It was always going to come down to this, and Episode 6 of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live will find Rick and Michonne going after the CRM directly, hoping to take it down from within. Cascadia Forward Operating Base will provide the setting for the Season 1 finale, as expected, and a who’s who of CRM top brass will likely be present. What will the Echelon Briefing reveal? Will Richonne be able to get out unscathed? We, like everyone else who watched Episode 5, have seen the teaser, so let’s irresponsibly speculate about what’s coming.
It was always going to come down to this, and Episode 6 of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live will find Rick and Michonne going after the CRM directly, hoping to take it down from within. Cascadia Forward Operating Base will provide the setting for the Season 1 finale, as expected, and a who’s who of CRM top brass will likely be present. What will the Echelon Briefing reveal? Will Richonne be able to get out unscathed? We, like everyone else who watched Episode 5, have seen the teaser, so let’s irresponsibly speculate about what’s coming.
I will happily admit that I have no idea what the much-talked-about Echelon Briefing will consist of. Here’s what we know:
- Only 10% of the CRM know what the briefing consists of.
- The Echelon Briefing represents the most secretive knowledge within the CRM, and this knowledge is integral to the long-term rebuilding of humanity.
- Whatever this plan is, it inspired near-complete loyalty in Jadis and a major loyalty turnaround in Pearl Thorne.
- The CRM are explicitly evil, so it’s probably very bad.
- Those extraction zones (above) seem too close together.
What we can realistically assume given how we’ve seen the CRM carry on thus far — especially the destruction of Omaha — is that the Echelon Briefing contains some kind of genocidal ends-justify-the-means plan that will not mesh well with Rick and Michonne’s moral compass. They will feel like they have simply no choice but to put an end to the plan.
The last we saw Pearl, she was being extremely unreasonable. Her character changed pretty dramatically upon receiving the Echelon Briefing, and it stands to reason that what she saw in it has either convinced her of the CRM’s altruistic intentions (unlikely) or terrified her into submission (much more likely).
Either way, this will inevitably put her at odds with do-gooder Rick, and she’s going to have to make a decision about where her loyalties are. I strongly suspect she will side with Rick against the CRM and help he and Michonne take them down. The alternative is that she tries to stop Rick and ends up dead, but that would be pretty wasteful. She’s an interesting character who received a decent amount of attention before Richonne fled the CRM.
