That’s probably one of the big reasons why when they wake up the next morning, Jadis is there and she’s got a gun on both of them.
Throughout the episode, interspersed with the cat-and-mouse game Jadis is playing with Rick and Michonne, are interludes of Anne, the teacher and artist, having a yearly picnic lunch with Gabriel. It opens three years prior to the events of the episode–yes, it’s another time jump situation–and tracks their relationship throughout the years as Anne slowly opens up about the doubts she has in the way the CRM goes about accomplishing its 500-year plan and is increasingly troubled by the things that she has to do as she climbs her way up from provisional status into a full-fledged warrant officer position in the militia. But, in a familiar refrain, Gabriel seems to think that she’s lying to herself that she’s really all-in with the CRM when her heart clearly still belongs to the people of Alexandria. Or at least certain people in Alexandria.
Perhaps that explains why Jadis has to explain herself to Rick and Michonne at gunpoint why she has to do what she has to do. If someone else finds them alive, it’ll get traced back to her. If she dies, her Alexandria files get leaked. She rationalizes it before the bullets start flying. She might have taken Rick from his family, saving his life in the process, and now Rick has to die in order to save his family. Two lives for the fate of the world, in the eyes of Jadis Stokes, is a fair trade. Rick still gets to win, just in a different way. Then, after she starts shooting, Michonne gravely wounds her with a hatchet and she stumbles away before Michonne can shoot her thanks to Rick’s intervention. They need Jadis alive, in order to recover her files. Cue the car chase, with motor vehicle crash.
In one of a few very funny lines in the script from Gabriel Llanas and Matthew Negrete, Rick calms down Michonne’s blood rage by asking her to consider maiming Jadis first before going right to killing her as the two follow the trail of blood in Jadis’s wake. Her major concern is survival, keeping the groups she’s come to be a part of alive even if it means her life. So she flees, not only to escape Rich and Michonne’s wrath but to keep Alexandria, and Gabriel alive. Her loose ends, so to speak.
Speaking of (funny) loose ends, those people that Rick and Michonne spared earlier come back to be a part of Jadis’s next plan to stop Rick and Michonne. People are a resource, albeit one that can be easily discarded or eliminated when they’re no longer useful to the plan. They serve their purpose, distracting Rick and Michonne to allow Jadis to get the drop on them and force them back into hiding. Rick’s loose ends trip him up once again, giving Jadis the opportunity to lay down the rules. If Jadis dies, Alexandria dies. RIck was finally getting with the Jadis program, seeing something bigger than himself, and MIchonne stepped in and screwed it all up again. But her wounded state gives Rick a chance to negotiate an ending that might be beneficial for all of them. MIchonne goes free and gets the medical supplies needed to keep Jadis alive, and Rick goes back to the CRM with her and they carry out the CRM vision of tomorrow.
Of course, once all parties throw down their guns and Michonne leaves, Jadis pulls out another gun and holds it on Rick because he’s proven himself to be untrustworthy. Always with the insurance, Jadis. However, the clever Mexican stand-off set up by director Michael E. Satrazemis becomes a double-cross, with Michonne stepping out of the shadows to hold a gun on Jadis while she holds a gun on Rick akin to the way she held a gun on Gabriel. And as with Gabriel, she isn’t able to pull the trigger and essentially gives herself up to the walkers behind her, the conflict between the Jadis half of her personality and the Anne half of her personality rendering her unable to act. Rick lives, and Anne chooses a side in the moment where her fate is truly sealed by walker bite and blood loss.
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