The Walking Dead‘s Rick and Michonne get a happy ending—but does that make for good TV?
The Ones Who Live's finale feels more like fan service than compelling storytelling
TV Features Michonne
Of course The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live wraps up with Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) tearfully and predictably reuniting with their children. It’s a homecoming we get to witness for three whole minutes in the finale, which aired March 31. After all, a spinoff series crafted squarely for the couple’s passionate fandom would’ve been met with fury if “Richonne” didn’t have a happy ending. What would the point be of investing in their relationship since the flagship series’ sixth season, when they first hooked up, or maybe even since they met in TWD’s third batch? TOWL exists solely to appease shippers. It relies on Gurira and Lincoln’s chemistry, not bothering with general narrative sensibilities or unique thrills. And this really explains why everything else around the two shatters to boring bits, even in “The Last Time.”
TOWL is worth the price of admission only if you’re a hardcore Richonne stan. And look, there’s an undeniable appeal to both actors. The screen sizzles each time they’re together, and they can yell, kiss, slash zombies, share passionate looks, or weep into each others’ arms—and you’ll be sucked in. Lincoln and Gurira have played Rick and Michonne since 2010 and 2012, respectively, and were heavily involved in TOWL’s production. Gurira’s writing and direction in episode four, an exceptional anomaly of the series, speaks to how well she and her co-star know their characters. The show peaks when it reminds us Rick and Michonne are sexy, committed badasses. But there’s not nearly enough of it to justify an exasperating, unnecessary expansion of AMC’s franchise.
For most of the show’s run, it spins in dreadful circles outside of Rick and Michonne. (Even the duo’s storyline from episodes one to three is dull, we’re sorry to say.) The supporting characters dawdle and are not fleshed out, making it hard to care when Okafur (Craig Tate) is shot while flying a helicopter, or—spoiler alert—when Major General Jonathan Beale (Terry O’Quinn) becomes a walker in the finale. The show wastes the Lost actor in a thankless role as the leader of a brute military organization. Until this installment, he barely has anything to do. Scratch that. Even in “The Last Time,” he’s stuck with bland writing before meeting his fate.
Lazy scripts, except for “What We,” are one of TOWL’s worst offenses. The tone wavers from melodrama to exposition to one-liners without consistency. And while the lead duo easily switches from serious drama to lighthearted banter, we can’t say the same about the rest of the cast. (Sorry to Lesley-Ann Brandt, who proved in Lucifer how adept she is at that exact switch.) It’s not like The Walking Dead didn’t have its fair share of cheesy lines, especially during intense moments, but here’s how Rick meets his son for the very first time in the TOWL finale:
RJ: I knew you’d come back.
Rick: How?
RJ: Because I believed.
Lincoln, bless him, devotes his entire being to playing Rick Grimes—and the same can be said for Gurira with Michonne. But their long-awaited exchange with the two kids feels so forced that it’s hard to connect with it on a visceral level. For comparison, Rick finding and hugging Carl (Chandler Riggs) in TWD’s third episode remains a gut punch. Still, viewers seem satisfied here because Rick adjusts RJ’s hat like he used to Carl’s. So… is that all it takes? We’ve seen 10 seasons of the original and are fully aware of their arduous journey to find each other. And yet, that three-minute payoff feels a bit clerical because TOWL spent far too much time before that on meandering subplots. Why devote so much time to Jadis’ (Pollyanna McIntosh) nonsense when the Grimes family is in the same show?
Then again, this series wasn’t designed with coherence in mind. It was devised for the fans who go feral when Rick glances at Michonne with hooded eyes, when she smirks at him, when they fight for each other, or when they finally get engaged. And those people are eating up these emotional, sexy endeavors. While their happy ending was the goal, the execution was sadly choppy. It’s in line with other spinoffs like Dead City and Daryl Dixon, which focused on original characters. (We have to ask: Why even end TWD then?) It’s gratifying to see Richonne joyful together, but at what cost? In the end, TOWL is six mostly lackluster outings with nothing new to say about The Walking Dead’s characters or universe except the following: This musty IP cannot be killed.
45 Comments
I hear it is a good limited series. The best of the show in a long time. Will I watch it, probably not.
What a nice big spoiler on the front page, in both the title and the image.
