The Walking Dead review: Rick Grimes bows out… but not forever

On Rick Grimes last episode of The Walking Dead, he leaves the show on an open-ended note allowing for his legacy to live on.

At the start of “What Comes After,” we see Rick Grimes standing in front of a very familiar hospital bed, trying to wake up his younger, unconscious self.

As he looks out the window, Rick sees what looks like a flurry of crows… and they turn into helicopters. He holds his side and realizes he is bleeding from the wound made by the rebar and its in the same spot where he had his gunshot injury in season 1. Rick looks at his bloody hand, and Morgan’s voiceover asks where the wound came from. Morgan had asked him this when the two first met, to verify that Rick had not been bitten. The flurry of flashbacks is strong a few minutes in, and Rick tries to urge his unconscious version to wake up — knowing that he’s not really here at all and in fact, about to be taken over by a herd of walkers.

As expected, Rick can’t just die impaled in a desolate location surrounded by nothing but walkers. Fighting to remain conscious, Rick wakes up and pulls himself off the rebar with his belt and gets back on the white horse with the herd following close by.

Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes – The Walking Dead _ Season 9, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Jackson Lee Davis/AMC

Rick’s wound is bad, and he holds his side as the horse treads forward at a steady pace. He finds a house riddled in bullet holes in the woods and stumbles in to find some cloth to wrap around his wound to stop the bleeding. He lays back in a chair unable to control his next lapse into unconsciousness.

His next dream is riding into Atlanta on horseback, another throwback to season 1. Rick soon approaches a cop car where Shane awaits on the passenger side.  This is clearly a hallucination to the first season, but I got such a joyous wave of nostalgia at seeing Shane before he went full blown psycho. Rick gets in the car with Shane, and they talk while eating fries. Apparently, Shane isn’t bothered by Rick digging into the fries with his bloodied hand. Rick tells Shane that he’s looking for his family and it is a reference to what Rick was looking for when he woke up in in the hospital. Until the day Rick walked into Shane and Lori’s camp, Rick was set on finding his family.

Rick and Shane engage in some fun banter the way they would have before the walkers invaded their city. And in an attempt to poke fun at Rick, Shane asks how his daughter is doing. Being that this is Rick’s hallucination, these are pieces of Rick’s deep-rooted psyche. While it’s always been possible that Judith was really Shane’s daughter, it has never been confirmed. But based on this dive into Rick’s mind; he’s always felt that Judith was Shane’s daughter, even commentating how they have the same eyes.

Rick apologizes for the way things went down with having to kill Shane and his bud shrugs it off as water under the bridge. Shane’s purpose in this moment is to encourage rage since Shane is most fondly remembered for how maniacal he became in the end. He wants Rick to dig down into his anger to survive. Before this moment is over Shane tries to say something else but never gets to because Rick is awakened by the herd who finally reached the cabin.

A few walkers dive for Rick, but he manages to wiggle out from a hole on the side of the house and jumps back on his horse.

Lauren Cohan as Maggie Rhee, Kerry Cahill as Dianne – The Walking Dead _ Season 9, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Jackson Lee Davis/AMC

We switch to Maggie for a moment, who is almost at Alexandria and chooses to jump off her horse to kill a rogue walker with her crowbar. This isn’t just an effort to clear the path but practice for what she’s about to do to Negan. In Alexandria, Michonne is having quality time with Judith until she’s alerted that Maggie’s arrived and is obviously headed for Negan.

Michonne and Maggie argue over Negan’s fate. Maggie is willing to do anything to reach Negan even if it means hurting Michonne to get her out the way. Michonne argues that it’s not what Glenn would have wanted. But as Maggie notes, Michonne would do the same had it been Rick. The truth is that it has been over a year and Maggie has been unable to turn off these feelings. And with that, Michonne hands over the keys. Such an unexpected turn of events since I would have never expected Michonne to stray from Rick’s mission to keep Negan alive.

Negan begins to taunt Maggie as soon as she gets to his cell, even referencing Glenn’s bugged out eye and how he enjoyed killing him. But given Negan’s knack for manipulation, you always have to question what he is really after. Maggie tries to get him to come into the light and ends up having to drag him out revealing that he is a shadow of the man he once was. Negan breaks down crying, begging to be killed to join his wife. Negan has been unable to take his own life and admits to having tried. While his taunts seemed like old Negan, it was just a ploy to get Maggie to put him out of his misery. Maggie decides not to kill him, because as Rick must have suspected, imprisonment is a far worse fate.

