The Walking Dead had a perfect villain in place for a crossover that could bring Rick, Carol, and Daryl all back together again. However, the villain was wiped out with the death of Major General Beale in the reunion of Rick and Michonne in The Ones Who Live. Now, things are splintered. Rick and Michonne are back with Judith and Rick Jr., Carol and Daryl are in Europe, and Maggie is in New York City with Negan. There is nothing big to explain bringing them back together, as there is no villain in place that could explain the need for the original Walking Dead characters to have to team up again.
Rick and Michonne destroyed and shut down the evil branch of the Civic Republic Military (CRM) in The Ones Who Live, so what could be left in the world of The Walking Dead?
The CRM was perfectly set up to be the big crossover villain for the future of The Walking Dead. The group was massive, bigger than even the Commonwealth. While the Commonwealth was a massive threat, it was one giant community. The CRM was a government force with helicopters, an armed militia, and a reach all the way across the United States. There was no way that even the main survivors should have been able to deal with this threat, but somehow Rick and Michonne did it by themselves in The Ones Who Live.
The CRM was hinted at in The Walking Dead with Jadis and officially introduced in The Walking Dead: World Beyond with a group of kids trying to find the organization’s location to save one of their dads. The CRM was shown to be a ruthless and horrifying villain, even slaughtering entire communities that were living and studying in peace. The CRM were cold-blooded killers, a true fascist force of nature that wanted to conquer the entire country in The Walking Dead. However, World Beyond was just showing how they use people, which led to Rick being taken by them as an asset. Thanks to Michonne finding him, they were able to take the head off the CRM and eliminate the greatest threat to freedom in the country.
While the CRM might have seemed like the perfect crossover villain in The Walking Dead, their defeat seems to have ended that. That does not mean it is necessarily out of the picture. As the real world has shown, a terrifying fascist faction can be brought down, but there will always be offshoots where people believe in the evil of these regimes. There are surely still large groups out there that believe in what the CRM was doing, and they could always pop up and become a major threat. The only problem is that The Ones Who Live showed the main CRM defeated, and anything else would seem second-rate.
This also happened in The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, which had what looked like the perfect new villain in Marion Genet, the leader of the Pouvoir des Vivants in France, but this villain also died. The Maggie and Negan series, The Walking Dead: Dead City, also brought in a new group that was a threat, but that series is mostly about warring factions and less about a major crossover villain. This leaves the reason for a crossover questionable.
The truth is that the days of Walking Dead crossovers are in doubt. Rick and Michonne are at peace, Daryl and Carol are on the other side of the world, and Negan and Maggie are in New York in the middle of faction wars. Morgan was last seen looking for Rick, so that would be nice to see resolved, but there isn’t much left to bring the old group back together. However, there is one thing that was shown that could play into the future of The Walking Dead.
In the main series, the dead were mutating and evolving. They were gaining a sense of intelligence they never had before. Even more disturbing was what was happening in Daryl Dixon, where scientists were mutating and turning the dead into weapons. Mutating the dead and turning them into more than just lumbering zombies would revitalize the franchise and bring the horror to the walking dead, rather than the humans who want to rule the world during the apocalypse.
Having the dead become something more akin to what happened in the 28 Years Later franchise, or something like in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, could make the zombies the real villains for the first time in The Walking Dead’s history. Smart zombies would be a change that could force Rick, Carol, Michonne, Daryl, Maggie, and even Negan to regroup to save their societies from a new threat. Other than that, there isn’t much that The Walking Dead hasn’t already done for crossover villains.