Oh no, somebody spoiled this miniseries that nobody’s watching! Shut up
I love the meta aspect of a show about zombies itself becoming a half-dead, directionless, shambling carcass that goes on forever.
A better version of this show would have framed that thematically through Rick and Michonne’s incredible knack for survival over a seriously long period of time.
Rick and Michonne’s incredible knack for survival despite his terrible decisions that get everyone else killed over a seriously long period of time
I agree. This series was a Valentine for homers. It added nothing, except the smell of ass to this universe they keep milking, and won’t let it die
Rick began “The Walking Dead” saga looking for his family; he ends it with… A completely different family.
But he does still remain, in the end, a family man, even if he had to try on a few different ones.
To be fair, he traded up.
Gurira and Lincoln’s chemistryReally? Not seeing it. Maggie and Negan had a stronger “will they/won’t they” vibe.
Totally agree…. I never felt the chemistry between those two, it feels fake and forced. Personally, this series spent too much time on trying to show how much they love each other and tooooooo much time watching them fuss.
“feels more like fan service than compelling storytelling”I feel like this described 90% of franchises are this point. I can’t name the exceptions, but I’m saying 90% to be safe in case there are any.
Sturgeon’s Law has birthed a brood of salty, bitter caviar as of late.
I made through the first two episodes before peacing out. The CRM is one of those storytelling devices that gets less interesting the more you learn about it. When the black helicopters were first introduced way back in the second episode of the flagship series, you kind of guessed “they’re like an evil paramilitary organization and stuff,” but it’s almost satirical that this is exactly what the CRM is and the writers came up with no ideas beyond that. The CRM soldiers even seem to spend almost all their spare time preparing and flying black helicopter missions. How many isolated ragtag survivor communities full of colorful one-note characters have made it increasingly far into the apocalypse, only to be annihilated within like a day of meeting Rick or a person one degree of separation from Rick? It’s uncanny that these people can survive like ten years with zombies and a total collapse of society, but once Rick’s wife needs a bed for the night, it’s time to die.Rick and Michonne should have just moved on and started dating other people.
Someone on Reddit posted the idea that the CRM would reveal to Rick that everyone infected turns after 15 years without the limited cure that only the CRM has in development and that they’re killing people in order to secure a future for the kids born post apocalypse who are all immune such as Judith.
When Thorton Wilder worked on the film adaptation of 1940’s “Our Town” he approved of changing the ending so that Emily’s death was just a dream. He said he couldn’t send millions of people home depressed with a world war hanging over their heads and that the story could still be as meaningful with a “happy” ending. Sometimes a good showrunner or film director understands that TV and film is often, actually largely, just entertainment for most people and that it’s all right to give them a “happy” ending. It’s OK. It’s just TV. It’s not real. It’s not even Dostoyevsky. It’s just TV.
Turns out, a fatal bat to the head was the best thing to happen to a TWD acting career.
It’s crazy to me that this story went so off the rails that this is where we have landed.That first and second season of TWD was really something interesting.
The pilot remains one of my all-time favorite episodes of TV.
I am just realizing the original Walking Dead series ended. I don’t recall this site even reviewing the series finale when it aired. Crazy how popular the show once was, and how quickly it became irrelevant.
The lack of any new ideas certainly played a part. I felt like it was the same plotlines rinsed and repeated for the entire back half of the run.
This musty IP cannot be killed.- The A.V. Club(Seriously, I would have liked to have read this article without being force-fed a Palm Royale video every two seconds until it crashed my browser)
The show was actually pretty great until around Episode 5. Those last two set up an awful ending.
but does that make for good TV?Maybe not for TV standards, but it’s far less predictable, given how many popular shows will end with no happy end just for the sake of thinking they’re being edgy and crave the controversial talk, though for me, it makes rewatching them less likely…looking, but not rewatching you Game of Thrones. Well, maybe up to season 4.
Probably too late to get a reply, but is the show any good? I’m contemplating watching it.
It just makes me want to see what they did after they reunited. The CRM was so boring. I can’t believe the big twist was that they were killing other communities. Like, duh? How did they get 3000 people on board with that? I thought for sure there was some deeper plan that wasn’t just “outright mass murder” that might have been tempting for Rick to stay. Of course he was never going to buy in to Echelon. I just want to see Rick reintegrate into the community now. The show was just okay. I quit watching the regular series right after Rick left because it was just the same thing over and over.
