Spend too much time around the Governor and he’ll try to kill you. Spend too much time around Rick and you’ll want to kill yourself.

You’re better off taking your chances with Eyepatch, no?

https://twitter.com/BenK84/status/402528878393962498
https://twitter.com/BenK84/status/402530236706721792

Any episode that strays from the main group is a good episode, ergo last night’s was a good episode. Lots of nice touches — the “Brian Heriot” stuff on the side of the barn, the pathos of the nursing home zombies, and the Governor’s roll in the hay with one of his new wards, a rare concession to the fact that there’d probably be a lot of carpe-diem nookie in a world as lonely as Zombie Earth. (As I recall, the only spur-of-the-moment sex on the show that didn’t lead to something more was Andrea’s afternoon delight with Shane in the car.) I can’t decide, though, whether his backstory is too cliched and underdeveloped to make him truly sympathetic or not cliched enough to spoil a character who, unlike most of the others, seems to have more than one emotion. Nearly everyone on the show is damaged or crippled from having lost a loved one, yet only the Governor became a warlord because of it, for whatever inexplicable reason. (My sense of him is that, before the zompocalypse, he was probably an executive at an insurance company or something.) His absolute power over Woodbury drove him mad, but that was a fait accompli; that’s always what happens in drama when someone attains absolute power. He’s basically following a Darth Vader story arc — starts off good, is seduced into running an evil empire by his rage and grief over the death of a beloved, then redeems himself by rescuing his (or “his”) child. At least it’s an arc, though, which is more than the stiffs in the main group can say.

I figure we’re destined now to see the Governor die either by sacrificing himself to a zombie horde in order to save the little girl (“Megan, help me take this patch off”) or being impaled by a revenge-minded Michonne Skywalker. He’d have to turn bad again for the latter to happen, though. In this show, much like in pro wrestling, “good guys” don’t fight each other.