The Walking Dead Rick and Michonne show will not, in fact, be titled The Walking Dead: Rick & Michonne. Nor will it be titled The Walking Dead: Summit (its temporary production moniker). The actual title of the upcoming spin-off series starring Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira was revealed Friday during the Walking Dead Universe Fan Watch Party in Hall H of San Diego Comic-Con, along with the first official teaser for the show.
“I’ve been out there a long time,” says Gurira’s Michonne in the teaser while advancing with her katana raised in a sea of red. “I lost someone years ago. And then things changed. And I found out that he’s alive.” Next, we see flashes of that lost love, Rick Grimes, doing some very violent things.
The title of the series is then revealed — The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live — along with the words “Coming 2024.” (Watch the teaser below.)
The phrase “the ones who live” played a huge role in the final moments of The Walking Dead series finale. After Norman Reedus’ Daryl Dixon literally rode off into the sunset, a final coda sequence took place that showed both Rick and Michonne in separate places writing in the same journal. Michonne’s final line to Judith — “We’re the ones who live” — was then repeated by 25 TWD characters from throughout the show’s run.
But the history of the line goes much further back. “We’re the ones who live” was first uttered by Rick in the season 5 TWD episode “Try” after battling super-bummer Pete Anderson (Corey Brill) in the street and challenging the more passive residents of Alexandria. “We know what needs to be done and we do it,” he told Deanna Monroe (Tovah Feldshuh) and the group. “We’re the ones who live.”
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The phrase was then repeated back to Rick by Michonne in the makeshift Alexandria jail in the season 7 midseason finale, “Hearts Still Beating.” “We’re still alive, Rick,” Michonne said. “So much has happened. So much that we shouldn’t have lived through. In spite of it, or maybe because of it, we did. We’re still here. The two of us. We’re still standing and we’re going to keep standing. So what do we do with that? How do we make that mean something? We’re the ones who get things done. You said that. We’re the ones who live.”
Michonne then repeated the words to Rick one episode later, in “Rock in the Road,” after surviving a close call with a herd. “We’re here! You can smile. We made it… we can make it. We’re the ones who live.”
The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead‘s chief content officer Scott M. Gimple explained the significance of the line to EW around The Walking Dead series finale: “It was always this phrase that was pretty wild. As much as there were so many people dying and being able to say, ‘We’re the ones who live.’ But I never took it as just applying to the living people, because that seemed a little much to be like, ‘Hey, we’re the ones that live, too bad about all those people we love.’ No, to me, it felt like there’s a continuum of a relationship and love that cannot be extinguished. And that is what is forged in this hell that we’ve lived through together. And the triumphant thing is that we forever lived through each other and beyond. That, to me, seems the message of the whole thing.”
This explains why it is the show title for the most anticipated Walking Dead spin-off entry yet. And now, we are the ones who must wait.
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