Let's catch up with everyone's favorite self-styled Governor, shall we? After killing almost all of his people in after the abortive raid on the prison, he soon found himself abandoned by Martinez and Shump as well, then went back to Woodbury to burn the place to the ground. Then there were months of wandering the wilderness, getting all scraggly and de-socialized. Eventually he came across a family of four holed up in an apartment building: young mother Lily, her foul-mouthed cop sister Tara, their ailing father, and Lily's daughter Megan, who's got some issues. The Governor tells them his name is Brian, because he can't have these strangers knowing the real name he hardly ever told anyone anyway.
But they aren't strangers for long. While the Governor's conversational skills are pretty rusty, he soon finds himself doing favors for these people, like retrieving a backgammon set from an upstairs neighbor and fetching oxygen tanks for Granddad from the local zombie-ridden nursing home. Over time he cleans up, becomes better company again, and helps coax little Megan out of her shell. But his relationship with the little girl hits a speed bump when Granddad finally succumbs to cancer and the Governor has to crush his undead skull in front of the whole family.
After that, the Governor figures it's time to move on, but Lily decides that she and Tara and Megan are coming with him. They all set out in granddad's food delivery truck, and Lily and the Governor end up taking a little "road comfort" with each other. But then the truck breaks down, and while they're on foot, and they're beset by zombies. While Lily and the injured Tara run for it, the Governor tries to carry Megan to safety -- only to fall into a pit where he fights zombies off her with his bare hands and then promises to never let anything happen to her. So yeah, he's totally down with his new family now. So it may prove a bit tricky for him when he finds himself looking down the barrel of one of the men who dug the trap: his old right-hand man, Martinez. Who may take a while to get into the habit of calling the Governor "Brian."
We're starting in the past, with the Governor and his two lieutenants, Martinez and Shump, surveying the killing field where the Guv just massacred every other Woodburian who took part in the abortive raid on the prison at the end of Season 3. And then the Governor drives off, with Shump riding shotgun and Martinez standing in the pickup bed. Of course they don't know that Karen survived, but that's not going to be the case indefinitely.
That night, the Governor sits watching a campfire with three tents at his back. A lone walker in a dress comes shambling at him from the other side of the fire, but the Governor doesn't move, watching blankly as it trips over the firepit and crawls toward him, dress now aflame. Martinez shoots the thing and shakes his head before going back to bed. Sure -- it should be safe now that a gunshot just echoed all over the countryside.
In the morning, the Governor crawls painfully out of the tiny tent that's barely bigger than he is and surveys the scene -- only one tent now, and the pickup is gone. So Martinez saved him only to ditch him, and I'm sure he'll live to regret one of those things. Lucky for the Governor, they camped near a weigh station and there's a heavy-duty truck abandoned nearby. So the Governor promptly takes this and returns to Woodbury, where he crashes through the front gate at speed, and burns the whole damn place to the ground while the zombies drift along the streets ignoring him. Bet he was surprised to find the town empty. And that was some fortuitous timing on the part of Rick and his group to get everyone out before he came back.
Cut to a ragged, hairy, bearded ex-Governor walking along the road months later, as we hear him telling a couple of unseen women about how he was traveling alone for a few months and before that was safe in a town. He sees a barn where notes and names have been graffitied, in a post-apocalyptic Facebook string that includes repeated references to someone named Brian Heriot. The Governor's conversation continues in voice-over as he tells his interviewers what happened to the town. "He just lost it… the man in charge. Barely got out alive." Okay, that first part was true. The Governor reaches another destroyed town, where even in his exhaustion he matadors past a walker that just ends up falling while lunging for him. This is really not making the zombie apocalypse seem all that hard to survive. Finally the Governor collapses in the middle of the street, but gets back to his feet when he sees a figure watching him from an open second-story window.
Inside that building, the Governor slowly treads the creaky floors, exploring a dark hallway with a flashlight. He soon comes across a woman in a doorway, guarding a young girl -- the person he saw in the window -- with a baseball bat. A second woman pops into view with a gun leveled, so the Governor holsters his own weapon and drops his gunbelt and bags at her feet. Apparently that's all he needed to do to earn an invitation inside.
After the credits, the two sisters are sitting at their candlelit kitchen table with the Governor. Lilly is the mother of the girl, Megan, while Tara's the tough-talking one with the gun. The apartment also contains an older man on oxygen, which must have been a fun supply to have to keep on hand. Apparently they've been waiting for the National Guard this whole time. And they're still waiting. They ask him whether he plans to stay in the building, and after taking a Tara-annoying length of time to answer, the Governor says he just wants to stay the night. Tara shows him her gun, and warns him that she's Atlanta City Police, "And I have enough artillery in here to kill you every day for the ten years." That's a pretty clear message and the Governor gets it, so Tara's cool -- though she has to pick up the Governor's hand to get a fist-bump from him. Then she starts to return his weapons, but Lilly stops her, saying he'll get it back when he leaves. They ask his name and he claims to be the someone whose name he saw on the barn earlier. "Brian," he grunts. "Brian Heriot." What did you think he was going to say? "The. The Governor." I don't think so.
