After premiering on AMC+ just under a year ago, The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live has finally dropped on Netflix. For those who are unfamiliar, The Ones Who Live (or TOWL) is a limited series that continues the stories of Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira), both of whom left the flagship series in Seasons 9 and 10, respectively.
It was a long wait to see the beloved anti-hero of The Walking Dead universe on our screens again. Viewers last saw Rick Grimes in full form in November 2018, a bit under halfway through Season 9, which eventually wrapped up with Season 11 in 2022—where we did see Rick one more time as a brief cameo in the series finale. But that's all we got: one brief appearance in the final moments of the finale after four years of speculating, theorizing, and downright praying to see Rick in the flesh once more.
Fast forward to February 2024, six years, four spin-offs, and one scrapped movie trilogy later, Rick and Michonne made their official on-screen return to The Walking Dead Universe—and what a doozy it was.
SPOILERS FOR THE ONES WHO LIVE AND THE WALKING DEAD
The Ones Who Live- Years gone bye
The first episode of the Rick-and-Michonne-centered spinoff was aptly titled "Years," alluding to the literal years that Rick Grimes spent in captivity since Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) flew him away in a mysterious helicopter at the end of Season 9, Episode 5, "What Comes After." So much has happened on the main show since Rick's disappearance. The series tackled the final two arcs of Robert Kirkman's graphic novel series—The Whisperers and The Commonwealth—completing the original story before sending off a few major characters into uncharted territory with the spin-offs.
It's hard to explain the feeling of watching "Years" for the very first time. With the show wrapped up and the comic storylines completed, TOWL was free to do whatever it wanted with Rick's story. He was no longer tied to the (more or less) predetermined trajectory of his comic counterpart. You could argue that he's always been allotted that narrative freedom, and the show did take its fair share of left turns throughout the series, but Andrew Lincoln's Rick has always been locked onto the path of Kirkman's Rick, for better or worse.
The Ones Who Live - New Frontier
The Rick Grimes we are presented within the opening minutes of TOWL is not the Rick we remember at all. Instead, we're greeted with a somber portrait of a man with quite literally nothing left to live for—a stark contrast to the Rick we meet in "Days Gone Bye," who is so unbreakably determined to find his family that he's willing to cross a zombie-infested wasteland with nothing but a few guns and a horse. This was immediately intriguing. Not even Negan had Rick so defeated; we all saw what Negan did to him.
So what happened between "Years" and "What Comes After?" Turns out quite a bit. After being held against his will by the expansionist military force known as The Civic Republic Military (or CRM), Rick attempted to escape on at least five different occasions, never succeeding. Although the CRM has appeared on The Walking Dead, Fear The Walking Dead, and The Walking Dead: World Beyond, we've never actually seen how far their reach goes—and it's far. Like us, Rick recognizes that he's never going to be able to escape their grasp unless he does something drastic.
So, he chops his own hand off to escape confinement.
Single Handedly
Not more than five minutes into "Years," we are met with a proclamation: The Ones Who Live is ready to go where AMC's The Walking Dead could not, and we should be ready to dive into uncharted territory, explore darker depths of the story and characters, and prepare for anything.
The Walking Dead had its fair share of brilliant episodes. "Better Angels," "Made to Suffer," "Too Far Gone," and "No Sanctuary" all stand as the reasons the show is beloved by millions, still to this day. But every one of those episodes was eclipsed by the source material. It could never fully deliver a true shock when comic readers always had a sense of what was roughly going to happen. But since The Ones Who Live transcends the material, it was the first time that every single viewer was on the same page. Nobody knew what would happen—you just had to be there.
With that in mind, the episode was tasked with catching us up on six years of Rick's story—something AMC's The Walking Dead has evidently had trouble with in the past, creating endless sequences of what fans would bluntly refer to as filler. But with the use of fast-paced storytelling, gorgeous backdrops, and extremely well-timed montages, "Years" was able to fill us in and introduce a plethora of new characters and storylines that felt both exciting and essential.
Enter Michonne
In continuing the trend of learning from the flagship series' mistakes, "Years" does something bold and unexpected by the end of the episode: Rick and Michonne reunite. This came as a total surprise to many viewers. Did we really just get served our cake and get to eat it, too? Do we really not have to wait six agonizing hours to see our favorite zombie-killing couple back together again?
Suffice it to say, by the end of "Years," fans were met with an unmatched level of excitement and curiosity that has arguably not been matched since the pilot episode of The Walking Dead. Rick was now a one-handed soldier, there was still so much to unpack with Michonne, The CRM, and the story was still so cryptic. The episode was the most-watched episode ever on AMC+ and was AMC's biggest premiere in over six years.
But now the show has landed on Netflix and is already trending in the top 5 of the week as of this article. The Ones Who Live was a huge hit for AMC+, whose audience is ostensibly comprised of fans of the TWDU, but Netflix could give a brand-new life to the limited series and, who knows, maybe inspire a second season.
What do you think? Did "Years" live up to your expectations?