This week, The Walking Dead brought back The Governor, its immensely controversial bete noire of season 3. We didn’t get so much as a frame of footage of Rick or anyone at the prison – it was nothing but the man formerly known as Philip Blake the whole time. And surprisingly, it was one of the most different and arguably most interesting episodes this uneven series has produced.
Let’s get one thing about straight right off the bat before we get into the events of the episode: I hate The Governor. Fuckin’ hate him. And not the way Robert Dorkman (Kirkman) and Glen Mazzara wanted me to last year, as a result of his epically heinous shit (battle royale fighting rings filled with walkers, feeding Andrea to a zombified Milton, quasi-raping Maggie and, oh yeah, killing anywhere between 20 and 30 of his own people in a random outburst, etc.). I hate the way an initially intriguing and almost multifaceted character was quickly transformed into a cartoon because…why, exactly?
Clearly it wasn’t all about Kirkman, because the version of The Governor from the comics is nothing like David Morrissey’s portrayal. (Although this in and of itself isn’t a bad thing due to the immense suckage/Grand Guignol absurdity of Kirkman’s original creation…damn, look at me baiting the comic readers again…whoops, #sorrynotsorry). And it probably wasn’t all Mazzara in season 3, but we’ll never know, because the specifics of the Kirkman/AMC vs. Mazzara behind the scenes creative conflict aren’t a matter of public record. It also wasn’t all Morrissey, because as bad as his performance got in the crazy final episodes, he started off playing the character well.
Point being, I was worried to the point of agita when I saw him show up in the last few seconds last week, especially considering how excellent that episode was in all other ways. So, while I’m far from convinced that The Governor’s return is good for The Walking Dead, I don’t yet think that it’s bad, based on the results of this hour.
We begin by zooming back to when we last chronologically saw Philip Blake, surrounded by the corpses of the people he supposedly wanted to protect. His two lead enforcers, Martinez and Shumpert, take off in a Jeep and leave him high and dry. So he burns Woodbury to the ground and then wanders, growing weary and filthy and bearded, eventually able to ward off walkers by basically looking as fucked up as they do.
By the end of the episode’s cold open, he’s arrived in a dilapidated old house with a family of survivors – an old man, his two daughters and a little girl named Meghan who, as many online have pointed out, vaguely resembles Governor’s zombie daughter from last season. He’s initially reluctant to talk and is cagey about his past – claiming the name Brian Heriot, something he saw spray-painted on a wall, elliptically claiming to be a survivor of the Woodbury massacre where “the man in charge went crazy.”
He spends basically the entire hour holed up with this oddly naive family, who have survived but don’t even know how to kill walkers by destroying their brains. One daughter, Tara, is an Atlanta PD cadet who has more bark than bite, the other, Lily, a nurse. (My lord, such plot convenience!) He goes to great lengths to look out for these people, busting into a nursing home full of old-folks walkers to fetch oxygen tanks and playing rudimentary chess with Meghan. This doesn’t stop him from bashing the old man David’s brains in when he dies and subsequently turns – which the daughters also don’t know about until they see it, leading to a very traumatized Meghan.
Soon after Governor turns walker-David into brain stew, he and the three girls are on the road to an uncertain destination. Meghan remains wary of our eyepatch-sporting friend, but Lily is quite taken with him once he shaves his beard and hair. And down to fuck, as it happens.
Those who wanted action in this episode were left pretty high and dry until the last four minutes. Although it might not seem like much happens with this new group of people from the audience’s surface perspective, clearly they’ve had quite the effect on Governor. A zombie horde comes upon them after their car breaks down, and he’s left carrying Meghan through walker-infested woods, holding onto her for dear life. At which point he and she naturally fall into a walker pit, because AMC knows its (majority) audience and wasn’t going to leave the gorehounds starving the whole time, letting Morrissey on the loose to take his performance to a physical place that he’s been before, but not in a serious or affecting way as is the case here.
Here, we get some of the most gruesome zombie violence The Walking Dead has ever depicted, as The Governor rips neckbones out of jugulars, destroys heads with barrages of punches and tears off the entire top half of one walker’s face and skull to rip out the brain. After gathering Meghan up and promising to protect her (oh, surrogate daughter), the episode ends with Martinez standing over the pit with a machine pistol, not aiming it anywhere but simply staring at the man now known as Brian Heriot and Meghan and saying, “Holy shit.”
Chronologically, we can assume that we’re about halfway synced up to the present timeline at this point. The Governor has obviously spent quite a bit of time with these people even if we haven’t and cares for them, but the teaser indicates that next week will also focus on him, his adopted family and the band of marauders that Martinez has joined. So we have no idea how Governor ends up alone, staring with a look of unclear intent at the prison where his old enemies still reside. But I’m actually glad that I have no idea exactly what will happen – it reaffirms my conviction that maybe, just maybe Scott M. Gimple is the showrunner that The Walking Dead was meant to have all along. In terms of week-to-week TV, Gimple has produced the best possible version of this series. (That initial six-episode run under Frank Darabont is very good too and arguably better, but in hindsight it works more like a miniseries than a long-form show. Gimple gets the rhythms of weekly TV and understands how to make the show appeal to most segments of its audience.)
Although this episode was far from perfect (a bit too slow-paced, some irking plot twists, etc.) it was also genuinely kind of good, which I wasn’t expecting, as you can imagine due to my Governor-rage a few paragraphs earlier. Being removed from his element allowed the character to reinvent himself as a positive human being, something even approaching a good one. The story here also brought subtleties out of Morrissey’s performance that previously seemed impossible, considering the bullshit bipolar nature of his character last year.
But is a year or so realistically enough, even within the extremely heightened reality of this series, for a character to work out demons that appeared to be genuine psychosis in season 3? There’s virtually no way they don’t return somehow, and not just as the survivalist violence we saw in that pit. (Which was definitely one of the old Woodbury walker pits – obvious but fitting to see him temporarily trapped by a plan from his past life.)
We’ll see next week. If nothing else, “Live Bait” was another sign that the show hasn’t run out of creative tricks just yet.
Liam can be reached at lgreen@thoughtpollution.com or on Twitter (@liamchgreen).