Jadis (The Walking Dead)

Anne/Jadis
The Walking Dead character
Jadis/Anne, as portrayed by Pollyanna McIntosh in the television series.
First appearance	Television: "New Best Friends" (2017)
Last appearance	Television: "What Comes After" (2018)
Created by	Scott M. Gimple
Portrayed by	Pollyanna McIntosh
In-universe information
Occupation	Art Teacher Artist Leader of the Scavengers
Significant other	Fr. Gabriel Stokes

Jadis (also known as Anne) is a fictional character from the horror drama television series The Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: World Beyond, which air on AMC in the United States and are based on the comic book series of the same name. She is portrayed by Pollyanna McIntosh. Anne is an original character in the television series and has no counterpart in the comics.

Appearances

Personality

Jadis is initially introduced as the oddly-spoken and enigmatic leader of the Scavengers. She is calm and collected, but also very cunning and sly. Though she originally only speaks in contrived broken English (and complains that others talk too much), she reverts to full sentences following the deaths of the Scavengers. Later, as Anne, she is a fully accepted member of the Alexandria community, beginning in season 9, and starts a relationship with Fr. Gabriel Stokes, which does not last the full run of the season. She keeps secret details of her connection with a mysterious organization still flying helicopters many years into the apocalypse and eventually leaves to rejoin them, taking a critically injured Rick Grimes with her by helicopter.. Jadis is not seen again until The Walking Dead: World Beyond Season 2 leaving her current personality and status a mystery.

Season 7

See also: The Walking Dead (season 7)

In the mid-season premiere "Rock in the Road", Jadis's group kidnapped Gabriel and then ambushed Rick's team as they searched for him. In the episode "New Best Friends", when asked by Rick to join forces to defeat the Saviors, Jadis is reluctant but takes it into consideration after being told that they could gain more supplies. Jadis tells Rick he needs to prove his worth and she pushes him down a trash heap into a pit of trash and metal. After watching Rick kill a heavily armored walker, she tells him that she and her people will help him, but that they need a lot of guns. In the episode "Say Yes", when Rick's group delivers 63 guns to her, she tells him that it is not enough, claiming they need nearly twice as many guns. Rick and Jadis renegotiate and agree that he will keep 20 of the guns while he searches for more. He finds the needed guns at Oceanside in the episode "Something They Need", seemingly clinching the Scavengers' support. In the season finale "The First Day of the Rest of Your Life", on the day of the battle, she crudely propositions Rick upon arrival at Alexandria. Together, the Scavengers and the Alexandrians wire up bombs at the gates ready for the enemy. When the explosion fails as Negan and his men wait by the gates, Jadis pulls a gun on Rick and the Scavengers follow suit with the rest of the Alexandrians. She reveals that she told Negan of Rick's plan and was offered a "better deal" by the Saviors. When the Saviors get distracted by the re-animated Sasha, Rick attempts to make another deal with her, but Jadis refuses and shoots him in the abdomen; she pushes him off the platform. During the battle, she flees with her group through smoke bombs.

Season 8

See also: The Walking Dead (season 8)

In the episode "The King, the Widow, and Rick", after the war between the Saviors and the banded survivors has begun, Rick again attempts to get Jadis on his side. She imprisons him in a shipping container. In the episode "Time for After", Jadis releases him to fight with another armed walker. He decapitates the walker and disarms her men, giving her new terms which she appears to accept. In the mid-season finale "How It's Gotta Be", Rick is abandoned by Jadis and her Scavengers when they discover the aftermath of Daryl's attack on the Sanctuary and are fired on by Savior soldiers.

