With the home stretch of The Walking Dead’s eleventh and final season only a few months away, a wealth of spin-offs and prequels await to quench our thirst for blood, gore, and drama – and extend The Walking Dead universe into brand new places. Chief among which, no pun intended, is the untitled spin-off featuring the return of Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) alongside Michonne (Danai Gurira) in a limited-series spin-off from 2023.
The series creator and showrunner Scott M. Gimple, who previously served as showrunner on the parent show through Seasons 4-8, has dished the first details on the upcoming spin-off during The Walking Dead Universe Preview 2022 special live on Talking Dead that aired Sunday, August 7.
Courtesy of a story from ComicBook. Gimple explained that he had been working on the spin-off “very, very deeply with Danai and with Andy, and we continue to work on it pretty much every day together with some Walking Dead vets and some great new voices.”
Rick and Michonne will be reunited on screen for the first time since Andrew Lincoln’s explosive exit from the show in Season 9 – saving the communities from a horde of the undead by destroying a bridge that seemingly killed him. It was revealed moments after that the Sheriff had survived the blast before being transported in a Civil Republic Military Helicopter – since which his whereabouts remain unknown.
Gimple has described their characters as “two people that have been separated for a very long time. They’ve lived whole other existences and they have to find themselves again, let alone each other.”
Gimple called Rick and Michonne an “incredible power couple” and further teased the return of “Red Machete Rick,” referring to a brutal episode in Season 5. The episode saw Rick dispatch the surviving Terminus cannibals with a red-handled machete. The Walking Dead returns to AMC and AMC+ from October 2 – with the final eight episodes of Season 11 airing weekly.
