledge, they decide to do what they should have done all along, which is destroy the CRM.
To do so, the loveable pair rig a munitions building with explosives that will be triggered by (a now zombified) Beale and the guard Michonne killed in a poetic moment of justice. Well, the guard probably didn't have a lot to do with the organisation's wider evil machinations, not in the same way Beale did, but here we are.
The bombs go off with our faves left miraculously unharmed. As they escape to safety in a helicopter, they hear news that the Civic Republic government has taken over the military CRM division now that they know what was going on behind their backs all this time. This means the citizens are now allowed to go wherever they please and are no longer prisoners of the CRM.
Dismantling a dictatorship while freeing thousands of innocents? It's just another day's work for Rick and Michonne, except it's not, because it's then that the pair are finally reunited with their children in a field outside of Alexandria. Why not in Alexandria itself? The casting budget probably didn't stretch far beyond the child actors who play Judith and RJ at this point.
Nonetheless, it's still a special occasion because this is the first time that Rick has ever met his son. Longtime fans will remember that the CRM actually snatched Grimes away before RJ was born.
"I knew you’d come back," RJ tells "The Brave Man". And how did he know that exactly?
"I believed," says mini-Rick. And with that, big Rick adjusts his hat in a cute fatherly kind of way and they all lived happily ever after.
Well, we assume, because that's probably the last we'll ever see of Rick and Michonne together onscreen. There's no cliffhanger or gotcha moment, not to mention a second season announcement, and even if those growing hordes do eat them within the next fourteen years or so, The Walking Dead will almost certainly never show that.
And just how do we know that?
Speaking to EW after the finale aired, Michonne actor Danai Gurira revealed that a "tragic ending" was never "on the table, I don't think at any point."
"I think it would've been a bit of a gut punch if we'd done six episodes, got everybody back, and then killed them both," added Andrew Lincoln. "I mean, that would've been a bit rude."
To be fair, that does make sense given everything these characters have been through together. It's just a shame the show hurtled through their swan song so quickly and without enough gravitas.
Just because it's not the end of their world, specifically, doesn't mean we couldn't have had more end of the world shenanigans on an a more epic scale. It's the least they — and we deserved after waiting around so long for what turned out to be such a lacklustre ending. More like The Ones Who Bore, looking back, unfortunately.
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live will air on AMC in the US from February 25th. A UK broadcaster has yet to be confirmed.
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