A long, bumpy road has led us to Alexandria. We’ve followed Rick Grimes through the infested streets of Atlanta, to Hershel’s farm, the prison, Terminus, all through treacherous conditions until finally finding a home and building a new world at Alexandria Safe Zone. “What Comes After” has been hotly anticipated with marketing pushing audiences to expect the worst as Rick’s time on the show comes to an end. Here are five thoughts on the episode. Warning: spoilers follow!
1. Confronting Negan
Before diving into the main event, let’s quickly cover this episode’s subplot. Maggie has finally made it to Alexandria – her first visit in a year and a half – to finish things with Negan. She’s met by Michonne, who blocks the entrance to Negan’s prison. Emotions run high as Maggie tells Michonne exactly why she needs to kill the man that took her husband’s life. She helped lead Hilltop in the war against the Saviors with the promise that she’d see Negan dead, but instead has had to live with the knowledge that he is still alive in a prison cell, forcing her to keep angry and hurtful memories alive for the past eighteen months. Eventually Michonne yields and gives Maggie the keys, allowing her to confront Negan.
At last the pair meet, and Negan is just as taunting and arrogant as always. As Maggie orders him to kneel, he stands, quipping about Glenn’s death. He once again keeps to the shadows, leading Maggie to physically throw him into the light so she can look at him. What she sees is a broken man, pleading for death. Through the entire scene, I was waiting for Negan to trick her, but perhaps he really is a distraught shell of a person. Maggie returns him to his cell, leaving him alive, telling him “you’re already worse than dead.”
The scene is a great adaptation of comic issue 174, pulling this confrontation into Negan’s arc earlier than expected. Whilst it was a strong scene, the weight behind Negan’s emotional shift may have been greater if the audience had had the opportunity to understand the impact of the loss of Negan’s wife and the importance of Lucille.
2. Wake Up
The main event of this episode, of course, was Rick Grimes’s journey. When we left him last episode, he had been impaled by some rusty looking rebar and had passed out with a giant horde of walkers closing in around him – it didn’t look hopeful. This episode begins as season nine Rick Grimes looks down at season one Rick Grimes who is lying in his hospital bed. He’s returned to the beginning of his journey. He urges himself to wake up and finds himself right where we left him last episode – back in reality.
Rick uses his belt to pull himself off of the rebar and crawls towards his horse. I’m used to suspending disbelief in The Walking Dead – I wouldn’t have made it through eight and a half seasons if I was a stickler for realism – but the fact the already terrified horse had not fled, abandoning Rick, but instead waited patiently for him to wake up crossed the line of convenience. Rick Grimes is one lucky son of a gun. Rick mounts the horse and continues to lead the walkers away from the camps.
The entire episode is peppered with Rick’s fever dreams, which gives him the opportunity to find closure with some long-lost friends. There’s an excellent moment with Shane as they sit in their old squad car with burgers and fries, Shane joking and laughing, making a pointed remark about him being Judith’s real father. Whether or not it’s confirmation that Judith is truly Shane’s daughter, it certainly shows that Rick has deep-seated doubts about his paternity. In another hallucination, he’s reunited with Hershel (an emotional moment following Scott Wilson’s passing) in the barn from season two. Rick is deeply apologetic for everything Maggie has lost along the way, but Hershel is well aware that his daughter can take care of herself. He tells Hershel he’s looking for his family and shows brief signs of giving up, suggesting that he might be able to find them here at the barn with Hershel. But instead, Hershel tells him to wake. Another fever dream wonderfully captures Charlie Adlard’s variant cover for the comic’s landmark 100th issue. The cast, past and present, lie dead, piled upon each other. It’s a sea of familiar faces, people Rick has lost along the way and those he stands to lose. In an odd twist, he is confronted by Sasha – a good character, but one Rick wasn’t quite as close to as Shane or Hershel. Nevertheless, Sasha reassures him that everything will be fine, everyone has their part to play, and he’s played his.
Continued belowAt the end of each fever dream, the character he’s reconnected with always urges him to wake up. Each time, he narrowly escapes the clutches of walkers. He can’t outrun them, he’s too badly injured; even galloping on the horse is too painful. Instead, he keeps a steady trot, making sure he’s always a few steps ahead. But as Rick reaches the bridge camp, strewn with dead bodies (and unfortunately more walkers) following the shoot-out, the horse throws him from its back and runs off into the forest, leaving Rick truly alone in what looks to be his final moments. Yet still, he soldiers on, camera focusing in on his well-worn boots.
3. Finding His Family
Eventually Rick’s feet give out under him, just as he reaches the bridge he’s been so intently building this season. In a moment of glory, as it looks like he may have to accept this is the end, our heroes show up and begin to slice their way through the herd, rescuing him. Michonne and Rick speak as he sits on the ground, urging him to continue pushing on. She fell in love with him because he’s a fighter, and he needs to keep going. Just as quickly as he realises that he has found his way back to his family once more, he realises that this isn’t real. He looks at his friends around him and knows he’s hallucinating again. Michonne urges him to wake up, and he finds himself back in cruel reality with the walkers on his tail. He knows what he has to do.