When Maggie comes out to speak with Michonne, they are alerted that something is up, which is likely word from Daryl on the herds and Rick trying to stop them.

Rick starts hallucinating again on horseback. This time he wakes up in a barn with Hershel. May our beloved Scott Wilson who played Hershel rest in peace. Again, Rick apologizes for what happened to Hershel and for what’s been happening to Maggie. But Hershel assures Rick that Maggie is strong and made stronger by baby Hershel.

If Shane’s purpose was to incite rage, then Hershel’s place was to encourage Rick to make peace with an afterlife in knowing that the future will resolve itself. Hershel tells Rick that although it has been hard to make the peaceful world that Carl dreames of, they will make it there someday. Maybe the world is not ready for this type of life yet, but it’s ultimately where they will end up. Just as Rick suggests that he can find his family in the sunset in the distance, Hershel urges Rick to wake up.

Unfortunately, his waking up is shortlived as Rick dips right back into another dream. This time, he’s wandering the hospital hallways as he did in season 1. We see a pair of doors, which before warned to keep out the dead, and now read “open, dead outside.” Rick opens the door to find himself amongst a sea of corpses, and Sasha rises from them to greet him.

We’re getting Christmas Carol vibes from this whole experience, with each spirit trying to tell or teach Rick something. While Sasha regurgitates Hersel’s theme on things becoming good in the end whether Rick lives or dies, her purpose in this dream is also to emphasize that the world is about many people working together and not just Rick. In other words, the world will go on in his absence.

When Rick awakes, he realizes he’s been tossed off the horse. (Side note: If there has ever been a non-human character that I wanted to die it would have to be that horse. Forget Negan; that horse is accountable for all my pain this season.)

At this point, Rick can barely walk and is bleeding profusely. He ends up in the bridge camp that is seemingly empty, but is not because the people who died during the Kingdom/Savior fight last episode are now walkers. Rick escapes the new herd following him, and ends up at the bridge.

He collapses on the other side of the bridge and is relieved to find Michonne, Daryl, Maggie, and the others swarm in to kill the walkers. Michonne holds Rick and tells him that she fell in love with him cause he’s a fighter and Rick needs to fight. Rick tells Michonne that she’s his family and he found her. And that’s when you notice that the others only cleared off one round of the walker herd and are standing at the bridge facing Michonne and Rick like a cast waiting to bow at the end of a Broadway show. This is not real, and Rick says as much.

Rick wakes up again, and the walkers are walking over the unfinished bridge. And get this, the herd’s weight isn’t enough to cause the bridge’s collapse. Some walkers even make it across to Rick. An arrow kills off a walker, and that’s when Rick realizes that the real Michonne, Daryl, and Maggie have arrived.  This time he waves them off to let him be as he plans to go down with the walkers.

Daryl is the only one that respects this decision and stays back to kill off walkers with his bow to allow Rick more time. A walker knocked off some dynamite on the bridge, and Rick aims with his gun to blow it up and the herd. Michonne and the others never make it to help. Carol and Maggie end up having to hold Michonne back as Rick aims his gun at the dynamite. The whole bridge blows up with Rick …or did it?

We learn Rick was close to the bridge, but he wasn’t that close.

Earlier, Anne received a radio call from the helicopter people while trying to drive off in a car that refused to turn on. They ask for their “A,” and warn her that she better not be up to anything sneaky. Anne assures them that everything is in order. After Rick’s explosion, Anne reaches out from downriver to the helicopter people desperately hoping to save the person that once saved her by offering them a “B”. Anne makes it on the helicopter with a heavily bandaged Rick who is very much alive to the sound of the same track that played when Glenn saved Rick in Atlanta during the first season.

There’s a time jump and a few strangers wrangle with some walkers till an unknown savior shoots all the walkers down. The small group walks into the woods to discover a little girl had been the culprit with a gun wearing a sheriff’s hat. The same hat that Carl once wore.

She introduces herself as Judith Grimes… and we realize we’ve hit a new time jump, and have a new (little) hero to lead us.

Undead Afterthoughts

• Rick is still alive! With that being said, Scott Gimple stated on The Talking Dead that the actor is set to star in multiple Walking Dead films. Where will this new journey leave Rick Grimes and what will his new challenges be?
• I’m guessing they couldn’t get Carl or Glenn on the show for this last goodbye, as they were both closer to Rick then Sasha ever was. It would have been nice to see Carl give his dad permission to let go of his dream.
• Judith Grimes is now old enough to take on the legacy of the Grimes name, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store for her.