Danai Gurira may have left The Walking Dead, but her time in the universe is not over. On Talking Dead after her final episode of the mothership show as Michonne, Walking Dead Universe chief creative officer Scott Gimple stopped short of announcing that Gurira will be joining Andrew Lincoln in the upcoming Walking Dead movie(s), but he hinted that this was not the last we’ll see of the sword-swinging survivor Michonne. “Her story isn’t done,” he said.
In Gurira’s final episode, “What We Become,” Michonne discovered evidence that Rick Grimes (Lincoln) had been onboard a ship that had since been abandoned and washed ashore on Bloodsworth Island, where Michonne had been searching for weapons at a naval base. Even though Rick was presumed dead after blowing up a bridge several years earlier, part of Michonne had always believed that her partner was still alive, and on the ship, she found evidence, in the form of pair of his boots and an etching of herself and Judith someone had done on the glass of an old iPhone and captioned “believe a little bit longer” in Japanese. So, with their daughter Judith’s (Cailey Fleming) blessing, Michonne headed north in search of Rick, possibly toward New Jersey, where documentation on the ship indicated it had come from. Along the way, she met two travelers — played by Mr. Mercedes‘ Breeda Wool and social media star Andrew “King Bach” Bachelor — who were trying to catch up to an enormous caravan of people on horseback, and she decided to help them.
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On a coronavirus-necessitated webcam edition of Talking Dead, Gimple, joined by Gurira, host Chris Hardwick and actress and frequent guest Yvette Nicole Brown, said that the presence of the boots and the etching are hints of a big story. “Rick Grimes and Andy Lincoln would not give up those boots easily,” he said. “There’s a story there, and Michonne might be moving toward it.” He also said that the drawing of Judith that depicted her as the ten-year-old she is now was not necessarily done by someone who had seen her.
“Her story isn’t done,” Gimple said later in the episode. “And the thing that we were so happy to find was, thematically, we were able to sort of conclude the character.”
He went on to say that, even though Michonne isn’t entirely clear about the people she’s encountered, her natural instincts moved her to be of assistance to them. “She is the person who would help those people. She has no idea who they are, and they have weird fashion sense, and she still helps them,” Gimple said. “Even though she has this lead on Rick, and then we see this group that’s organized, nomadic. It’s a neat, strong-looking group. She’s going towards them on behalf of these other people. Something’s going on here.”
Gimple said it was thrilling to see her character be able to fulfill her arc in the story, while opening up a whole other story while on the road to a story that we want to find out more about: Rick’s. “So yeah, there’s more to do with Michonne.”
The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.
Danai Gurira, The Walking Dead