With the arrival of the Rick and Michonne spinoff The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, however, we now finally have the answer to this long-running question.

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live picks up with Rick in the clutches of the massive society known as the Civic Republic, which is defended by the incredibly powerful military force known as the Civic Republic Military. We’ve seen these folks and their alliance’s distinctive three-ring logo quite a few times in The Walking Dead canon now, most notably in the aforementioned World Beyond and also Fear the Walking Dead.

Since Rick is considered a “B” he handles the lowly grunt work expected from an unremarkable individual – clearing out hordes of walkers with a sharpened stick. He’s a “consignee” and after six years of zombie pruning, he will be allowed to enter the walled sanctuary of the city (that was once Philadelphia) to live in peace. Or at least he would have been allowed to, if a CRM officer named Donald Okafor (Craig Tate) hadn’t forcibly recruited him to join the army.

Roughly 19 minutes into The Ones Who Live‘s premiere episode “Years,” Okafor explains why he knows Rick and his fellow soldier Pearl Thorne (Lesley-Ann Brandt) aren’t “B’s” but rather “A’s” and would therefore be the right people to reform the CRM.

“The CRM designates people it finds A’s and B’s. A’s have a strength, A’s will die for what they believe in. People follow A’s. The people we cross in the world, the few we bring in, they’re classified as B’s. Every day people who are just trying to survive. B’s get in. A’s are sent away and killed except you two.”

All this time, the explanation as to what A’s and B’s were was the obvious one: letter grades that apply to human beings. B’s are good, A’s are better. But ironically, the CRM doesn’t want “better,” it wants “decent and compliant.” Someone like Rick, a natural-born leader who not only survives through unimaginable circumstances but thrives in them, is an inherent threat to the CRM’s carefully maintained hierarchal structures.

Danofgeek