The Walking Dead has been teasing a very specific scene all season long, a weird series of cuts that show a red-eyed Rick either grieving, or on death’s door. Originally, the idea was that this scene was after the death of a major character, Carl, we later learned, but that’s turned out not to be the case. Last week, we got a zoomed-out shot (above), that showed Rick actually injured, leaning against a tree.
Last night, I think The Walking Dead just solved the mystery of what exactly is going on in this flash-forward. It took me a little while to connect the dots, but after how last night’s episode ended, I’m 98% sure I have it right.
If you’d like to remain in the dark, feel free to stop reading now, but if you clicked on an article that hoped to “solve a mystery,” perhaps you want to know. This has to do with a development that occurs in the comics, and the way it connects to last night and red-eyed Rick.
At the end of last night’s episode, we saw Negan get the rather dastardly idea to start coating the Saviors’ weapons in walker guts. The idea is that any wound from any weapon should prove fatal due to the contagion on them, which doesn’t exactly make total sense given what we’ve seen in the past with walker blood going in people’s mouths and wounds and what not, but it’s a comic-based development that is now apparently panning out on the show.
It’s sort of a clumsy plotline, but the end result is a Negan-led attack on the Hilltop, where the Saviors attack with infected weapons. Soon after, those that are wounded start to die, and everyone realizes what Negan has done.
The big turn happens when Dwight shoots Rick with an arrow in the side. Negan sees this, and believes Rick to be a dead man walking due to the pending infection, thinking he’s won the war, and now just has to wait for Rick to die so everyone else falls in line.
The only problem is that since it’s the double agent Dwight that shoots him, Dwight has actually not coated his weapon in guts, meaning that Rick can recover from the wound normally, and he survives.
In turn, I think some part of this process is what we’re seeing with red-eyed Rick in these flash-forwards. I believe this scene takes place after Rick has been shot, as you can see the injury in his side, and his panicked expression is that he’s seen what the infected weapons can do, and he thinks that he’s going to die from infection. Whether or not the audience understands that Rick isn’t going to die at this point because of Dwight’s involvement, I’m not sure, because if not, it would be yet another Walking Dead fake-out that I’m guessing people wouldn’t take too kindly to.
I expect that this moment, where Rick thinks he’s going to die, with lead him to some sort of come to Jesus moment where he survives and finally takes Carl’s advice to heart, that mercy, not mass execution, is the way forward. So he lives, and tries to make peace with Negan (but not before one final throwdown). One detail of this scene that’s kind of neat is that Rick is injured in the exact same spot where Carl is bit, which I’m guessing was done intentionally.
So yeah, I wasn’t expecting this to be something pulled from the comic, but I would be amazed if I’m wrong here. The injury, Rick’s expression where he seems near death, and the timing of all this implies to me that Rick is shot with a fake-infected arrow and just hasn’t figured that out yet. His “miraculous” survival plus Carl’s death will have him try to pursue a more peaceful end to the war with the Saviors, which now only has five episodes to wrap itself up before this season ends.
This half-season has been pretty good so far, and I’m curious to see how the final segments of the war are handled. And if I’m right about this Rick business. We’ll know soon enough.
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