#RICK THE WALKING DEAD ON THE PHONE SERIES#
First of all, if the chances of finding a missing person is increasingly unlikely after 72 hours in normal human society, how bad are those odds in a zombie apocalypse? The dreaded farm season was also The Walking Dead’s first sign of trouble, as the series eschewed any progress or zombie-infused action for narrative stagnancy and developments like Daryl finding Sophia’s goddamn doll in the woods being a Big Deal. Rick’s decision to hunker down is a failure on a couple of levels. Losing a child is obviously quite tragic (even if the character rarely spoke and was treated more like a MacGuffin), so Rick decided the group would stay at Hershel’s farm to try to locate her, which took up an entire half-season. Surrey: Carol’s daughter, Sophia, went missing at the start of the second season, when she ran into the woods after the group’s RV was surrounded by zombies on a highway. To commemorate Rick’s final episode, my Ringer colleague Ben Lindbergh and I-two people who have committed a disconcerting amount of time to this undead universe-are ranking all of Rick’s horrible plans over the years, from the least bad to the absolute worst. It’s difficult to imagine The Walking Dead without Rick, and despite his frequently questionable leadership, he’ll be sorely missed. Of course, this bad plan went awry when he was surrounded by a second horde, and as the realization hit that this was probably a terrible idea, his horse threw him off its back, impaling him on some sharp rebar as the undead descended on him. Something finally gave in “The Obliged.” Once again, Rick devised a nonsensical plan: He would single-handedly shepherd a zombie horde away from the construction of a bridge that’s essential for establishing trade routes. Sure, Rick’s had some solid leadership moments: He did sneak up on the Terminus cannibals and hack their insidious leader to pieces, and he did help conceive the zombie-guts-as-immersion tactic, but how many times has Rick’s planning gone awry and led to some of his own people getting slaughtered? It is legitimately strange that nobody from the group has questioned Rick’s leadership long enough to supplant him with someone else. If there is one constant to The Walking Dead outside of its endless zombie hordes, it’s that Rick Grimes likes to come up with a plan, and more often than not that plan is disastrous.
![rick the walking dead on the phone rick the walking dead on the phone](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0f/6d/20/0f6d200c8c9870055f13fd24c00e0b90.jpg)
You see, Rick is going to die because of a really stupid plan he hatched. In the pilot, we watched Rick stumble out of a coma into a desolate world with confusing signage like “DON’T DEAD, OPEN INSIDE.” From there, Rick has experienced about everything you’d expect from a fully realized zombie apocalypse: He’s fought and killed countless walkers, lost loved ones, forged inseparable bonds with fellow survivors, and even ripped out a dude’s throat with his mouth when his son was threatened (it was gnarly).īut after the fourth episode of Season 9, “The Obliged,” Rick has reached the end of the road, and with a cruel, ironic twist of fate at that. We’ve followed Rick, played by Andrew Lincoln, for nine seasons, over 100 episodes, and countless mumble-growls about stuff and thangs. For longtime (and arguably long-suffering) Walking Dead fans like myself, it’s a shocking turn of events. On Sunday night, the unthinkable is happening: Rick Grimes is exiting The Walking Dead.