The fifth episode of The Walking Dead spin-off series The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live saw the end of one of the most interesting characters. Jadis Stokes, real name Anne (played by Pollyanna McIntosh), is the only character to appear in three of the shows: The Walking Dead, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, and The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, which has become a massive success, shattering records for AMC.

She had an interesting journey from antagonist to friend to cruel and heartless villain, giving her one of the most intriguing arcs in the franchise. It’s interesting to look back at her journey through the TWD universe and all the ups, downs, and complex decisions she made.

At first, Jadis was a woman of few words. An art teacher prior to the apocalypse, she found solace in a landfill known as the Heaps, where everyone’s trash became her treasure. She could make beautiful things from what might be considered garbage and build a fortress for herself and her people, known fittingly as the Scavengers.

Rick (Andrew Lincoln) comes across her and her people in Season 7, and Jadis becomes a tertiary antagonist and one of the show’s best villains through the second half of this season and into Season 8. Looking to other communities to help in their fight against The Saviors, Rick hopes he can get Jadis on board. But he has no idea what he’s in for when he tries to reason with her.

A master negotiator, Jadis survived for so long by making trades. She held no allegiance to anyone: whatever was the better deal was the one she would take. She proved this when she betrayed Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and sided with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) when he offered her what she deemed a better deal.

It’s later revealed that Jadis also had another means of surviving: she was secretly working with the Civic Republic Military (CRM), trafficking humans in exchange for supplies. She labels them either an A: a test subject, a strong-willed person whom the CRM will either kill or use for experimentation (likely both), or a B, an asset, an individual just trying to survive, who will become a working-class member of the city and won’t kick up a fuss about it. She continues to do this work even after siding with the residents of Alexandria Safe-Zone following the end of the war against the Saviors.

Growing out her hair, speaking in complete sentences now that she feels she has a reason to, and becoming a trusted member of the community, Jadis even strikes up a romantic relationship with Gabriel (Seth Gilliam). This seemingly ends, however, when Jadis is accused of murdering missing Saviors the group had taken in. She is angered that the group doesn’t believe she can change and tries to have Gabriel killed by a walker in a fit of rage. Ultimately, she snaps out of it and lets him live but decides to leave. She claims to have honestly tried to change. But she doesn’t think she’ll ever be trusted or will be able to be what they need her to be.

However, before she departs for good, Jadis witnesses the bridge explosion and sees a badly injured Rick. She calls for help and lies to the CRM, telling them she has a B who needs help and it will be worth their while. Rick is flown off to “safety” with Jadis on a CRM helicopter, presumed dead by the others.

Jadis on The Walking Dead: World Beyond

Jadis has a much bigger role in The Walking Dead: World Beyond. A primary antagonist, she has now been working with the CRM for many years. With a fresh, cropped haircut that gives her a hardened look and her old attitude cranked up a few notches with more dialogue and power, Jadis is someone to be feared.

She is devoted to the cause and works her way up to warrant officer within the CRM. She is perceptive, figuring out the people working behind her back and using and manipulating them to get information and thwart attacks. However, her conscience also makes her blind to people working against her, like Huck (Annet Mahendru).

Even though she ends up killing Huck, it clearly troubles her in the moment, and she tells the woman before her dying breath that she wishes it didn’t have to happen. But Jadis takes over again when she betrays Huck’s mother, making Elizabeth (Julia Ormond) take the fall for the attack on the research facility to increase her own stature.

Jadis is cruel and unafraid to hurt or even kill for the sake of the cause. She reveals this in secret annual meetings with Gabriel that would have started during the time of The Walking Dead: World Beyond and confirmed in The Ones Who Live. Despite her hardened attitude, Jadis still struggles with who she is and whether her allegiances to Alexandria are deeper than those to the CRM. This is evidenced by the fact that when she joined the CRM full-time, she adopted Gabriel’s surname, Stokes. It was as though she still wanted to keep a piece of her old self alive.