In the episode "The Lost and the Plunderers", Simon, not pleased with Negan's approach and knowing the Hilltop has the rest of his 38 men in captivity, goes to the Scavengers' junkyard and accuses Jadis of going back on their deal with the Saviors, but gives her Negan's offer of returning to the original terms of their deal and giving over all their guns. Jadis agrees, but Simon does not believe Jadis is showing enough remorse and kills her two lieutenants, Tamiel and Brion, in cold blood. She punches him, causing Simon to then order his men to kill the rest of the Scavengers. By the time Rick and Michonne arrive at the junkyard, all of the Scavengers but Jadis have reanimated. They find Jadis alone, having dropped her aloof nature. She explains that she had been an artist before the outbreak, having used the junkyard for materials, but afterwards, she and the Scavengers saw the junkyard as a way to keep themselves isolated from the rest of the world while using the entire yard as their canvas.

Rick, tired of Jadis' double-crosses, decides to abandon her as he and Michonne escape. Jadis lures the remaining walkers into an industrial shredder to protect herself, crying to herself as she watches her former friends be destroyed. In the episode "The Key", Jadis captures Negan at gunpoint. In the episode "Still Gotta Mean Something", in flashback, Jadis plays dead to save herself from the massacre of the Scavengers by Simon and the Saviors. In the present, she takes time to compose herself before collecting a captive Negan and carrying his modified baseball bat, "Lucille", and a suitcase. Negan tries to apologize for what happened to her people, recognizing that Simon had went against his orders in wiping out the Scavengers, but Jadis is steadfast and still threatens to kill him. While she is out of sight, he is able to access her suitcase, containing a gun and pictures from her past, convincing her to talk lest he destroy them with a flare. He reveals that he named his bat after his late wife, Lucille, and, like Jadis' pictures, his bat is the last thing he has to remember his previous life. Jadis suddenly rushes him, more to get at the flare, but it is knocked out of their hands into a puddle, and extinguishes. She runs off to get another flare as a helicopter hovers briefly overhead before disappearing, too late to see Jadis' second flare. Jadis breaks down into tears. Jadis lets Negan go; he offers her to come with him and follow a new path, but she refuses. In the season finale "Wrath", Jadis tells Morgan that he can call her "Anne". Morgan comes to the junkyard and tells her she can go anywhere she wants now that Negan has been defeated, so she leaves, but he stays in her place.

Season 9

See also: The Walking Dead (season 9)

In the season premiere "A New Beginning," Anne, now a fully accepted member of the Alexandria community, joins a supply run into Washington, D.C. Having visited the Smithsonian Museum once with her class when she was still a teacher, Anne is able to lead the group to a cache of supplies in the basement of the museum. On their return, they find the bridge to Hilltop is out, and Rick develops a plan to rebuild it. In the episode "The Bridge", Anne helps with this reconstruction, during which she and Father Gabriel start to discover feelings for each other. However, while on watch one night, she spots a helicopter flying overhead. In the episode "Warning Signs", the next day she departs from the construction camp, unaware Gabriel is following her. Back at the scrapyard, she recovers a walkie-talkie and talks to an unidentified man on the other end. The man tells her she missed her pickup and they will only pick her up if she brings an "A" with her. Anne discovers Gabriel and subdues him. In the episode "The Obliged", she prepares to feed Gabriel to a walker but cannot come to do it, but she still tells the man on the other end of the walkie-talkie that she has his "A". Gabriel recognizes that Anne has been engaging in human trafficking, but she lets him go while she flees to meet with the helicopter. In the episode "What Comes After", she races to the meeting point, insisting to the man she still has her "A". While waiting at the site, she witnesses the smoke set up by Rick's destruction of the bridge, and among the various walker bodies that float down river, she finds a heavily-wounded Rick washed ashore. She reports to the landing helicopter that she has a "B" and he needs their help. Anne and Rick are loaded on the helicopter and taken away.

The Walking Dead: World Beyond

Season 2

Jadis is not seen again until The Walking Dead: World Beyond Season 2.

