Won’t somebody give The Governor a cuddle? The Walking Dead S4E6 – Dork Review

At the end of The Walking Dead’s third season, big villain the Governor finally snapped, launched an unsuccessful attack on the heroes’ prison stronghold, then followed it up by gunning down a load of his own people. He’d also spent the entire year killing and betraying everyone, so you’d think he’d be a hard one to redeem, right?

Well, the writers of this show are nothing if not optimistic, so… wait, actually, they’re horrible doom-laden pessimists. No idea what’s going on here then. Spoilers follow.

Governing The Beard

Since his breakdown last year, the Gov wandered around a bit, grew a manly beard, met a family and discovered a human connection, so decides to be shave off the face-fuzz and be a nice chap again. Weird.

I’m assuming this is meant as a portrayal of a really unstable individual, rather than a man whose mood swings are so rapid and arbitrary, you never really get a handle on who he is. Still, as a standalone zombie-survival-horror story, it works well enough, David Morrissey has the charisma to anchor it, his newfound travelling chums have enough dimensions for us to care if/when they die.

The pace is a little plodding, but then again, the Governor was such a dick last season, they probably needed to make us really feel his exile in order to squeeze sympathy from our horrible cynic’s hearts.

Spiking The Governor

To be honest, not much happened here (good  final zombie-crunch/cliffhanger sequence though), so my word count naturally drifts towards where this could be going. Will we see the Governor slowly rebuild a life, before his personality problems rocket back up and destroy it? Or is this a genuine stab at redeeming the bastard, turn him into some sort of Spike-in-Bufy anti-hero who can stick around longer, maybe as the leader of another settlement?

Well, they might want to give him more charming moments and jokes to pull that off, and they really did such a good job of making him irredeemably evil last year, it’ll be a hard road. But I must admit, they’ve got my attention – I am properly interested to find out where it’s all going. Plus – mid-season finale in two weeks. How will they bring it all together? Intruiging.

So, although I’m somewhat expecting it to go wrong down the line, this was a decent Walking Dead in itself. Fair enough. I await the remaining two episodes of this run with interest – looks like the next one is another all-Governor effort, so the eighth and final pre-break episode should be action-packed.

More The Walking Dead on Dork Adore | The Walking Dead: Indifference – Dork Review

Nick Bryan

Nick learned to read and write at an early age. This has developed into an unhealthy need to either write stories or consume them for later dissection. He reviews film and TV on Dork Adore and The Digital Fix, lives in London and enjoys a nice white beer.

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