SPOILER ALERT!  This article will discuss hints about the upcoming mid-season finale as well as the comic books!

The last two episodes of AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ have focused on The Governor (David Morrissey) and what he’s been up to since the end of the previous season.  Basically he wandered around in something of a daze, lost his two loyal enforcers and wound up in the company of his new “family” Lily, Tara and Megan.  And with the responsibility of taking care of this new family, he set his sights on The Prison.

With the midseason finale coming up this weekend, shocks are ensured.  Showrunner Scott M. Gimple was careful not to give too much away but did remark “Any sort of Rick-Governor conflict is going to be a very different conflict — if there is one.”  I’m pretty sure there will be a conflict.  I can’t imagine Rick welcoming The Governor with open arms.  He went on to say “If these two people [have a] showdown — and God knows it certainly looks like that at the end of episode seven — I would hope that they’re two very different men who have gone through very different things.”

Gimple also compares the parallels between the two characters.  “One of them has tried to lay down his guns, tried to stop from being a leader, tried to pull his child back from the brutality of the world, tried to pull himself back from the brutality of the world and from the brutality of leadership.  And we see him in the first episode [of season four] having achieved that, but it’s all taken away from him bit by bit in those first five episodes. Carol tells him he can be a farmer but he can’t just be a farmer.”

“Rick is a different guy from the season-three finale and season-four premiere,” he adds. “The Governor, from the beginning of [episode] 406 is a very different guy. When these two guys meet, in some ways, they’re meeting for the first time, and in some ways, it’s a new story. The only way to achieve that is to tell a different story with those characters leading up to it.”

He doesn’t delve into the new characters Lily, Megan and Tara.  A character named Lilly (with two l’s in the middle) was one of The Governor’s followers and was actually the person who killed Lori in the comics.  A character name Tara Chalmers appeared in the prose novel ‘The Rise of the Governor’, but is an obese Christian musician who wears various muu-muus.  The TV Tara is a lesbian, so the odds of her moonlighting as a Christian singer aren’t likely.  And the book Tara had a sister named April, not Lily.

If you read the comics, you know The Governor’s tank-fueled assault on The Prison was a bloodbath, with a large chunk of the cast being killed off, like the previously mentioned Lori (who is already dead on the show).  Can we expect the same here?  Who do you think will make it out alive?

Source THR