Surprise visitor saves 'Dead's' day

Spoiler alert: This story contains numerous details from Sunday's Season 5 finale.

Morgan Jones certainly has a sense of dramatic timing.

The Walking Dead mystery man, seen twice briefly this season, showed up just in time to save Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Aaron (Ross Marquand) from a swarm of zombie walkers in the Season 5 finale Sunday.

Morgan (Lennie James), who has a bond with survivor leader Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) that goes back to the pilot of the top-rated AMC drama, finally catches up with Rick – "The only person on the planet Morgan knows," James says – in the season's final scene.

"He doesn't know anybody else," James says in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY. "He lost his wife and child, the only other people he had a connection to in the post-apocalyptic world."

Rick, who formed a bond with Morgan and his son when they met just weeks after the zombie apocalypse, gave Morgan a walkie-talkie to stay in contact. After going their separate ways, the men had a brief reunion in Season 3, when Morgan, who had "quite clearly lost his mind" after losing his son, had barricaded himself into solitary confinement surrounded by deadly traps, James says.

"He blamed himself for the death of his son, because ultimately it was because he couldn't kill his (walker) wife that his son ended up dying. He went down a very dark hole in which not even death would have been salvation for him," James says. "He set around himself a fortress of traps. Rick penetrated that and shows him mercy and compassion."

Morgan has been tracking Rick this season, aided by a map he found that Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) had left for Rick, detailing a path toward Washington, D.C. By the time of his arrival at the Alexandria community in Sunday's episode, Morgan "is a different man. Something has happened to him between (Season 3) and now," says James, without detailing the reason for the change.

In Sunday's episode, which opens with Morgan waking up in a car, he crosses paths with two of the mysterious people, eventually revealed to be Wolves, behind the "W" tattoos increasingly evident on walkers.

"How Morgan dispatches them is a testament to the new man he is, because he takes them down but doesn't take them out. He gives them the possibility of life, whereas before he never would have done that," says James, who also plays a trauma surgeon in Critical, an English real-time medical drama that he describes as a cross between ER and 24.

Later, Morgan saves Daryl and Aaron "for no other reason than that life is precious, which seems an obvious statement. But, coming from Morgan's mouth, considering who he was the last time we met him, it's a testament to the seismic change he's gone through. Life was certainly not precious to him then," James says.

James, who previously starred in AMC's Low Winter Sun and CBS' Jericho, says he has enjoyed his return to Dead. The London native understands the comparisons to Jericho, another post-apocalyptic drama that forced people to band together, but says Morgan is much different from Jericho's Robert Hawkins.

Hawkins was a husband and father "who knew more than everybody else. He had trained for what was happening and he was the only person who wasn't surprised by what was happening," James says. "Morgan is somebody who has never known what he is capable of until presented with every single situation that has befallen him. He's a much more lonely man than Hawkins and more ill-prepared. They're operating from different ends of the spectrum."

Morgan, who will return for at least one Season 6 episode, introduces a new weapon, a long staff, that can join Michonne's sword and Daryl's cross-bow in the arsenal of walker-control devices.

"He has built up survival skills. He has changed his weapon of choice," James says. "He has become incredibly proficient with the stick. He wields it as a deadly weapon, but not a weapon that necessarily kills."

The drama of the Rick-Morgan reunion and what it means going forward appeal to James, whose character comes face to face with Rick, who also has changed since their last meeting, at the end of the season finale.

"We arrive at a moment of really intense drama. Rick has just put a bullet into (Alexandria resident) Pete's head and Rick is covered in the blood of a walker," he says. "Morgan just says Rick's name and they look at each other and that's the end of the season. It's literally the last line of the episode."