Spoilers below for anyone who hasn’t yet watched The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live’s series premiere on AMC or with an AMC+ subscription, so be warned!
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After years of keeping fans waiting to reconnect with Andrew Lincoln’s post-apocalyptic hero Rick Grimes, the latest Walking Dead spinoff finally arrived on the small screen and gave fans a pair of huge reunions between the former lawman and Danai Gurira’s Michonne, though only one happened outside of his imagination. The premiere of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live also delivered a remix of a wildly infamous moment from Robert Kirkman’s comic book series: Rick getting one of his hands chopped off. But considering how long it took to finally get here, and everything that happened in the interim, I can’t help but think this was a “too little, too late” kind of callback. Let’s discuss.
Rick’s Reason For Losing His Hand In The Comic Makes Way More Sense
In the source material, it’s the sadistic Governor who’s responsible for Rick losing a limb, though the protagonist is technically just as much at fault, since it’s his insistence on not giving up the location of the prison (and the other survivors) that convinces the villainous leader to sever Rick’s handiest appendage. So on the page, Rick’s protective act of defiance in the face of an imminent threat is the reason why he has to learn how to do everything left-handed from that point forward.
On the TV show, however, that motivation is slightly more skewed. Rather than another character doing the chopping, it’s Lincoln’s beloved hero who consciously chooses to sacrifice his hand in an attempt to escape his CRM-connected captors. Which, as a way to get rid of a tracker, is definitely a ballsy move. But that choice is instantly watered down by the reveal that it didn’t actually lead to his permanent escape. So rather than The Governor using it as an unsuccessful act of torture, Rick uses it as an unsuccessful escape tactic.
Plus, it happens so early in the Ones Who Live premiere, when the exposition is in full swing, that it wasn’t immediately obvious when it was happening, or what the overall impact was. Time jumped forward, and he was rocking custom gloves and other fitted attachments, without much of a sense of struggle on his part to grow accustomed to such a huge change to his body.
The Walking Dead Already Remixed Rick’s Hand Amputation With Aaron
At this point in The Walking Dead’s live-action existence, many fans are already aware that its longtime star was one of the main proponents of his character losing a hand in the AMC series, and we’ve reported on Andrew Lincoln’s attempts to convince the producers to bring that comic moment into the live-action series. Unfortunately, those plans failed to materialize at the time David Morrissey’s Governor was around, with the reasoning being that it would have been too costly and difficult to make it appear as if Rick’s hand was gone in every single scene he was in. The idea of having to fall back on constant green-screen tech being needed was more stress-inducing than it would have been worth.
And so, despite sporadic moments in later seasons when it seemed like Rick might lose his hand to Jadis or Negan or another humanized threat, that character modification never came to light while Lincoln was still a series regular. On the contrary, the show actually ported the missing-limb element to Ross Marquand’s Aaron, whose arm is crushed beneath a pile of logs in Season 9’s “The Bridge,” and is then amputated. It’s an injury that Rick actually apologizes to Aaron for - as if he knew that it only happened because Rick never dealt with it himself - but was supposedly put in place before the Rick comparisons were realized.
Granted, it wasn’t until the flashforward in Episode 906, which took place after Andrew Lincoln’s final Rick episode, where Aaron was able to bring some badass adornments to the table, such as his patented ball of spikes, which he was able to use with success in the flagship series’ final few seasons.
As such, it feels…strange, if not simply repetitive…for The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live to double down on severed limbs among this franchise’s leads at a time when many fans had already stopped expecting the TV universe to acknowledge that particular piece of the source material. Plus (for understandable reasons), as opposed to Comic Rick losing his dominant right hand, the live-action characters both lost their left hands. Which maybe isn’t so much an issue for Rick, who has long appeared to be just as capable as a lefty, but still.
Nothing Is All That Different About Rick’s Hand At This Point
For anyone expecting or hoping for Andrew Lincoln’s Rick to earn a slightly similar appendage upgrade similar to Aaron’s in The Walking Dead proper, The Ones Who Live has the potential to make the latter’s spiky ball look like…a toy spiky ball? The CRM is the largest organized organization in the country, and seems capable of producing most things competently, so there was an opportunity missed in not showing off any cool add-ons in the premiere.
Rick’s own rebellious behavior no doubt had higher-ups nervous about equipping him with anything too deadly, but it was still mildly disappointing to see him largely rocking a hand-shaped attachment and a bladed one. Now that Rick appears to be successfully out of the CRM’s clutches, having reunited with Michonne after the military helicopter was shot down, he’ll presumably need to fashion his own arsenal of weapons to attach to his left arm as the season goes on. In fact, Andrew Lincoln had to stop himself from spoiling where things go on that front when talking to THR, saying:
I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s a moment later on in the other episodes… no, I can’t.
I can’t be the only one out here hoping for a future The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live episode to introduce Chekov’s chainsaw in the opening act, only to bring it back in the third act for Rick Grimes to go all Evil Dead 2 on somebody by somehow jamming the chainsaw onto the end of his left arm. Rick Grimes + Ash Williams = the undead’s worst nightmare.
So I’ll allow for the idea that Scott Gimple & Co. still have lots of time to deliver some truly amazing and Grimes-approved mayhem by way of whatever Rick modifies his left arm with, and I’ll keep the faith that it’ll be worth the wait the same way it was worth waiting for their emotional shockwaves upon reuniting in the premiere’s final moments.
For my money, I would have liked to have seen The Ones Who Live set up Rick’s new normal in a way that put an additional emphasis on how vital his hands were for everyday duties, so that his eventual decision to lop it off would have had more specific ramifications for his daily duties. Maybe I’m asking for too much. If so, I’ll blame that on the comic book’s excellence.
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live airs Sunday nights on AMC at 9:00 p.m. ET.