Right?!
The plan is…we kill people and take their stuff so we survive for longer. Oh, not shocking enough for ya? Ok…we’re also gonna steal children! Wait, FTWD did that 2 seasons ago…
Yeah, the big plan was so cartoonishly evil and stupid and so much more likely to end humanity rather than save it that it was a letdown that Thorne bought into it much less Rick.And can you believe she hid those super secret documents in plain sight up a wire cat’s ass on the window sill?And I guess what’s left of the old gang is doing well back home, but I kind’ve would’ve liked to have seen more of wherever they’re living now. How much could the old gang be getting for cameos nowdays?
I haven’t watched any of the series in a while but it did crack me up that any community of size seemed to involve bloodthirsty tyrants.
That was the way of most of human history.And even now when society breaks down. Look at Haiti.
Fair. And maybe it takes that kind of tyrant to keep a group safe under these circumstances. Just got really repetitive.
I stopped watching The Walking Dead because it started to feel too much like torture porn and the deaths of main characters became eye-rolly. So, actually a happy ending sounds good. Not good enough to get me to watch this though
How the fuck did they survive that explosion??? Cause they were under a wet blanket? Cause they showed that concussion wave ripping through those troops that’d rip your lungs out even if you’re behind/under something. And was that poison gas that didn’t seem that poison and dissipated a minute later?And why did they waste all that time wiring those grenades? Did they think leaving a crate of grenades next to all those conveniently placed bombs wouldn’t be enough to blow the whole thing up?And why did Rick leave his iron fist behind? Some sort of symbolism I suppose, but it sure would have come in handy. Good thing Rick got the conveniently huggy kind of zombies instead of the conveniently bitey kind the plot sometimes call for.
And didn’t Richonne leave all their CRM gear in a demolished building?
And if Beale wants Pittsburg back, he could just stroll back in in the winter and shatter them, since they freeze solid in the cold.
Beale says there’s million strong herds of zombies now, but that just doesn’t seem likely given that they do deteriorate over the years and every year there’s fewer humans left to die.
And why did Rick leave his iron fist behind?Because the whole fucking thing was so heavy handed.
I loved it, I completely disagree! It’s what fans of this show were waiting for, Rick’s journey had to to be told, and with Michonne by his side there was nothing he couldn’t achieve. Plus the action was superb!. Don’t know what show you were watching, it’s the fans and super fans of these two characters is exactly what we were waiting for, it had it all! It did not! disapoint, and it left it open in my opinion for other beloved characters finding Rick, that’s what I’m hoping for!
Tangentially related in the latest episode of Invincible, Mark Grayson crossed over into the world of the Walking Dead as a result of his fight with Angstrom Levy.He even sat and talked with some campers around a campfire.
RJ: I knew you’d come back.Rick: How?RJ: To Me, You Are Perfect.
If only they had all been slaughtered on-camera.
I would have preferred to see them return to Alexandria only to find it over run with walkers. That would have been a real ending. The Walking Dead universe deserves an ending where the remaining humans snuff themselves out of existence because they can’t get along. That would be the most realistic ending.
So glad I gave up on these shows shortly after Negan showed up. Not because of what Negan did, I read the comics so that was no surprise; and even arguably justified in the context of the show, because, as has been covered at length, these shows aren’t very good and expect us to believe characters are villains just because they either aren’t Rick and Friends or are so cartoonishly evil as to be pointless. I gave up around that time because it had become increasingly clear that’s exactly what these shows were going to be: aimless, meandering slogs with absolutely no end in sight. Fear the Walking Dead gave up after one season and became essentially a clone of the parent show. Anoway, sounds like I made the right choice.
Having watched all spin-offs, I have to say a clear happy ending was somewhat unexpected. Now, I am just wondering are they going to leave Carrol out there searching for Daryl forever. Or, did I miss something. Also, it was good to see Rick again. But, oddly enough, fear the dead with Morgan ended up being my favorite. Which was not the case in the beginning of that spin-off.
Dull zombie-food side characters, inane plotting, paper thin characterizations, and overally shitty scripts? Sounds like the reason I gave up on the original show.