Previously on The Walking Dead, ‘Internment’

This episode is the first of two Governor standalone episodes we were promised this summer. No Rick. No Daryl. No Carol fallout. Just an hour of what the Governor got up to after murdering the majority of his Woodbury people. And it was great.

The episode begins with the immediate aftermath of the Governor firing on his people. He leaves in the truck with Martinez and the black guy whose name I never got. Later that night, the Governor sits staring at their campfire while a walker approaches and falls into the fire, still crawling towards him.

Martinez shoots the walker, shakes his head at the Governor, and then goes inside his tent. The next morning the Governor awakens to find they’ve left him. He takes a truck to Woodbury and sets the town on fire. I really wanted him to go find Andrea’s body. I know, in retrospect, what he did to her was the last thing on his mind, but I still wanted to see it.

He’s stumbling down the road, bearded and dirty. Through a voiceover he’s talking to two women and telling them that he’s been on his own for months, he used to live in a safe town until the man in charge lost it and he barely go out alive. He spots messages on the side of a barn, notes for survivors seeking their people. Later, he stumbles past a walker, pushing it away, and falls in the middle of the street. He has completely given up. He spots a little girl in the window of a nearby building and makes his way inside.

There he meets two women, their sick father, and the little girl he saw in the window, Megan. Now we know who he was speaking to in the voiceover. The younger of the two women, Tara, tells him she’s a cop and that she will put him down if he tries anything. I would have believed that more if she didn’t then immediately offer him his gun back. Her sister, Lily, has more sense and tells him he can have his gun back when he leaves. For now, he’s going to stay the night in an apartment across the hall. He tells them his name is Brian Heriot, one of the names he saw on the barn.

Lily brings him a plate of food later, which he accepts but spills out the window when she leaves, opting to eat a can of sardines instead. Guess he doesn’t like Spaghetti-Os. They hear him when he tries to leave the empty plate outside their door, and Tara tells him he can come inside and wash his own damn dishes. Then he learns that the father drove a truck for a food company and had one when shit hit the fan. He picked up Lily at the hospital, Tara at the station, and Megan at school and they’ve been holed up in their apartment building ever since with the provisions from the truck and some oxygen tanks Lily stole from the hospital. The dad is ready for bed and the Governor carries him to his room.

The dad talks about the importance of protecting your little girls and then asks the Governor if he’d mind going up to another apartment for a backgammon set kept under the man’s bed. He’s hoping it will help Megan talk again because she rarely does since everything went to hell. They’ve been playing on a makeshift board using coins for pieces and pieces of paper with numbers on them for a die. The Governor goes, finds the set and some ammo under the bed, and then finds the man in the bathtub where he’d killed himself. He was a double amputee vet who’d left his prosthetic legs outside the tub so when he turned, he couldn’t walk. The Governor stabs him in the head and takes the gun. Back in his apartment, he looks at a picture of him with his wife and daughter, and folds the picture to cover his face.

The next morning, Lily brings him food for the road, which he doesn’t want to accept, but she throws it at him. She also tries to return his gun, which he asks that she not throw at him. He shows her the gun he found upstairs and tells her to keep his. She asks him for one last favor: to head to an old folks home a few blocks away for another oxygen tank for her dad, who is on his way out. He has about two days of oxygen left and he’s the only one who can put a smile on Megan’s face. That does the trick and like a character in a video game, the Governor heads off on another mission. At the home, he starts to take a whole cartful of tanks, but he’s surrounded by walkers and only manages to grab two before running off.

Lily tends to the Governor’s head wound he got while he was out and tells him that Megan thought he was her dad. He left for beer and a power ball ticket three and a half years ago and never came back. Megan walks in and Lily leaves her there with the Governor - great parenting! - while she goes to get some ointment. Alone with the Governor, Megan starts to ask him about his eye patch. He gets her to laugh when she calls him out for not being a pirate, but then tells her that he lost his eye trying to protect someone he loved very much.

The Governor has cleaned himself up and a few days have passed. He’s teaching Megan how to play chess while Lily and Megan tend to their dad. The father has died and Lily brings Megan in to say goodbye. She says he’s been gone awhile. The governor looks uneasy when she says that and tells them they should probably step out, but they want a few more moments with him. Of course, he awakens and grabs Tara and the Governor has to put him down with an oxygen tank to the head.

He digs a grave for the father and buries him. Inside, Tara thanks him for saving her and says their dad would have been grateful that he did. In his apartment, later that evening, the Governor burns the pic of his family and then says goodbye to Lily who insists that they’re going with him.

They hit the road in the food truck and Tara admits that she’s not a cop, but she was in the academy. That night, in the truck, Lily has sex with the Governor with Megan and Tara right next to them. Ewwww. The next morning, the truck won’t start - in protest, probably - so they have to hoof it. Tara trips and twists her ankle, and the Governor spots a herd of walkers nearby. They have to drop their bags and make a run for it, but Megan freezes.

The Governor is finally able to get her to run to him and carries her off into the woods with Lily helping Tara.

On the run, the Governor and Megan fall into a pit of three walkers. He takes them out with his bare fucking hands and it is great. He tells her that he is never going to let anything happen to her. He looks up to see Martinez holding a gun. He reiterates to Megan that he won’t let anything happen to her… cross his heart.

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