Michonne tends to get a little sidetracked on her journeys. In fact, after an explosive cold open, Michonne finds herself getting the third degree because she helped two people who needed her during her journey. She stopped, but the traveling caravan whose leader’s sister (and sister’s boyfriend) she saved would not. Michonne tries and tries to extricate herself from the situation without causing offense; she just wants a horse and wants to get on the road, and she’s not interested in joining up with a new group. The folks she saved, Bailey (Andrew Bachelor) and Aiden (Breeda Wool) push hard to get Michonne the horse she wants and to stop hard-selling the community, but there’s a problem. Michonne needs to go north, and there’s a few million migrating wailers between her and her destination.
That’s her big delay, and that delay allows her to make friends, not just with Bailey and Aiden, but also with the brilliant, caustic engineer Nat (Matthew August Jeffers), who introduces himself by raging at group leader about leaving her own sister to die. Of course, she’s not dead, and he’s got Michonne to thank, and thank he does by supplying her with weapons when he’s unable to talk her out of her fool’s errand. But he’s going to need a day, and that’s all it takes for Michonne to make fast friends with the good people of the caravan around her.
From their introduction through to the point where the group splits, with Nat, Bailey, and Aiden (and some other folks) splitting off from the main group to follow Michonne, you can kind of tell where this is going. Friendly new faces don’t last very long in The Walking Dead universe, and that’s very disappointing. Generally, I dislike the trope of the single-serving friend, but these characters left an immediate impression and their loss actually hurt; these won’t be people Michonne forgets but faces she’ll see in her version of Rick’s nightmares.
The new characters are framed wonderfully in Nana Nkweti & Channing Powell’s script. Aiden and Bailey are great new characters, friendly and helpful and well-meaning, Nat is one of the show’s better new characters, funny and well-rounded from his very first moment on screen. All three are immediately likable, and that’s a credit to the performers. They do a good job of selling to Michonne the dangerous errand she’s on, and yet they help her anyway because she helped them.
The mass crowd effects used on The Walking Dead have gotten much better over the years, and Nat’s plan of dividing the groups by using, essentially, fireworks on either side of the valley is very clever. We’ve seen similar ideas, but never on such a massive scale. It’s a great little sequence that shows just how valuable her new friends are. Nat is the sort of person whose brain is very valuable in this world, and it’s not a surprise that, in spite of his gruffness, he inspires a good portion of the caravan to follow along with him when he leaves. It’s a move Nat has been planning for awhile, he says, but he’s never had the guts to do it until he fell in with a CRM class A leader personality like Michonne.
No wonder the CRM are so afraid of those A types. They’re inspirational, and that’s dangerous. Michonne’s leading of a group through the wailer-infested tri-state area and on the road heading towards CRM territory is enough to get the bad kind of attention; it’s the sort of attention that explains why Michonne and Nat immediately wanted to shoot down the next helicopter they saw. Chlorine gas must be a very nasty way to go, and it’s kind of sad to see such good potential new characters killed off in such a callous way. But it’s also fitting; the CRM is nothing if not callous, and if they’re willing to throw away allies, why would they think twice about gassing a convoy of travelers getting a little too close?
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