Apr 09, 2019
Few issues succeed like this one in truly leaving one speechless at the end of it. And a little sick to the stomach if I'm being honest. I have a pretty high tolerance for gore, but that sequence with Lori and Judith pushed me to my limits. It is quite truthfully the most brutal issue up to this point as we are forced to endure a bloodbath as ceaseless as it is senseless. I don't even know where to begin, but I suppose the best place to start would be to consider all the lives that were so viciously silenced.
Patricia and Alice:
I group these two women together because they both died having saved main characters who we are quite frankly much more invested in. Patricia gave blood to save Rick Grimes when he was on the brink of death
after being shot in the gut. Alice provided some heroic covering fire for Rick and his family as they attempted to escape the Governor's massacre. While these characters never really gained the traction that so many other Walking Dead protagonists have garnered over the years, they left their mark on the series. They both risked their own lives (and in Alice's case actually lost hers) by trying to protect Rick and his family. Rick's story going forward appears to be far from over, but that story may have been cut off prematurely had it not been for the sacrifices of Patricia and Alice.
Hershel and Billy:
This one hit me nearly as hard as Lori and Judith. I really had come to admire these two characters over the course of the series so far, and losing them both in the same issue is a hard pill to swallow. Billy was never the most capable contributor in the group. His courage had a tendency to waver, and that fact once placed Dale in grave danger. But this happened as he was trying desperately to keep the generator going for Lori's delivery of Judith. He was "Andrea Lite" when it came to sniping, but he knew how to make use of a grenade. He did not have the resilient faith of his father, but he had enough. I think it's safe to say the Lord was there for him in the end after all.
Then we have Hershel, a man of profound faith who exemplified what it meant to hang on to the higher things that differentiate human beings from mere carnal animals. As contemporary Christian singer Danny Gokey once stated: "Unshakable faith is faith that has been shaken." Hershel's faith was shaken throughout his arc in the most gut-wrenching of ways. Remember Susie and Rachel? Arnold and Lacey? Even Maggie was wrested away from him in a sense. But like the prodigal son's steadfast brother who never left his father's side, Billy was always there for his father. This is why losing Billy was the final straw for poor Hershel. He simply had no more will to go on. It is a grim scene indeed where an utterly spent Hershel bows in submission to the maniacal Governor. The man holding the power in the exchange is the one who has neglected all traces of his humanity. The man kneeling in defeat is the one who always strived to hang on to something better. The better man-the stronger man-was murdered by a beast who had long abandoned any pretense at being a man at all. This elevation of the psychotic, the weak, and the base over the moral, right, and strong is one of the most bitter realities of the zombie apocalypse. It is in these moments that the fate of mankind looks bleakest and perhaps even beyond saving.
Lori and Judith:
There is a beautiful moment right at the beginning of this issue where in the midst of the Governor's frenzied assault on the prison, all is right with the world for Rick, Lori, Carl, and Judith as the Grimes family shares what will tragically become their final embrace. After that one fleeting moment of Heaven amidst all the hell, time moves pretty quickly as they make a mad dash to escape with their lives. It is not meant to be. One bullet fired by a confused and misguided woman is all it takes to fatally tear through mother and infant daughter alike. In witnessing his worst nightmares manifest before his very eyes, Rick Grimes sees both his future and his past eradicated as though they never existed. He might very well have given up like Hershel did if it wasn't for one member of his family who yet drew breath in the present. While losing Lori (a character who has been with us from the very beginning) leaves a hollow ache, losing Judith is much more crushing on so many levels. Of course, her loss is horrific because she is a baby. But even more than that, her birth represented a symbolic message that life had found a way to prosper in a dead world. Judith's birth was the birth of hope in a very hopeless place. And one bullet was all it took to callously dim such a bright ray of hope. The small mercy left to Rick is that his son still lives, and not everyone ended up so lucky (Hershel for instance). But even though Carl gives Rick a reason to keep going, Rick does so from this point on from a place of deep despair. Hope failed him, and it will be interesting to see how that bitter reality shapes his path going forward.
Brian "Philip" Blake:
I almost did not include in this worthy list of victims the name of the man who became the inhuman fiend known as the Governor. In an age of increased gun violence in our own society, there is a prevalent tendency among the media to not include the name of deceased shooters in the company of their victims. The message is that their deaths are unworthy of human recognition and do not matter compared to the lives of the innocent victims they terrorized. I understand this sentiment, but I wonder if it really sends the best message. No one is born a Governor. Monsters are created from the ashes of real, perhaps even decent human beings. Brian Blake was once a good man who abhorred the violence that so quickly seemed to be saturating the fallen world around him. He once watched in horror as his brother committed one atrocity after another. He would have laid down his life for Penny, and her death absolutely shattered him. This is not the story of an evil man, and yet that is what Brian Blake became. We need to remember the Brian Blakes, school shooters, and Boston Marathon bombers of the world because the lesson of their lives is one that we should all heed. We can write these "Governors" off as one-dimensional manifestations of violence, or we can take an uncomfortable look at the men and women who they were before they became something much less than human. In doing so, perhaps we might even come to grieve the loss of who they once were. If we mourn the loss of their humanity, perhaps we may one day avoid losing our own in the same way.
I have one last bit of advice here for anyone who genuinely was captivated by the Governor arc. Please, please, please read Jay Bonansinga and Robert Kirkman's Governor-themed novels. I promise you that they will greatly enrich not only this issue but pretty much any issue featuring the Governor. Fiction often rewards those who invest a little more time to dig just a bit deeper. That is most certainly the case here. Do the extra work. Dig deeper. You won't regret it. more
