The Walking Dead World Beyond, Season 2: Who ISN’T The Worst?
By Liam O'Leary
Jadis
Jadis proved to be a very vile character in her return to the Walking Dead universe, being an equal-opportunity villainess, heeling out on both our heroes and people high up in the CRM. Because of this, one might think that she showed nothing in the way of redeemability, but that would be a mistake.
You see, peppered throughout this season, we noticed that, despite her integration into the CRM and just how deeply she’s adopted the goals of the Civic Republic, she had never forgotten her old life back in Virginia.
On more than one occasion, she reflected on the loss of her original community, the Scavengers, and how they were taken from her. The latter seems to have left her more traumatized than her final season on The Walking Dead had ever indicated. Even all these years later, Jadis lamented her fallen friends. The ones who looked to her for leadership and how her poor decisions and inability to control her emotions led them to their untimely demise.
Perhaps more revealing, though, was the respect Jadis showed for a man who (As it was often characterized this season) she traded to the CRM for a place within it, this man, of course, being Rick Grimes.
Once again, even all these years after parting ways with him, and after so long as part of the CRM, Jadis had, apparently, not lost her respect for Rick, whom she unquestioningly regarded as the strongest man she ever met. While this doesn’t make up for trading him to the CRM, one thing might.
As Jadis herself explained to Huck during their confrontation in the series finale, when she “corrected” her assessment of Rick in his final episode, “What Comes After,” describing him as a “B.” She did so as a last-ditch effort to spare the life of a friend, a man who she held the utmost respect for, from a fate worse than death, while they would likely never see each other again, as she put it: “It was the least I could do for him.”
Was Jadis a most loathsome villain in World Beyond? Yes. But, buried deep within that villain, still beat a modicum of the woman we saw taking Rick away from certain doom.