The appearance of the Governor and his one good eye at the end of last week’s episode definitely signaled a game-changing turn of events for our heroes. This week’s episode focused on what the Governor was up to while Rick and crew were up to their necks in sick folks and moral quandaries. Though it was easy to picture season three’s megalomaniacal antagonist plotting his revenge in the darkness of Georgia’s wilderness, the reality of the Governor’s time since his failed attack on the prison was not what I expected at all. As this was a fairly revelatory episode, you might want to shuffle on back if you haven’t already seen it. Consider that your official spoiler alert, friends.
“What Happened To Your Eye?”
A montage set to a melancholy alt-country tune (The Last Pale Gun in the West by Ben Nichols; kind of an amazing song) shows us a ruined, stripped-down version of the Governor. He’s no longer the manipulative dictator that he once was. As he fixes a detached look of indifference on a walker that is slithering through his campfire in an effort to devour him, we get the impression that he wouldn’t be overly upset if he were to join his undead companion in a fiery death. After his remaining henchmen move on without him, the Governor returns to Woodbury.
And burns it to the ground.
It’s hard to watch his home and empire go up in smoke without discounting the thought that the Governor as we knew him in season three is no more. Let’s not be too quick to assume he’s on the straight and narrow—the dude had a trophy case full of severed heads after all—but it definitely creates a trajectory for redemption that adds a whole lot of complexity to the character. On Talking Dead tonight, David Morissey mentioned that the Governor torched Woodbury for two crucial reasons: It provided the Governor with necessary closure on that part of his life while ensuring that a certain heroic sheriff wouldn’t be able roll in and use the town for his own survival. The Governor is so finely-tuned to the world of the undead that even his metaphors serve practical purposes.
“Mess With Me Or My Family, and I Will Put You Down.”
After setting Woodbury ablaze, the Governor continues walking through the ghost towns and wilderness of post-apocalyptic Georgia for what I assume to be the duration of season four thus far, as he’s sporting Daryl hair and a scraggly beard. The distinction between his lifeless shuffle and that of a solitary zombie is almost nonexistent.
Eventually, he pauses in front of a derelict apartment complex to catch a glimpse of a little blond girl staring down from one of the upper floors. Though she looks like the ghost of the Governor’s daughter from the street below, her name is Megan and she’s one of four new characters that are introduced this episode.
Megan has been living with her mom Lily, her aunt Tara, and her grandpa Don since the beginning of the walker invasion. When the Governor shows up, Tara (a former cop) makes sure that he knows how serious she is about taking out threats to her family. Both the Governor and this family are in a dire situation. The girls need help taking care of their terminally ill father, and the governor, simply put, needs a reason to live.
The Governor’s stay with this surrogate family reveals a lot about how his character has evolved since the prison incident. When he tells the story of Woodbury, he explicitly states that the town’s leader lost his mind; he then pulls a Don Draper by assuming the alias of Brian Harriet, the name of a dead guy that he spotted on the side of a barn during his travels. He also forges an instant connection with Lily’s daughter Megan, and that connection breathes new life into the broken man. Though I’m trying to remain optimistic about the Governor’s future, he utters a somewhat foreboding statement while he’s teaching Megan how to play chess. When Megan asks if getting all of your pawns killed means losing the game, the Governor simply replies, “You can lose a lot of soldiers and still win the game,” which prompts Megan to draw an eye patch on the white king. The pessimist in me can’t help but think that his foreshadows a greater conflict down the line.
“You Helped Us. I’m Saying Thank You. Deal With It.”
In addition to brightening Megan’s spirits, the Governor also conducts a salvage mission to a nearby nursing home to fetch some oxygen for Grandpa Don. He makes it by the skin of his teeth, but Grandpa Don dies anyway—and you know what happens when folks die around here. It’s a brutal scene as the Governor arrives to see Lily, Tara, and Megan sitting around their deceased father’s bed. When Zombie Grandpa Don makes a grab for Tara’s head, the niceguy switch in the Governor’s head flips off, and he beats the newly minted walker to hell with one of the oxygen tanks that he had brought back—ironic, considering the oxygen was supposed to keep Don alive. Though the adults in the situation completely understand, Megan is now reasonably terrified of her new buddy.
Now that their father has passed on, Lily and Tara decide that the apartment building is no longer safe and insist on going wherever the Governor is going. He’s resistant at first, but even jaded former tyrants need human contact. The four of them pile into Grandpa Don’s truck and hit the road.
“For Now, You’re Stuck With Us, and That’s Just the Way It’s Going to Be.”
During a zombie holocaust, it’s only a matter of time before your car breaks down. After spending the night together (Lily and the Governor manage to have some sex while Tara and Megan sleep next to them—when opportunity knocks…), the four set out on foot—only to stumble upon a mighty horde of the undead. Panicking, Megan freezes and doesn’t run off with the rest of them. In a climactic moment, she runs to the Governor who lifts her out of harm’s way and into the woods—where they fall into a zombie pit.
Said zombie pit is home to a few of the most brutal treatments of the undead that I have yet seen on the show. The Governor rips a walker’s throat out, a la Dalton from Roadhouse; he cracks one’s head open with his bare hands; and, to wrap it all up, inserts a human femur into the mouth of a walker and pries upward, opening the top half of its head like a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Once again, we see the viciousness that is still a part of the Governor explode, however this time it’s in defense of an innocent life. The scene ends with his old buddy Martinez showing up—which serves as a reminder of who he really was while ruling Woodbury. It will be interesting to see how he manages to juggle this connection to his old life with the new life he’s starting to build.
Verdict
Awesome episode. Ditching the folks at the prison to draw an intense focus on the evolution of the Governor was totally unexpected, and I feel that this new characterization offers some interesting possibilities for the rest of the show. Will Carol meet up with the Governor and indulge in some therapeutic Rick-bashing? Could an alliance between Rick and the Governor be on the horizon, or will he revert back to his tyrannical ways? Regardless of where this leads, I appreciate the decision to add some sophistication to a character that could have very easily become the caricature of a moustache-twirling supervillain.
PHOTO: Gene Page/AMC