When Rick Grimes lost his hand, “The Walking Dead” got a disabled fan

The Walking Dead Franchise on AMC caught my attention for the first time in nearly a decade with The Walking Dead: The Survivors.

No, it wasn’t the steamy romance between Michonne (Danai Gurira) and Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), although that ultimately contributed to my enjoyment of the series, as it was refreshing to see a wholesome Michonne stick by her man. (Frankly, George A. Romero’s Monkey shines is one of the few other examples of sex between a disabled man and an able-bodied woman on screen that I can think of.) Rather, the reason was that they decided to return to a popular disability story from the comics written by Robert Kirkman: when Rick loses his hand and then learns to cope with the amputation.

I will briefly summarize what happened in the series premiere of The survivors briefly, but first, how I got here with a franchise I once loved, because I know I’m not alone. It’s a fandom story I hear so often that the opinion is almost a fact: The worst thing the original TWD The series never managed to address the death of Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun). After teasing fans with a fake death in Season 6, Episode 3, “Thank You,” in which viewers saw Glenn fall into a horde of zombies and scream in pain, it was later revealed that the character somehow survived the zombie horde, allowing him to make a brief return only to be unceremoniously killed by Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) in the Season 7 premiere, “The Day Will Come When You’re No Longer Here.”

Glenn’s death was the last episode of the series that I saw, but unlike other TWD Fans, I continued watching the spin-offs. Fear the walking deadNick Clark (Frank Dillane), recovering heroin addict and son of Madison Clark (Kim Dickens), was one of the best portrayals of addiction and recovery on television EVER, with Nick’s nihilism and street smarts proving crucial to the family’s survival in the zombie apocalypse more than once. From experience (February 2024 was my 13th birthday when I was sober), I think most current and former drug addicts would have the skills to survive any apocalypse. Do you know how to stitch your own wounds? I do.

After we have gotten Glenn out of the way both figuratively and literally, we come to Rick and the second worst TWD ever done: the decision not to have the Governor (David Morrissey) chop off Rick’s right hand, along with other disability-hostile changes to the character, who suffered and adapted to numerous injuries in the comics.

At the beginning of Kirkman’s TWD In the comics, Rick severely mutilates his hand during the prison story arc. After learning that there is a serial killer living among the survivors in the prison who is hunting the others, we see the former sheriff go into Frontier Justice mode and beat the man to a pulp in a fit of rage. At some point after Rick sustains this unrelated (but relevant to this article) hand injury, it is amputated by the Governor during a confrontation in Woodbury when the former refuses to tell the latter that his group of survivors are safe in the prison. (If you’re unfamiliar with the plot, the key point is that cutting off Rick’s hand is not an act of mercy, but manipulation.)

While I’m not an amputee and can’t address these stereotypes, I do have a disability that sometimes affects the use of my limbs and can attest to how ableist stereotypes impact the broader disability community — and me in particular. As a fan of the comics, I liked Rick’s post-amputation story because it was unique in that it forced the character to adapt to the change in order to survive, without it being a moral lesson for the reader. Additionally, he was one of many protagonists in the comics who had to learn to adapt to their physical and psychological traumas, and while the process was often messy, the rawness felt similar to the real-life struggles of people in the disability and chronically ill community.

When Kirkman announced TWDwas his concept: “What happens to the protagonist of a zombie movie after the credits roll?” Although Kirkman has questioned his decision to amputate Rick’s right hand, as he felt it posed later narrative challenges, those challenges also helped the comic stay true to the original concept. I had hoped that forcing himself to imagine living in our skin would generate more empathy. Despite Kirkman’s reservations, it was a bold, powerful move for us disabled people to have a character we could relate to that normalized amputated bodies in mass media and, moreover, showed that they could attain abilities. Because by making this decision, the comics had to avoid the common ableist cliche of the “single episode handicap” (or in this case, single problem handicap), in which a protagonist is afflicted with a short-term disability that is cured in the next story arc.

This representative power was undermined by the TWD‘s refusal to make the storyline center around Rick’s hand, initially on the grounds that it was difficult to write around a one-handed hero. Instead, the show opted to remix Rick’s prison storyline, in which he sustains a nasty gash on his hand in a scuffle with the Governor’s posse in “Thank You,” the same episode as the aforementioned faked death of Glenn. In that episode, a rival posse intercepts the ex-sheriff while he’s grappling with a herd of walkers, and his hand is injured.

As a viewer with a disability (and maybe that’s a small blessing), I couldn’t even hope for the possibility of seeing the amputated depiction from the comics on the show this episode, because the showrunner immediately went on a press tour telling everyone that Grimes’ hand would not be amputated.

“I’ll give you an absolute no, because I’ve dealt with a lot of ambiguity in storytelling here to protect the story: Rick’s hand is safe,” said showrunner Scott M. Gimple The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “You can proclaim it from the mountaintops: His hand is secure! He will wrap it around. There will be some ointments.” In other words: God forbid a character learning to adapt to a disability. That would make my job more difficult! Now imagine how difficult it must be to adapt to the non-disabled world when you live with a disability.

I was very touched when I started watching the first episode of The survivorswhich began with Rick amputating his left hand. This happened very differently than in the comics – namely because the hand he amputated was remarkably not his right, not his dominant hand, an important difference.

But the storyline that led Rick to disability isn’t what’s important to me, but what the show did with it afterward. While the show sometimes skirts around the terminal illness cliche (noting here that this cliche is sometimes used by non-sick people in non-terminal situations), it also touched on a part of the disability experience that isn’t often portrayed in media: the relationship between disability and suicidal thoughts. And much like what I loved about the comic, Rick’s journey was raw and messy, not a morality tale for non-sick consumption.

(Featured image: Gene Page/AMC)