The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live got intimate on Sunday night.
Having survived jumping out of a helicopter and making their way into a high-tech apartment building, newly reunited couple Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) made love. That’s the best way to describe it, as the “sex scene” wasn’t as sexualized as what viewers may be used to. Rick’s trauma was front and center as the pair bonded and healed.
“I think it is about pain,” Lincoln told Entertainment Weekly of the tender moment. “It’s about [Rick] wanting [Michonne] and then fearing what he’s about to unlock again. He gets to sort of articulate it in the scene further in the episode, when he gets to say that ‘I can’t do this again. I haven’t got the capacity to do this again. I’ve worked out how to die and live again.’”
Arturo Holmes/Getty
Further reiterating the snap in their marriage bond he added, “It is an absolutely necessary scene that allows Michonne to realize that there’s something really broken here, more broken than she’s ever anticipated,” he said. “It’s not just resolved by their intimacy. It explains a lot of his behavior prior to this meeting. It also informs that scene when she says, ‘It doesn’t matter if we die in this building, so be it, but we’re not done. It’s not time to go.’”
For Gurira, who wrote the episode, the moment between Michonne and Rick is a testament to their all-encompassing love (which has survived an incalculable amount of grief and danger). “It’s a love story, for God’s sake. We’re proposing a love story. So at some point, they have to make love,” she said. “It’s really that simple.”
Ahead of filming, Gurira was aware it would be an unusual type of romance to see on screen. “I think the goal for that scene in my head was that it shall not be a typical love scene,” she continued. “It shall not be, ‘Oh, when they copulate and it’s so lovely — it shall not be that. It needed to have a character moment in it that allowed for something to shift. Even if the audience doesn’t fully get what it is.”
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.
