Connecting The Walking Dead, Season Two: The Last Light
By Liam O'Leary
Jadis’ Walking Dead Past Is Always On Her Mind
Jadis was, far and away, the villain of season two of World Beyond, posing a threat not only to the show’s heroes but also to its other villains. With such a prominent role in the show, it is no surprise that her past often became a topic of discussion.
Nowhere was this more apparent than the series finale, where, in her confrontations with both Huck and her mother. Jadis referenced her use of an unnamed man as her entry point into the Civic Republic and its military. Huck would then say that the idea of throwing away the lives of others to further her own goals was always in her character. We know the name of this man, whom Jadis described as “the strongest person [she] ever met”: Rick Grimes.
It is curious to hear Jadis speak of Rick, as it appears that, even all these years since she handed him over to the CRM, she still holds him in high regard. She not only praised his strength but also countered Huck’s suggestion that she used Rick to get in. When bringing him to the CRM, she contradicted her original assessment of him as an “A.” Instead, she described him as a “B”, to spare him from being used as a test subject in Lieutenant Colonel Kublek’s experiments. “I owed him that much.” She recalled.
Of course, Rick was not the only part of her past life that Jadis seemed to have on her mind constantly. As Huck criticized her and the CRM for their destruction of Omaha, Jadis replied that Huck didn’t appreciate what she had in the Civic Republic and that she hadn’t lost a community she created. Here she is suggesting that her loyalty to the idea of the Civic Republic is borne out of her untreated trauma of losing her group, the Scavengers, at the hands of Simon, Negan’s second-in-command. Perhaps the funniest part of that is that Jadis, while lamenting the loss of her community, has learned to admire the mentality of the leader of the group who took it from her. When criticized about trading Rick for her place in the CRM, Jadis replied that “People are a resource,” the linchpin of Negan’s philosophy, though not quite the way he had meant it.