Later, the Governor sits alone in an empty apartment across the hall until Lilly brings him a bowl of off-brand Spaghetti-Os, The Governor politely thanks her, then closes the door and dumps the lot out the window before sitting down to enjoy a can of cat food like a civilized human being beholden to no one. Screw you, Chef Boyardee.
In the other apartment, Megan is playing backgammon with her grandfather using change and scraps of paper with numbers on them, because this, at long last, is what it has come to. While the sisters are fretting over Megan having boycotted dinner again, they're alarmed by a noise out in the hall. But it's just the Governor trying to leave his empty plate outside their door. Tara tells him to come in and wash the damn thing himself. At gunpoint, in fact, because Tara is nobody's scullery maid. Lilly calls her off and offers the Governor some coffee. Soon they're all hanging out in the sitting room so the sisters can tell him their version of the first few days, when their dad the food truck driver picked up Megan from school and Lilly from the hospital (Lilly having the foresight to have stolen a load of oxygen tanks at the time), and Tara from the police station. So, thanks to dad's food truck they've got a shitload of junk food parked right out back. If the zombies don't get them, the sodium and high fructose corn syrup will.
Their dad asks for a break, so the sisters ask the Governor for help getting him out of his chair and into his bedroom. The Governor's a little slow to comply, and Tara gets a little owly with him until the Governor just scoops up the guy in both arms and carries him into the bedroom. In there, they can hear creaking from walkers above, which keep getting up there even despite Tara's many sorties to blow them apart with her guns. He asks the Governor if he's got kids -- which the Governor answers with a simple no, rather than telling the whole twisted tragic story about Penny -- and volunteers out of nowhere that becoming a father taught him what it was to be a real man. "You protect them, you keep them safe, you just try to make them stronger until they can look out for themselves. But this here, I never counted on this." Clearly he was never a Boy Scout. Believe it or not, he does have a point; he wants the Governor to go up to apartment 303 to fetch his late friend's backgammon set. "Might be something that'd make my Megan talk again. Please." The Governor should know better, not only because it's dangerous, but also because children who talk on this show never lead anywhere good.
But the Governor is up there in the abandoned and trashed unit, finding the fancy backgammon set stashed under the bed right where the old guy said they'd be. There's also a box of bullets, which he pockets. And then he checks the bathroom, where there's an abandoned wheelchair outside the closed shower curtain. The Governor twitches the curtain aside to find a well-rotted former backgammon aficionado lying in the tub, apparently still non-ambulatory even in undeath. Making it less of a walker and more of a recliner. It snarls at the Governor until it takes his knife in the face, which is when the Governor notices the gun in the legless corpse's hand. Which he also pockets. OH NO THE GOVERNOR HAS A SECRET GUN NOW HE'S GOING TO KILL THAT WHOLE FAMILY ZOMG.
The Governor returns and presents the backgammon set to the grandfather and Megan. The grandfather accepts it with a grateful handshake, because dialogue is expensive. Lilly also thanks him, and the Governor just barely remembers to say "You're welcome," before returning to his own squat and pulling out the creased picture of himself and his family, when they were all still alive. Then he folds over one corner to hide himself. Is somebody maybe experiencing some self-esteem issues?
The morning, Lilly comes in to find him crashed out on the couch. He wakes up and the first thing he does is snatch the photo off the coffee table where he left it, though she already snuck a look. She offers him a small sack "for the road," though there can't be more than enough inside it for the town square. He tries to decline, but she tosses it at him anyway, making him jump. "You helped us. We're saying thank you. Deal with it." She also wants to return his gun, but he doesn't want it back either. "Don't -- throw that at me," he adds. And then he shows her the other gun he found upstairs, so it's not a secret any more. She agrees to keep it, and now that he's been spared getting her cooties, the Governor tells Lilly that you have to hit the zombies in the brain. And it turns out Lilly's got one more favor to ask. Her dad has stage four lung cancer and two days of oxygen or less. So it would be kind of awesome if he could go snag an oxygen tank or two from the retirement home up the street. NBD. Just a depressing building full of even older zombies. I bet the Governor wouldn't have taken on the backgammon mission if he'd known it would lead to this.
He draws his new gun as he makes his way up to the building. He heads inside, finding it quiet and empty… at least at first. One of the rooms has a walker strapped to a bed, and another one reaches for him from a wheelchair in the hallway, though he just pushes past it, possibly not realizing that maybe it can get up after all. He simply closes a door on a third one, and then finds himself in a room where a cart holds not one but eight tanks. Why, it's a veritable windfall of wind! He slips another one into the cart and starts wheeling it down the hall as the noise of the walkers' slavering starts to increase in volume. He's soon outnumbered and crashing the cart into a line of them, then has to make a run for it, grabbing just one or two fallen tanks on his way out. And yeah, he left them all alive in there. Maybe, like Rick, he's had enough of killing for one lifetime. Who's that, you ask? Rick. Remember the guy who used to be the main character? That guy.
