The Walking Dead Review: “Live Bait”

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Well that was unexpected.

I certainly knew that the Governor would be back at some point on The Walking Dead, given his rather unceremonious exit from the show last year. But I thought he’d come swooping in riding in a fighter jet, dropping live zombie bombs as he strafed the prison.

I was NOT expecting an episode (two episodes, from the looks of next week) meant to turn take the Governor from a delusional megalomaniacal psychotic into a “do the right thing” kinda guy like the very people he was so desperate to hunt down.

We learn that the Governor wasn’t roaming the countryside, plotting his revenge. Rather, he was just a broken man with a shattered soul, wandering aimlessly for months. He burns down Woodbury as some sort of cleansing fire ritual, then roams around until he almost dies from hunger, thirst, exhaustion, or some combination of all of them. I particularly liked how he barely even wanted to kill walkers anymore, content with letting them stumble past him. That changes by the end of the night, but it’s a slow transition.

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The Governor, in full hobo beard mode, meets a new group of survivors holed up in an apartment, and they’re everything he couldn’t stand in Woodbury. A dying old man, a mute child, and two tough talking women. I spent most of the evening waiting for things to go terribly wrong, and for the Governor to end up accidentally or purposefully killing them all and raiding their supplies. I mean, that’s what the old Governor would do, right?

But again, we’re really seeing something different with season four of The Walking Dead under showrunner Scott Gimple. In season three, the Governor was such a ridiculously over the top bad guy, he was practically a cartoon. But it says a lot about the new thoughtfulness of the show that they’re willing to devote an entire pair of episodes to bringing him back from the brink, and trying to restore his lost humanity. The comic certainly never brought that sort of complexity into the character, I’ll say that.

He ends up bonding with the family, doing everything from grabbing board games from the zombie-infested upstairs, to raiding an old folks home for oxygen tanks. He kills their reanimated father once he dies, and in what was probably the most intense zombie encounter ever on the show, he manages to brutally re-kill three zombies in a tiny pit as they threaten his new little girl companion after they’re forced on the run.

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David Morrissey did a phenomenal job in the episode, and I love how both he and the show surprised me in terms of what the Governor is capable of. I fully expected him to simply return and re-declare war on the prison, but it seems to be more complicated than that. We end the evening with him meeting up with his old crew, and who knows where things go from there?

Even with his newfound attachment to other humans, I don’t know if this necessarily means that he no longer has it in for the prison group. They did a lot to him, after all, and it’s not like they could just forgive him either. I know that sometimes enemies become friends on this show, but I don’t see any sort of world where The Governor is brought on board as “one of the gang.”

I thought this was a surprising, fantastic episode, and it serves to reinforce the fact that season four is the best collection of episodes of the show to date. No, we haven’t had any shocking deaths per se, but the show has evolved into one with more depth and less obvious stupidity. I’m no longer yelling at the dumb decisions being made onscreen, I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to see what happens next.

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5 Comments

  1. I’ve got to agree with you. I really expected this season to bomb and become complete nonsense after breaking completely from the source material, but I’ve found myself very pleased with the show’s direction. The music in particular has been amazing, and the slower pace taken to develop the characters has been well-utilized. I keep thinking how glad I am that I didn’t quit the show during season 2.

    Personally, I think the Governor is building a new army to resume his war on the prison, and possibly bring the show back to the comic’s storyline. He’s got Lilly with him and a new surrogate daughter to “protect”, he’s clearly not contrite about his previous actions when he talks about how he lost his eye, and the scene where he was explaining chess and glanced over at the family as he explained the role of pawns was clearly foreshadowing. Make that double when the little girl draws an eyepatch on the king. This gun be goooood.

  2. I’m enjoying this season a whole lot more than the last 2 as well. But some of the stupidity is still glaring. Why does every character who enters an unknown potentially zombie infested building have to exit a different way than they came in?
    It’s a minor nitpick I know, but when you’re talking about survival it seems more than obvious.

  3. I haven’t seen the episode yet (the wife and I watched the rest of Season 2 of HOMELAND on DVD last night), but I had read an interview with Morrissey where he said something about being really ‘tired’ of the character as he played out in Season 3 … so maybe that’s the reason for the tonal shift.

  4. I don’t think that it was that he didn’t want to kill walkers. If you were walking every day, you would use up WAY too much energy killing every walker that crossed your path. It looked to me like he was just conserving energy.

  5. I really don’t want to go into the differences between the show and comics/books. But this entire episode is just a ripoff of the Book The Rise of the Governor. The entire family he meets are the exact people he meets in said book. The only difference is the little girl is Penny in the book. The episode was decent but a complete ripoff.

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