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Walking Dead star Danai Gurira’s final episode, “What We Become,” turned out to be an exceptional and moving chapter that acted as both an alternate timeline retrospective and a nice push forward into the realm of…whatever the Rick movies are going to be about.
Which is a relief not only because Michonne is such an important legacy character on the series, who deserves a proper send off, but also because the way the story shuffled Michonne off the board in the midseason finale felt rushed and clunky.
For the show to rebound from this — from Michonne’s oddball choice to head off with a suspicious (to say the least) stranger across water, leaving Judith behind — is a wonderful thing. Firstly, it involved giving Michonne an entire episode to herself, which is challenging to do when fans probably wanted to see an immediate follow up to Alpha’s death. Secondly, the writers discovered a creative way to take us back through Michonne’s history without anyone around for her to talk to. Meaning, she had no one, like Daryl or Carol, to reflect with or recollect the long road they’d all been on together. Michonne’s trip here was all in her head, and it was a Jonathan Crane-style blast.
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Michonne Will Remember That
Curiously, the episode opened with a “WTF?” scenario in which Michonne doesn’t save Andrea at the end of Season 2. We’d have to wait a little while before that multiverse version of Michonne was explained.
As it turned out, all of our instincts were right about Virgil (The Leftovers’ Kevin Carroll). Not that he was an evil person, per se, but that he was “off.” He’d snapped. His family was dead and his claims of a weapons cache was a soft lie. Michonne was led into a Navy Research Facility because Virgil want her to put down the undead versions of his wife and kids, whom he’d accidentally trapped inside a building with walkers. He wanted to bury them properly and he needed her sword skills. Though this crucible, Virgil got to briefly become a Scarecrow-type villain, capturing Michonne in a Saw bathroom and dosing her with some type of psychotropic drug that put her through the mental wringer.
Now…there’s really only one big theme The Walking Dead ever tackles, and it’s been doing it for a decade straight. Do humans become the real monsters in times of panic and peril? The show is all about the choices we make and how we need to cooperate and what happens when a single strand of that blanket starts to unravel. We’ve pretty much gone through every scenario for this. We’ve also witnessed enough show exits that also deal with the power of hope and good will. So the fact that we got a whole new take on the same tune was kind of thrilling.
Michonne’s vision/journey took her through a timeline of alternate Telltale Games choices in which: She didn’t save Andrea, she got abandoned by Daryl, wound up joining the Saviors, rose up to become Negan’s right hand, and then got killed by Rick in the big war. It was crazy. Also, the flashbacks were a stark reminder that — oh yeah! — Rick, Glenn, and others totally went into a Savior compound and murdered people in their sleep. Well, except in this world, Michonne survived the ambush and killed Glenn. And with him gone, she was the one who swung Lucille down on the head of…herself. Okay, that part was more trippy than timeline tweaking.
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When Michonne came out of this left turn timeline, she was able to curb her anger and spare Virgil’s life (while convincing the other scientists he’d imprisoned to do the same). It was yet another way for the show to remind people to be merciful in times of strife and sourness. And as a fortuitous reward, Virgil took her to an abandoned ship that just so happened to be a vessel Rick was once on. Yup, it had his boots and it had a log of ports that it had used in its travels. All in all, this escort side quest turned into a very compelling look into Michonne as a character who had to be coaxed back from the brink of wrath and isolation by love and camaraderie. Sadly, she couldn’t convince Virgil to leave behind his anguish.
Hey Jude(ith)
The final part of Michonne’s journey on this series involved saying goodbye to Judith who, basically, gave Michonne permission to go. Looking back at how the final conflict with the Whisperers quickly played out — over the course of four or five days, really — it made a lot more sense that by the time Michonne ran through her Virgil mission (where he decided to stay back on the island and slip even further into madness) Alpha was dead and there was no need for her to have return to give them guns or protect her children. Everything needed to be safe back at home or else there’s no way she’d be able to head off in search of Rick.
In fact, the show teased us a tiny bit by not letting us in on what situation Judith was in. Was she locked down with the other kids during the assault on Hilltop? If so, Michonne would have had to come rushing back. After a few minutes, we were let in on what was happening in Judith’s world. Alpha was defeated and things were, presumedly, calming down.
Sure, it would have been better for Michonne to have a face to face with someone before leaving the series, but her walkie chat with Judith still managed to tug on all the heartstrings. The fact that, after six plus years, the two of them now have a breadcrumb that definitely suggests Rick was alive at some point in those six years, that he didn’t go down with the bridge, is huge. And once Judith heard the news, she new her dad needed her mom to save him. “What if he needs you more?” was a great line.
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