The Governor returns to apartment 203 with two full tanks and a little blood on himself, and tells Lilly he's okay before disappearing back across the hall. There turns out to be nothing in his medicine cabinet, but Lilly follows him in there with a bottle of alcohol. She manages to prevail upon him to sit while she cleans up a cut on his forehead, glad to have something to do. "Nobody ever mentioned just how boring the end of the world was gonna be," she says. Oh, is that the show's explanation now? Is that what we're going with? Fine. She tells the Governor that when Megan spotted him from the window she thought he was her dad, who disappeared three years ago on a beer/Powerball run. Why Megan would want anything to do with someone so prone to rank cliché is anyone's guess.
Speaking of Megan, she comes in, saying, "Mama?" Lilly says it's okay. "Brian just got a boo-boo that needs cleaning up." Nobody seems to think that it's any big deal that she's speaking again. In fact, Lilly commemorates this magical moment by leaving her alone with the (obviously annoyed) Governor to go get some ointment. So the girl stands there staring at the Governor until they're alone, whereupon she gets curious about his missing eye. I'm curious why a guy who didn't see another living person for months continued bothering with the eyepatch in the first place. She wonders if that was a bad question to ask, and he not only says no, he offers to tell her what happens if she promises to keep it secret. They seal the deal with an awkward pinky-swear, and the Governor comes clean. "Well… I'm a pirate." Megan says no way, and the Governor cracks up. Now that this episode's one entertaining moment has been and gone, he tells a super-vague story of how he was trying to help someone he loved by stopping them from getting hurt. Of course, Penny had already been head-skewered by Michonne's sword when Michonne buried a chunk of one of the Governor's fish tanks in his eye, but Brian Heriot is not one to get bogged down in details. "Did they get hurt too?" Megan asks, and the Governor says "they "did. Megan says she's sorry, and the Governor says he is too. Was Lilly getting that ointment from Atlanta or something?
So the Governor is driving them in the mostly empty food truck, with Lilly and Megan in the back, expansively saying they'll go wherever they can. In the shotgun seat, Tara confesses to the Governor that while she was in the Academy, she's not really a cop. She apologizes for lying, not that the Governor minds. When Tara asks if he thinks they'll make it, he says they will. "Are you lying to me?" she asks, "No," lies Brian.
They camp off the road near a pond, through Megan doesn't seem keen to join the grown-ups at the campfire. The Governor tries not to be hurt by her rejection, probably understanding that a young girl's opinion of one can change if she sees you bashing the fucking shit out of her grandpa's corpse. That night, they're all sleeping in the back of the truck -- well, not exactly sleeping, because Lilly rolls over to face the Governor and they're soon making out. So clearly she's doomed.
And then we hear the noise of the truck's engine squealing angrily as Tara tries to crank it the morning, but it looks like the truck is finished. And then they're on foot, walking down the road dragging their luggage and hoping to find another set of wheels. Tara starts talking about her ex-girlfriend, of which Lilly's apparently heard more than enough before. Tara is startled by the caw of a crow enough to twist around and fall over on her backpack, and while Lilly is helping her to her feet, the Governor scouts cautiously ahead. Sticking his nose around a bend in the road, he sees a fairly large herd of zombies milling about near a loosely swinging metal sign, which is probably the most sensory stimulus available for miles. The Governor tells the others to drop their bags and start running, but Megan only does the first part. Supporting the injured Tara, Lilly tells Megan to get a move-on as the walkers realize something besides a squeaky sign has just entered their world, and start to close in. The Governor hangs back, coaching Megan to come on, and she finally runs into his arms. So he has finally won back her love and trust, at least in a situation where the only other alternative is death.
He carries her into the woods, with the sisters now trailing behind and the zombies behind them. Eventually they find themselves in an open field and while still carrying Megan, the Governor shouts and disappears from view. That's because the and Megan have found themselves in a rectangular pit dug eight feet deep, with nothing for company but piles of bones and a few moving zombies. Now that the trap has caught a couple of live ones, the Governor fights the walkers off of Megan with his bare hands, smashing one's skull on a pile of bones and tearing out another's throat (which somehow works), and then levering the third one's head in two with a handy femur. After Megan witnesses all of this unleashed savagery -- so much more graphic than what he did to her grandfather -- she reaches a hand out to the Governor. And he gladly scoops her up and says he's never going to let anything happen to her. 'Promise?" she asks. "Cross my heart," he promises. So I guess he and Michonne had both better hope she never finds him.
Finally someone appears at the edge of the pit above them. "Hoe-lee shit," says none other than Martinez, lowering the weapon in his hands. I thought I heard machine gunfire when they were down there, and I don't know where Lilly and Tara have gotten to at all. But it's probably more likely that Martinez was just shooting the zombies that followed the Governor into the field. As for the Governor himself, he has no interest in anything going on above ground level. He simply whispers again into Megan's ear, "Cross my heart." Anything else you want to tell her the truth about, buddy? Because now seems like it would be a good time.
M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, or just e-mail him at m.giant[at]gmail.com.
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