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.