“Years” isn’t just the title of Sunday’s series premiere episode of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live — it’s how long Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) has been in the clutches of the CRM. Eight years have passed since Rick disappeared on season 9 of The Walking Dead, where the wounded Rick led a walker herd to a bridge and then blew it up to save his family and friends. His wife Michonne (Danai Gurira) thought she watched Rick die, but Jadis/Anne (Pollyanna McIntosh) radioed someone that she had a “B” and airlifted Rick away aboard a Civic Republic Military helicopter to… somewhere.

The Walking Dead: World Beyond dropped clues that Jadis traded Rick to the CRM for entry into the Civic Republic, a hidden city of 200,000 survivors in post-apocalyptic Philadelphia. The series finale of The Walking Dead confirmed this when Rick, shown wearing a jacket with the three-ring symbol of the CRM, tried (and failed) to escape before being recaptured by a helicopter pilot who reminded Rick: “It’s like he told you. There’s no escape for the living.”

(Photo: Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes, Lesley-Ann Brandt as Thorne – The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live _ Season 1, Episode 1 – Photo Credit: Gene Page/AMC – Gene Page/AMC)
That was Rick’s third escape attempt. Picking up five years after the bridge, the new series begins with escape attempt number four: Rick cutting off his hand to free himself from a CRM soldier’s leash while on assignment killing walkers (called “delts”). As Consignee Grimes, Rick is the charge of CRM Lt. Col. Donald Okafor (Craig Tate), the one who told Rick “there’s no escape for the living.” He’s also the man responsible for saving Rick’s life: Okafor convinced Major General Beale (Terry O’Quinn) to allow Rick into consignment.

After his helicopter flight with Jadis, Rick woke up in a military hospital at the C.R.P. (the Civic Republic of Philadelphia). He’s spent years working in the outskirts of the city with other consignees, people the Civic Republic’s army rescues and then tasks with killing walkers or working in energy, growing food, or water and waste management. After six years of consignment, workers have a path to becoming citizens of the Civic Republic. “Security and secrecy above all. That’s the army’s code,” Rick writes in a letter to Michonne. “So no one can leave, ever.”

As it turns out, Okafor protected Rick to recruit him to his covert program with fellow consignee Pearl Thorne (Lesley-Ann Brandt). One year after Rick and Thorne enlist as soldiers in the CRM, Okafor reveals his plans for Sgt. Maj. Grimes and Sgt. Maj. Thorne: to become leaders and join force command within the Civic Republic Military. Okafor needs leaders to help him change the CRM from the inside, explaining why Rick and Thorne — both designated as “A’s” — were allowed into consignment and the military. (A’s are people with strengths, and B’s are everyday people just trying to survive. B’s get in; A’s are sent away and killed to be used as test subjects for the CRM’s secret zombie experiments.)
(Photo: Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes – The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live _ Season 1, Gallery – Photo Credit: James Dimmock/AMC – James Dimmock/AMC)
Other CRM secrets will be declassified when Rick and Thorne move up the ranks and receive the top-secret Echelon Briefing: “All the info, the whys, the things 90% of our force doesn’t know about and 100% of our city doesn’t.” Okafor believes that A’s who become soldiers will become leaders who can change the CRM, which has been carrying out clandestine “tactical military operations” that eliminated the Omaha Safe-Zone (population: 97,407) and Campus Colony (population: 9,671) communities with a green liquid chlorine gas on World Beyond. With a force of 17,000, this is their chance to save the world.

“He wanted to change things, change the army without them even knowing it. And he wanted my help to do it. I’d play along, but it wasn’t my fight,” Rick writes in his letter. “Everything was about secrets. The army kept the city a secret at all costs. Everything the army did was secret to the city. And then there were the soldiers with those blood-red stripes keeping what they did a secret to the whole force. Secrets on secrets.”

Okafor keeps secrets from Rick, too. He found the message in the bottle that Rick tossed into the water during his escape to Rat Island (in The Walking Dead series finale) and learned about Rick’s wife and daughter, and then used that intel to track down Rick’s home at the Alexandria Safe-Zone. If Rick were to escape, CRM protocol would have dispatched Okafor to find and kill his charge, Michonne, and anyone else who knew about the Civic Republic in the name of operational security. Security and secrecy above all.

Rick contemplates suicide when he learns that escape puts his family in danger. Okafor moves Rick to Logistics with Thorne to help convert a college in the Cascades to a battle-ready forward operating base where CRM brass will convene for a summit in one year. Rick and Thorne spend the next 12 months converting the college into the CRM Cascades base, and by the time its completed, it’s been eight years since the bridge.

“I love you so much. I love you so, so much. I tried. Please just know I tried,” Rick writes in a letter to Michonne that he then burns with phones etched with drawings of Michonne and Judith. “I tried… but I failed.” There’s no escape for the living.