The Walking Dead Theory: Why Does The Civic Republic Want Rick?

The Walking Dead World Beyond

According to Jadis, Rick Grimes is “something very valuable” to the Civic Republic. In this installment of The Walking Dead Theory, I try to find out WHY.

I thoroughly enjoyed this past week’s episode of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, primarily because of the espionage game the group is now playing inside the Civic Republic research facility, learning Dr. Belshaw’s tragic backstory, the reappearance of Dr. Abbott (Suggesting we may learn how he died), and, of course, Jadis’s formal reintroduction to The Walking Dead universe. I got a kick out of all of it.

However, there was something that I almost completely overlooked from this week’s episode, specifically, something Jadis said to Huck. Had I not been rewatching the scene to make sure I got a quote right, I wouldn’t have noticed the implications of what she said: “I created a ticket to get into the Civic Republic. I gave the CRM something very valuable (Emphasis mine), and I got a new life.”

I mentioned it in my Connecting The Walking Dead this week, but let’s break that down for a second, shall we? The Civic Republic Military deems Rick Grimes “something very valuable.”

There are, of course, two possibilities to this: 1) The CRM decided Rick was “something very valuable” after he was brought to them. 2) Rick was deemed “something very valuable” before the CRM got custody of him. Both of these have different implications that deserve exploration, and frankly, deserve to be tackled separately.

Let’s start with the first, which, itself, has two different possibilities.