Jadis on The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live

Jadis reappears on The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, proving to be a formidable enemy to Rick. It’s her knowledge of who he is and where he is from, in fact, that prevents Rick from escaping. Even if he manages to do so, she has a file outlining everything about him and his family at Alexandria. If she were ever to be killed, this file would inevitably be found, and everyone he knows and loves would be killed as well.

Yet Jadis, as discussed in her meetings with Gabriel, doesn’t feel good about this because it’s an outcome she isn’t sure she could live with. She admits to others that Rick is “the strongest person” she has ever met and that she lied by calling him a “B” to ensure he would not be killed after being rescued. When Michonne (Danai Gurira) arrives at the CRM, Jadis, clearly aware of who Michonne really is, tells Rick that she will keep his secret. But she also uses this as leverage against him, furthering her goals at the CRM.

Jadis reveals to Gabriel that she still loves and respects the people in Alexandria and doesn’t want them harmed. But if that is what it comes to for the sake of the cause, that’s her priority. The fact that she has kept the community’s existence a secret proves she wants to protect them while still doing the work she feels is essential at the CRM. She’s constantly torn between these two sides.

Gabriel can see, however, that Anne still resides in her body and mind. When Jadis abruptly pulls a gun on Gabriel, threatening to kill him and apologizing for making him a “loose end,” he looks unaffected. He knows Anne will not have the heart to do it, and he is right. Later, when Rick calls Jadis “Anne,” a glimmer of heartache in her eye suggests that Jadis’ façade might be just that, and she still has the potential to be good.

Following the frantic fight between Jadis, Rick, and Michonne, when she finds them hiding away for the night in a remote cabin, Jadis seems unafraid. She knows they won’t kill her because the secret file she has still looms over their heads.

But when she is bitten by a walker, and her emotional death is inevitable, she retreats to a version of that woman they first met at the Heaps, or more so, the one who joined them in Alexandria. She decides to die with honor, wanting to prove to Gabriel that he was right should they ever return to the community and be able to tell him.

“I was tired of losing,” Jadis says in her final monologue. “I was finally part of something that could last. And I couldn’t lose another community. My old one. And my new one. I know if I didn’t kill you all, somehow, some way, you’d come for the CRM. So, I drew up the dossier to protect myself and make sure you couldn’t. I thought in my death, it was worth it. I’d chosen a side, right? I thought I had. Back and forth. Jadis, Anne, Alexandrians, CRM.”

In the end, Jadis reveals the location of her dossier to Rick and Michonne so they can retrieve and destroy it, but pleads with them not to take down the CRM once they do. They refuse to honor this request but are sympathetic now, knowing that everything Jadis did was to protect both communities. In a final act of mercy, Rick shoots Jadis in the head at her request before she endures more pain, passes away, and turns.

Was Jadis Good or Bad in The Walking Dead?

Jadis was one of the most complex characters in The Walking Dead universe. She was cunning and manipulative but also fiercely protective of her people. She realized that the world had become ruthlessly transactional. To survive, she had to play that game as best she could in a way that would always benefit her and the people she cared about.

She may have blindly followed the CRM, believing that even despite its most heinous acts, it was all for the greater good. In her mind, she had no other choice because this was the only group she had ever encountered that seemingly hadn’t (and didn’t) lose people or had at least justified to themselves that the losses were sacrifices. Jadis wasn’t a bad person, just someone looking for purpose and resolution.

While Jadis lasted for some time as Anne in Alexandria, she still never felt like she fit in. Unsurprisingly, she gravitated to a group that she felt would always accept her for who she was or at least who she was pretending to be.

Cold-hearted and dark, this acceptance and admiration eventually fueled her desire, and Jadis fell deeper and deeper into the worst version of herself, as shown, in particular, in The Walking Dead: World Beyond. Jadis became hungry for power, not only wanting to be a part of changing the world but being the one leading the charge.

Ironically, a woman who lived a life where she saw beauty in things no one else could became the antithesis of that after enduring so much suffering and heartbreak. But she went out with one final act of mercy, showing that while the face of Jadis might be who she became, Anne was always who she was. Watch episodes of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live on AMC and stream them on AMC+.