Spoilers below for those aren't yet caught up with The Walking Dead's most current episodes.
The Walking Dead has gone to some strange places so far in Season 10 – with Negan and Alpha's temporary kinship sitting front and center – and it looks like the creative team kept that streak going for Danai Gurira's final episode as Michonne. AMC debuted the opening minutes of the upcoming episode, titled "What We Became," which features the archival return of a character we haven't seen since the Season 3 finale, Laurie Holden's Andrea.
Rather than getting actress Laurie Holden back for the Season 10 episode – she was publicly not very pleased about the way her character was killed off – showrunner Angela Kang reincorporated footage of Andrea from the Season 2 finale into a twisted flashback of sorts for Michonne. Check it out below, and read on to see why this might not bode well for Michonne.
Wild, right? For those who didn't watch, or weren't able to, this opening sequence features a hooded Danai Gurira in flashback mode, once again with her two chained-up walker "pets." As she walked through the woods, she heard a gunshot and then witnessed Andrea running in the distance. Here's where the scene started to take a sharper turn away from how the situation played out in Season 2's "Beside the Dying Fire."
In the first place, the brightness was ramped up so that it was no longer a nighttime scene. Second, Michonne made a starkly different choice after she witnessed Andrea's struggles against encroaching walkers. Rather than stepping in and taking those walkers out, Michonne instead chose to walk away, and Andrea's screams made it clear she was getting chomped by the zombies.
As interesting as anything else is the look on Michonne's face throughout the opening sequence. She at times seemed slightly confused about why she's reliving moments from her past. But then when she left the struggling Andrea behind, the disgust on her face implied that she was indeed punishing Andrea for having defected to side with The Governor and the Woodbury folks.
So what does this all mean for the big picture? It's obviously not totally clear yet, but it's probably safe to assume that this is some kind of dream sequence in which Michonne is possibly rectifying some of the decisions she made in the past. One of the newest images from the upcoming episode appears to show Michonne being kept captive in a room, so it's likely that things get dangerous once she and Virgil make it back to the Naval base where his family is supposedly hiding out.
While it's not overtly troubling to know that Michonne is going back over what may be her biggest regrets in her post-apocalyptic life, that moment in particular brings up some concerns. Had Michonne not saved Andrea at that very moment, she might never have met up with Rick and the rest of the survivors, and thus might not have found love or had children again. Considering Rick has been missing for ages, perhaps her pain has compiled in such a way that she wishes none of it would have happened. Probably not, but maybe.
I really hope this isn't one of those situations like Tyreese's death, and Rick's near-death experience, where former characters return and then something awful happens. We want to see Michonne learning that Rick is still alive, and then making the trek to find him.
Does this mean we might also see David Morrissey's The Governor again during Michonne's final episode, or any other long-gone characters from yesteryear? It's definitely going to be an emotional episode, however it goes.
Check it out when The Walking Dead airs Sunday nights on AMC at 9:00 p.m. ET.
