When the writers put their backs into it “The Walking Dead” can spin decent relationship tales. That’s easy to forget with all the marauders and rotting flesh stumbling around, unless love is the point, as it is in “The Ones Who Live.”
I’m not just talking about Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira), the franchise’s exemplary couple. “Become,” the spinoff’s fifth episode, proves they can spend years apart and sync up again in no time flat.
A montage set to Tony Bennett’s rendition of “The Good Life” shows them happily taking a road trip to reconnect, kill zombies and discover of a hoard of ramen – a brand called Tasteful Noods, no less – before saving a clumsy trio in a national park, only to beat them down when they turn on the couple instead of thanking them.
Rick and Michonne are golden heroes who stand for something more than themselves. Michonne hints at that when she pauses to consider a sign outside the park ranger’s station that reads, in part, “Protect the People From the People.”
Ultimately, though, what their nemesis Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) has with Father Gabriel Stokes (Seth Gilliam), who unexpectedly resurfaces in this episode, ends up being just as pivotal to the survival of Rick, Michonne and their family.
Jadis has always been out for herself. Before she saved Rick's life (as in, when Lincoln left "The Walking Dead" in 2018) and handed him over to the Civic Republic Military in exchange for better status, she and Gabriel had a brief relationship. Back then he knew her as Anne.
Years later Jadis is a high-ranking CRM officer, and this spinoff's main villain, neither of which gain her a decent stylist. Payment for her sins? You be the judge. As Anne she was cursed with a terrible fringe. Instead of growing that out she leaned in and now sports an “Oops, All Bangs!” edition of a haircut that makes her look like Moe’s evil sister from “The Three Stooges.”
Despite that, Father Gabriel still loves her. The Lord forgives but honestly, you'd think he'd bless his followers with better taste. Anyway, “Become,” the fifth episode of “The Ones Who Live,” brings him back on the scene to round out her villain arc, opening with a surprise shot of him walking through a forest. A helicopter buzzes overhead, and he looks surprised, but we know it belongs to Jadis.
This happens in the present, but as the story progresses we see they’ve been meeting up for at least three years in the same location. In their first encounter, Gabriel offers Jadis forgiveness, then apologizes for losing his faith in her.
They settle on some oblique version of mutual confession, during which she tells him that she’s keeping Alexandria a secret, just like she refuses to tell him anything about the CRM, including that Rick is still alive. “You weren’t even here, Anne,” he says.
This looks like an unrequited love . . . but maybe not. After all, as part of her new identity, Jadis assumed Gabriel’s last name: Stokes. In her meetings with him, she allows her old self to surface – Anne, the woman who made art from trash and traded that life for the conveniences of the CRM’s restored Philadelphia, which she earns with violence.
“The Walking Dead” and “The World Beyond” reveal Anne was supplying the CRM with people designated as A's and B's. Those classified as B are put to work in the CRM compound. Class A people are considered threats and either used for lab experiments or put to death.
Puts a serious pall over Rick and Michonne’s lovebird getaway, doesn’t it? Not as much as Jadis interrupting their “lost weekend” bliss at a cabin by waking them at gunpoint. In a classic villain’s monologue, she informs them that Anne doesn't live here anymore, and that by killing them in that cabin Alexandria will remain a secret.
But in the same way that Rick and Michonne overpowered the three hikers who ineptly tried to mug them, they outmaneuver Jadis. Michonne even lands a hatchet blow to her gut before she runs away.
Flashing back to her meeting with Gabriel two years before, Gabriel reveals that he meant to marry Rick and Michonne, and even found a ring for them, “but what happened happened.” She expresses regrets about the cruel things she has to do, and Gabriel asks if, since she has doubts, then she knows what she’s doing is wrong. She replies that she knows she has to be terrible for the new world to survive.
Then Gabriel reveals that his settlement’s walls have been compromised and the children are going hungry. He asks for help, and she denies him. “Please know that my remorse is real,” Jadis says. “As you do cruel and difficult things,” he says bitterly before apologizing. Then he offers her the ring meant for Rick and Michonne.
“You’ve been questioning things. This is a symbol of faith. Of love,” he says. “Maybe it’ll give you something you need. Giving it to you is giving me something that I need.”
They agree to meet at the same place next year. “If I’m alive,” he tells her.
Gabriel has better odds than she does after crossing swords with Rick and Michonne. They drive her into a ditch to end a high-speed car chase, but she escapes and enlists the assistance of those same three dumb hikers Rick and Michonne let live. With their help/interference, she tries to trap the couple in the park’s nature museum.
In the obligatory haunted mansion hunt that follows, Rick and Michonne gain the upper hand and the hikers end up being munched by roving zombies. But the mortally wounded Jadis evades them, grazing Rick with a gunshot.
A year before all this, with Gabriel confesses he still has feelings for her and begs her to return with her to Alexandria. At this, she apologizes for turning him into a loose end as she points a gun at him. But she relents, realizing Gabriel is the only genuine human relationship she has. She's a slippery eel, deceiving no one more consistently than herself. Gabriel says that the fact that she can’t kill him proves it.
Back in the present, Rick and Michonne make the same argument as a wounded Jadis tries to bait Rick to return to Philadelphia with her. She tells Rick that he was on the verge of receiving the Echelon briefing which would have brought Rick into the CRM’s inner circle.
Not only did he blow that chance, Jadis says, but he imperiled Alexandria since the moment she dies, CRM will find her file. Of course, in trying to get Rick and Michonne to surrender, she fails to account for her three new wilderness buddies becoming walkers.
One rips a chunk out of her neck before Rick and Michonne can put them down. It isn’t enough to kill her immediately. In her dying moments, Jadis confesses Gabriel was right. Throwing in with the CRM never stopped her from vacillating back and forth between her identities: Jadis and Anne, Alexandria and the authoritarian military.
Gabriel, she realizes, was her one true relationship. Then Jadis tells Rick and Michonne that they'll find the dossier at the base in the Cascades base and asks them not to go after the CRM.
Her last moments are written as amends, less to the character than to the audience. She’s still hateworthy but one can't help feeling sorry for her as she's dying and realizes how shortsighted her crusade for stability and power was.
“I wish I’d died an artist. It was never about survival in that life. It was just about truth,” she said, as scenes flash back to the times she created things for and with the Alexandria community. “This is mine, the end of my story. My peace.” She hands Gabriel’s ring to Rick and tells him what Gabriel wants for them.
Then she asks Rick to do what he said he would do, and Rick shoots her in the head.
Instead of tears “Become” ends with Rick and Michonne exchanging wedding vows. “It’s a broken world, Michonne, and you’re the only thing that puts it back together. To my last breath, I am yours,” he says, getting down on his knees.
“I could never have imagined this, but it could only ever have been you,” she says, joining him on her knees. “I am yours.”
Elsewhere, Gabriel shows up at the appointed meeting place to wait for Anne, but she’s buried near a shallow stream that Rick and Michonne fly over, on their way to tear down Jadis' work.
"The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live" airs 9 p.m. Sundays on AMC and AMC+.