As established in the previous episode, the weight of such a big herd would be too heavy for the incomplete bridge. All Rick has to do is lure them onto the wood. In one final push, he stumbles across the structure, a vast sea of undead behind him. His plan’s working, but there’s one flaw: the bridge is holding. Rick stands to be destroyed by his own creation. And the cavalry does arrive: Michonne, Maggie, Carol, Daryl – everyone he truly cares about is there, but they can’t help him, trapped on the other side of the bridge. Despite Rick motioning for them not to approach, Michonne and Maggie lead the group to the back of the herd to try and thin them out, but Daryl is frozen, instead picking off walkers with his crossbow to buy Rick some time. It’s a really tense and moving scene which suggests it could truly be the end of Rick Grimes. The score swells effectively as Rick continues fighting to the bitter end, heightening the emotion. A walker knocks a case of explosives to the ground, and Rick takes his iconic position, aiming his gun at the dynamite, and blows up the bridge, taking flaming walkers and himself with it. He found his family, and he is willing to do anything for them.
This is a truly fitting send-off for Rick. He’s been a hero, an anti-hero, and everything in between. He’s done good things and bad, but he ultimately went out fighting for what he believes in. He finally ended his journey as he began it: alone. But unlike his venture into Atlanta all those years ago, he was never truly alone. The ghosts and memories of those who have impacted his journey kept him safe along the way until he was reunited with his new family. There were so many echoes of previous episodes from the early seasons and small Easter eggs that made this an impactful end to Rick Grimes’s run on the show. It was a shame that Lori and Carl didn’t feature in the episode, and I think they missed a trick by not having Glenn wake him from one of his fever dreams with, “Hey, you. Dumbass. Wake up.”, saving him one last time. This season has heavily focused on new beginnings, and Rick’s demise is a clear mark in the end of an era: “the end of the beginning,” as Andrew Lincoln said himself.
4. Let’s Do the Time Warp … Again?
The episode doesn’t end on a down note, however, giving us both an end and a beginning. We’re swept to six years later, and a group of key comic characters come rushing in to make their debut on the show. Readers will know that the introduction of Magna and crew marks the beginning of a big chapter in the comics, so it was surprising to see a relatively rushed first appearance. The newbies find themselves surrounded by walkers, fighting through them. Just as their efforts appear hopeless, someone creates an opening for them. They make their escape, running into the woods to be met by a young girl with a gun in her hand, small katana on her back, and a cowboy hat at her feet. Judith Grimes is all grown up (sort of).
Continued belowThis quick jump in time raises a few questions. It’s now unlikely we’ll ever see the immediate impact of Rick’s departure from the group and the holes and problems it might cause. He’s undoubtedly been the key leader all this time, so there could be some really interesting plot threads to follow in the days after, exploring how the group copes in his absence and how they readjust. Doing a second time jump in one season is a bold move, but at least keeps the momentum going. Whether or not this will now become Judith Grimes’s story remains to be seen.
5. One Way Ticket to Hollywood
All in all, this episode was an emotional and impactful send off to Rick Grimes – that is, until The Walking Dead revealed they were up to their old fakey tricks again. Of course Rick isn’t dead.
Just before the time jump, we see that Jadis is finally ready to meet with the helicopter pilot she has been in contact with all season. Standing in the clearing as the chopper arrives overhead, she sees charred walker parts float down the river behind her. And there on the banks is Rick. Barely alive, but still breathing. Not even a rusty rebar wound (likely septic by this stage, let’s be honest), severe blood loss, and being caught in the blast from an exploding bridge can keep our cowboy cop down! Jadis radios the helicopter saying she’s got a B, telling them she’s trying to save a friend.
Honestly, I don’t know if I’m happy or infuriated with this resolution. It’s not fake-out fatigue – although I could do without them after so many – it’s that the episode dedicated such careful time and effort to bidding Rick a fond farewell, the audience prepared to say an emotional goodbye, only to scrap its significance with a “gotcha” moment. It’s hard letting go of characters on this show – you never want to see them come to harm, particularly those who have been there since the beginning, but part of the thrill is knowing no one is safe. The Walking Dead lost that thrill many seasons ago, and to finally kill Rick was a brave proposition, but they just couldn’t do it.
The real kicker is Scott Gimple has revealed plans for three Rick Grimes movies. His story will continue in feature film form on AMC. This leads me to believe that Rick and Jadis are off to the Commonwealth, where they’ll eventually be reunited with the remainder of the characters from the show (though why he wouldn’t have gone in search of Judith and Michonne in those six years since his disappearance is oddly out of character for him). Three movies are a bit much, but perhaps ten seasons and three films to wrap everything up is what the franchise needs. Instead, Gimple has revealed that there will be lots of new installments as they experiment with story format, from flashback films featuring old characters to web content – the list goes on. I’m a Walking Dead fan, but this feels like too much for me. By the time we finally do reach the franchise’s end, it will no longer be fighting on valiantly like Rick Grimes, but ambling lifeless like the undead.
I’m so pleased The Walking Dead has returned natural dialogue, better pacing, and good plot and character development to the show, but this episode and the long-term plans for the franchise has revealed that they are still too afraid to kill their darlings, which ultimately undercuts the dramatic impact and emotional stakes.
