Danai Gurira will be leaving The Walking Dead TV series in the back half of season 10. There has obviously been a lot of speculation about how and when she will leave the series, but that storyline has been very successfully kept under wraps, so far. In fact, Michonne does not appear in the first two episodes of the season’s back half, and we don’t even know how many episodes Michonne will appear in.
What we do know is that Michonne has set sail along with a new character named Virgil for a naval base, where she is expected to exchange goods for weapons, which the Alexandrians need for the war against The Whisperers. We’ve seen in trailers for the back half glimpses of Michonne on the ship; Michonne using zombies as weapons (as in, when we met her on the series); Michonne killing zombies; and Michonne interacting with Virgil.
The latest teaser trailer for The Walking Dead sees Michonne in a completely different context: Holding Negan’s bat, Lucille (or another bat styled after Lucille) and angrily beating someone to death with it. The POV of Lucille and Michonne is the same POV we saw when Negan used that bat to kill Glenn and Abraham, although Michonne looks considerably more angry here. The question is: Who is she using the bat on, and who would make her angry enough to use that bat with so much force? Is it Alpha or Beta? Or is it a new character she meets on her travels with Kevin? Will this interaction result in her death? Or her decision to leave the series? There’s a lot to unpack here, and we’re going to have to wait a few more weeks to find out.
However, The Walking Dead itself will return next week, and from what I understand, we have 40 weeks of The Walking Dead in store from next week until around Thanksgiving, including the fifth season of Fear the Walking Dead and the first season of The World Beyond.
