The longer a character lasts on The Walking Dead, the bigger a deal is made about their exit. Michonne has been around since the finale of season 2, and last night’s episode was entirely constructed around the build up to her final departure and the one thing that could have convinced her to leave.
There were a lot of surprises in store for her, including a trippy hallucinatory rewrite of her history that brought back a litany of former characters that included Rick, Carl, Glen and Andrea, and imagined what would have happened if she’d ended up with the Saviors, but the biggest was the revelation that Rick is still alive and out there somewhere. This was seemingly partially confirmed by Japanese text etched onto a phone case along with pictures of her and Judith, which according to showrunner Angela Kang, translates to “Believe a little bit longer.”
Exactly why the message was written in Japanese was not addressed, but it’s possible that Michonne might know the language, as a later scene sees her talk over the radio with Judith where they refer to each other by the call signs Daitō and Shōtō, the Japanese names for, respectively, long and short swords, reflecting the weapons the two wield as well as their sizes relative to one another and that the blades are often used to complement each other. The images also suggest that Rick has been provided with some kind of way of keeping tabs on his family, as he left with the CRM when Judith was only a toddler and so would otherwise have had no idea what she now looks like.
The phone itself is clearly part of a larger story that has yet to be told, but now that Michonne has already stumbled across the proverbial message in a bottle sent by Rick for his wife to not give up hope that they would one day be reunited, then searching for him by holding onto the message as a talisman might ultimately result in that rarest of occurrences in The Walking Dead: a happy ending.