Spoilers

Michonne gives herself and Rick a ‘timeout’ in a decaying Utopian community. They tell each other the truth as the world comes down around them.

Award-winning playwright Dani Gurira makes a splash with her first script for the show in every sense. From the opening plummet from a helicopter to the giddy, horny running battle that finishes the episode this is everything the franchise does in one episode, concentrated down to espresso intensity and painful emotional fragility.

Let’s set the stage, as Gurira does. The backdrop for the episode is a failed survivor enclave, a high-tech tower block with a smart system still running and roombas methodically keeping the empty rooms spotless. The Walkers here are thin and emaciated. The place died a long time ago and no one has found it. Until Rick and Michonne literally crash into it. Gurira gets a couple of excellent theatrical gags into this single location extravaganza and my favourite is the way the system proudly announces how close it is to the ideal temperature and how that never reflects the level of tension between Rick and Michonne. Perhaps more revealing is the roomba, and how little Rick knows about it. It’s a smart beat that grounds the show in its sometimes wonky timeframe (Michonne mentions she got a roomba just before the world ended) and also re-establishes Rick’s blue collar pragmatism. He’s a rural cop, inherently conservative as a result and being reminded of that also reminds us of just how out of his depth he is.

Gurira builds one of the show’s most impressive episodes in years on this foundation. She and Lincoln have played these characters for years and together they’re completely comfortable with being uncomfortable. Gurira cleverly makes Michonne a point of constancy here, to near superhuman levels. She throws them out of the helicopter and trusts they’ll live. She listens to what Rick says and trusts and loves him enough to point out he’s lying. As the building collapses around them she is still and calm and determined. Michonne loves this man enough to die with him if that’s what it takes to get him home. It’s a terrible road, and she spends most of the episode murderously furious about being on it but that fury comes from deep, relentless love.

Andrew Lincoln has the more energetic job here and Rick twists and turns on the line even as Michonne methodically reels him in. Over the space of the episode we see Rick go from loyalty to conciliatory to mentally and psychologically stripped bare. He’s not broken but he is abjectly, utterly terrified. The emotional journey the two take is heart-wrenching and familiar. Anyone who’s been abused will recognise the armour Rick makes for himself and the fractured, flat tone he uses when he explains that he’d rather Michonne live and be separate than die with him because then he can at least dream. It’s hard, brittle work and he and Gurira excel throughout.

Emotionally intense as the episode is it also has some real moments of humour. Rick and Michonne bickering as they fight their way through the first horde is funny. Rick and Michonne wading through a much larger horde, on a timer as the building is about to collapse, unable to keep their hands off each other is funnier still. They’re amazing, they’re terrifying and they’re finally on the same page. Structural destruction has never looked so romantic.

As the episode closes, Rick and Michonne are free and everything’s looking up. But there are two episodes left and it’s a long way home.

Verdict: Some will undoubtedly find this all emotions all the time (with occasional missiles) episode maddening. I think it’s one of the franchise’s finest hours to date and looks to be setting up one hell of a third act. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart