Review: The Walking Dead ’Live Bait’

This week’s episode of The Walking Dead, ‘Live Bait’ takes a break from the antics at the prison and follows the journey of another character, one we haven’t seen in a while and one that I personally never thought would get his own private screen time - The Governor.  Let me start first by saying that I found this character incredibly two-dimensional during the third season, so I was expecting to not give a crap this episode.  As it turns out, they did a pretty decent job of bringing The Governor to life and making him into something more than a homicidal sociopath.

We start out this week with a brief look at The Governor, post-season three.  He’s still with the survivors from his crew, although his will to live has been sapped.  After they abandon him, he sets off into the zombie-infested world, wandering here and there and not really caring too much whether he lives or dies.  Until he happens upon a small family of survivors, that is.

While his original intention is to just stay one night and then keep moving, the family ropes The Governor into helping them get a few things done - dangerous things.  Being that he was a family man at one point and the leader of a community during another, he can’t pass up the opportunity to help out.  This is one aspect of the character that was lost during season 3 (in my opinion), but they bring it to life here.  Eventually, he grows fond of the family and when he sets out to continue his journey, they decide to come along.  Of course, nothing ever turns out well in The Walking Dead and The Governor, new family in tow, runs into his old bandit crew.  That story, however, will be left until next week.

One major problem with this episode is the fact that the character of The Governor was left so two-dimensionally developed during season 3 that you have to make some assumptions about why he’s doing what he’s doing.  The episode uses a nice, steady pace and would have been perfect if we had already had an interest in the character to begin with.  But with few points of reference to work from, you have to infer much of what’s going on in his head.  David Morrissey does a great job given what he has to work with, but the director and writers could have been a little more heavy-handed with the presentation to get their point across (and that is the ONLY time you will ever hear me saying that).

By the episode’s end, I found myself actually wondering what was next for The Governor, which says something about the quality of the episode, so it wasn’t all miss.  It was, in fact, a rather good episode overall.  Unfortunately, we shall have to wait for next week’s episode, ‘Dead Weight’ to see if the story arc for The Governor was worth delving into.  If they can pull off more development, his arc could become very interesting, especially in how it ends up fitting together with the story of the prison crew.  All-in-all, another good episode though not the best this season.  And still better than almost everything from last season.

For a sneak look at next week’s episode, head over to this site.

Photo Credits -           

Live Bait courtesy of thecoolship.com