Andrew Lincoln credited as playing...
Rick Grimes
- Rick Grimes: I never lost my son. I lost myself. He brought me back. My wife brought me back. We're the sword that kills. We're the sword that gives life. One life. One unstoppable life. We're not dead.
- [stabs Beale in the heart]
- Rick Grimes: You are.
- Major General Beale: Put your gun on the table. That prosthetic with the blade. In front of me. Away from you. I want you to reflect on your life. On all your lives before and after. All the before and afters. All the things you did before this moment. Because... after this next moment, everything will change. What's the worst thing you did to make sure someone else survived?
- [flashbacks of Rick killing Shane, Tomas, the cannibals and Joe play]
- Rick Grimes: I killed someone with my teeth. Like they do.
- Rick Grimes: My dad taught me, for better or worse... sometimes things have to burn to bring things back.
- Major General Beale: It was that. The sword that kills is the sword that gives life. I killed my past and a whole city so another could live. Let me tell you the first secret, Grimes. The first one that I share with each Frontliner I've briefed. The most likely outcome after all the fighting and killing, all the plans and sacrifices, we lose. Most likely outcome is that we're all gonna die.
- Major General Beale: We've discovered million-strong dead masses out there. Our modeling shows that non-necrotic human life - people - now have 14 or so years left on this planet. Could be quicker. And it isn't just the delts. It's starvation - the tenuous balance between population and yield. Disease, with a billion petri dishes out there stumbling and cooking in the sun, waiting to transmit God knows what to us while it transforms into God knows what. And in the end, the most likely outcome is that this rock will be cluttered with corpses to eventually rot into food for the trees. And it all becomes a strange temporary museum to an even stranger species that conquered it and marked it for a blink of its existence. This is why we do what we do.
- Rick Grimes: What do you do, sir?
- Major General Beale: We're trying to beat the odds, Grimes.
- Judith Grimes: [hugs Rick] I knew it, Dad. I knew you were still out there. I just never wanted you to feel alone.
- Rick Grimes: I thought I was. Then I realised... I wasn't.
- RJ: You're the brave man?
- Rick Grimes: I am.
- [adjusts RJ's Sheriff's Deputy hat]
- Rick Grimes: But maybe you can call me Dad.
- RJ: I knew you'd come back.
- Rick Grimes: How?
- RJ: I believed.
- [hugs Rick]
- Rick Grimes: I'm Sergeant Major Rick Grimes. You probably think I'm dead. He said I didn't need to be scared, that it was just "the burning".