(Spoilers ahead for the Season 10 mid-season finale of “The Walking Dead” on AMC)
The first half of Season 10 of “The Walking Dead” has ended, wrapping up a rather interesting eight-episode run in which the Whisperers and the communities got into quite the will they/won’t they situation. And we managed to make it this far without Michonne (Danai Gurira) dying, which is nice.
The anticipation around Michonne’s imminent exit has been a cause for consternation among fans ever since Gurira announced that this would be her last season on the show. And that anxiety has only increased as this cold war has ramped up this season. Hell, at this point the actual war might have started. Maybe. It’s hard to tell, because it’s clear now that Alpha (Samantha Morton) clearly is enacting some kind of plan that viewers aren’t privy to.
War seems inevitable regardless, and I figured Michonne would either end up as a casualty of that war, or with her death being the catalyst for its beginning. But showrunner Angela Kang and the rest of the creative team on “The Walking Dead” might have another plan in mind for ending Michonne’s story.
At this point, the TV show version of “The Walking Dead” is taking a path that is pretty far from the way this conflict went down in the comics, with most of the happenings of the past few episodes being original to the show. And Michonne’s story is no exception. Given that Michonne made it all the way to the end of the comics, it seems likely that her divergent storyline as it unfolded in the finale might be how Gurira ends her run on the show.
So in the mid-season finale, one of the major events is that Michonne and her group encounter a man named Virgil (Kevin Carroll) at Oceanside, who claims to live on an island in the Chesapeake Bay with his family. Virgil is trying to return home, and makes a deal with Michonne — she makes sure he gets home, and she can have the stockpile of weapons to use them against the Whisperers.
The island in question is Bloodsworth Island. Michonne says there was a military base there. In the real world, Bloodsworth Island served as a bombing range for the U.S. military, and the public is not allowed to visit because the place is covered in old, unexploded ordinance.
And so Michonne sets off with Virgil. Just the two of them alone. Everything about this is a red flag.
First off, Carroll is not joining the cast of “The Walking Dead” just in a brief guest spot — he’s going to be around on this show for at least a little bit. Second: the last time a main character went off in a vehicle with somebody who wasn’t from one of the communities it was Rick in the helicopter with Jadis. Third: this little journey will take us to a brand new major location that none of the characters who were on the show before this episode have ever been to.
So there are wild cards everywhere. The boat trip could be Michonne’s back door into the “Walking Dead” movie that Rick flew away to in that helicopter. Maybe she’s going to die on the island and Virgil will take the weapons to Oceanside himself. Or maybe Virgil is a Whisperer or a member of some unknown faction and is going to instead take Michonne to someplace that isn’t Bloodsworth Island.
This is territory that has not been explored in the “Walking Dead” comics, so this situation feels pretty wide open. Literally anything could happen with this thread. But one thing is certain: at some point in the next eight episodes, Michonne is going to exit this series.