In the trailer for The Walking Dead: World Beyond Season 2, Jadis appears dressed in Civic Republic Military attire saying: "I know that the Civic Republic is the last light of the world. My purpose is to create a new era on this planet,"

Development and reception

Pollyanna McIntosh portrays Jadis/Anne

Pollyanna McIntosh appears as Jadis in what was initially just a recurring role in 3 episodes of The Walking Dead's seventh season. However, for the eighth season of the show she was promoted to the main cast.

Ron Hagan for Den of Geek! in his review of season 7 episode "Something They Need" said, "Jadis and the garbage men (best band name ever) are a prime example of the writers having a little fun with the show, creating a new faction that is both wholly original and fits in with the overall mythology of the show." Kevin Fitzpatrick of Screen Crush reviewed the season finale "The First Day of the Rest of Your Life" and said that "there's a notable dichotomy between treating that reveal [of Sasha's death] as a moment of surprise, and having Jadis and the junkyard folks' betrayal actually catch viewers off-guard. The outbreak of war itself isn't any major shock, nor is the lack of any notable casualties, but a non-comic element like Jadis felt like the one true wild card in an otherwise predictable showdown." He also commented that "as much as Jadis' interaction with Negan reiterates the amusing distinction* her group provides, the 'Heapsters' heel-turn does mean we spent two or three episodes building these characters up as allies, only to have them turn with little explanation, and essentially guarantee their role as enemies next season" and that "Jadis' proposition to 'lay with' Rick offered another wonderful moment of weirdness for this oddly monosyllabic group, but why even bother, given what she knew of how the exchange would go down?" Blair Marnell of CraveOnline commented on how "Jadis and her Scavengers had betrayed Rick's group to the Saviors. Really? You mean it wasn’t a good idea to hunt down guns and give them to these cartoon psychos that they barely knew? There are times when the TV show improves upon the comic book’s storyline, but this was not one of those occasions. From the start, the Scavengers have felt out of place on this series, and it would have been refreshing to see all of them end up as tiger food." Marnell also said that "At least Jadis had a very funny moment in which she propositioned Rick right in front of Michonne and basically asked if Michonne had a problem with that. The facial expressions of Danai Gurira and Andrew Lincoln were really priceless. That take on Jadis could have had more potential, if all of her followers didn't also have the same strange way of speaking. There was simply nothing more to Jadis or the Scavengers other than their bizarre trash motif." Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian called her hairstyle "the fringe that's an unwitting homage to King Henry V of England c1415" and said that "Jadis and her gang turned their guns on the Alexandrians. Even Michonne found herself in the cross hairs of a former ally on the roof. Why did it have to be this way, Jadis, why? 'I got a better deal,' quoth she. Just hope, for her sake, the deal she struck with Negan includes a few hours at a top salon, if you catch my drift." Elise Nakhnikian of Slant Magazine was critical that "the mystery isn't so much why Jadis betrayed Rick as why he ever trusted her in the first place. She clearly never gave a damn about his safety or well-being, tossing him off her trash heap to fight with the armored walker on their first meeting, and she was a mercurial and unreasonable trading partner, insisting that Rick's people go back for more guns after they'd risked so much to bring her the first batch. Yet he keeps trying to negotiate with her even after she shoots him, offering to strike a new deal until she casually pushes him off yet another high platform, annoyed that he failed to obey her command to kneel down."

On the role in The Walking Dead: World Beyond, AMC Network's Scott Gimple confirmed in a press release: "In our story, years have passed—we'll get hints of what happened with that fateful helicopter ride and learn Jadis has new allies and alliances; she is a big part of connecting the CRM and Three Circles mythology that's seen throughout all three series. We can't wait to share it all with fans of the TWDU."

McIntosh said of her return: "I love the character of Jadis, and I love this world, so getting to inhabit her again in collaboration with the talented team at The Walking Dead: World Beyond in beautiful Richmond, Virginia was a joy."

Walking Dead Chief Content Officer Scott Gimple has said that McIntosh as Jadis/Anne is planned to appear in the upcoming movie spin-offs, telling the story of what happened after Rick and Jadis departed in a helicopter.