The Walking Dead: War Costs

This. This is the Rick I’ve been wanting for a while. [looks at writers: don’t you ruin this for me]. This week, we saw Rick cautiously optimistic. I mean, I’d be optimistic too if the universe had granted me the repeated privilege of touching Michonne’s flawlessness. Behold! The luckiest man alive and the gawdess who deigns to love him. For context, Rick and Michonne are out on a run looking for guns. The guns are payment to Jadis for the help she and the Junkyardigans are going to provide in the newest iteration of Operation:FOH, Negan. “At your service and ready to kill for the low price of all the guns you can find.” We’re not sure how long they’ve been out, but we do know that Rick is in no hurry to get back. We get a lot of the lovey-dovey scenes. We know that Rick and Michonne are affectionate. We got seasons of slow burn and at least one Jesus-walking-in-on-them-buttassnaked scene. In this episode we get to see them away from Alexandria, away from Carl, away from Judith, away from all of it. In a lot of ways, this episode is about a date. There’s a car ride, a romantic dinner, a day at the fair, and more than a little of the beast with two backs. This is important: that love exists despite the harsh climate of the world; that these people have found each other against odds I cannot calculate; that they fight for each other in every meaning of that phrase. This is important. When the writers decided to be cute this episode with the bait-and-switch is-he-or-isn’t-he alm…