AMC's The Walking Dead

To be fair, it started after the massacre and the Governor clean shaven, so it was at least as long as it took him to grow a long beard.

I agree with the rest of your criticism, though.

 

Yeah, I forgot about that. So it is probably reasonable to say the whole episode stretched over a month or two. But the interaction with the family, where the redemption and character turn happened, was 3-4 days, unless I am misunderstanding that timeline.

He arrives, stays the night, about to leave but is asked to go get the gas tank, has to kill dear old dad, drives away, trailer sex, falls in a hole.

Ok, maybe it was a week at best.

 

I don't think that's accurate at all.
He's asked to go get the oxygen tank because he successfully goes upstairs and gets the backgammon set with no issue and this family has never ventured outside an occasional run to the food trunk. The mother tells him he's got more experience out there and asks him to go the few blocks to the nursing home so he does.
In that scene, she tells him her dad has two days of oxygen left but there's no way of knowing how long it is after he gets that tank that the granddad actually dies and how long after that they actually leave.
And we also have no idea of how long they're on the road before the pit incident and how long they're with Martinez and company before that shot of the Governor sitting outside of the prison.
We also have no idea what the time frame is between the end of Season 3 and that moment in Season 4 but it has to be long enough for the group to get comfortable with walkers around the fence, to grow a garden, raise pigs, etc so it could be as much as half a year.
My guess is from the moment Martinez leaves the Governor to the moment he finds him in the pit has to be at least six months. That would give the Governor enough time for his montage of loneliness, for him to find the family and stand holed up enough for his trail to go cold, for his trip to the nursing home, for the granddad to die, for the group to decide to leave the apartment, for the family to bond enough that the mom wants to bang him and for them to travel enough to really run into trouble.
Seems plausible enough to me.
The thing I don't think is plausible is that he actually runs into Martinez in that pit. What are the odds the guy who left him would be there at that exact moment, the first time he really ran into trouble? Why would Martinez even care enough to look in that pit? That seemed a stretch to me plotwise.

 

I think your breakdown might be accurate, but if so I think the writers did a major disservice to the Governor character. I would have been much more intrigued by the character had they doled out his story in bits and pieces, intermingling it with the larger story. That way, week to week, we could have wondered "I wonder what the Governor is up to? Do think she is going to bang him? Has he turned a corner?"

Instead, it was, "I wonder what the Gov ... oh, that's what he's up to."

Needless to say, this was one of my least favorite episodes and it had nothing to do with the small amount of zombie gore porn. It had more to do with the fact that I felt the writers took an intriguing, damaged character that could have been a real catalyst and brought him down to something much simpler and did so in very hasty and sloppy fashion. The fact that we even have to quibble over the timeline makes me think the writers swung and missed at what they were trying to do. I've seen shows do something similar (cover a large amount of time) much more effectively without any confusion or loss of interest in a character.

All that is to say this: After the last episode, I couldn't wait to see what the Governor was up to. Now, I couldn't care less.

 

Regarding the amount of time passed, this is the same thing I assumed: a few months had gone by.

 

I believe when the season started, they ran a subtitle on the first scene that indicated it was six months later. I might have just made that up though.

 

In contrast to Ty Webb, I found this to be a solid episode. Easily up there in the top 10 of the series for me.

It made me care about The Governor. I wanted to see him do well and come back from this, but I know ultimately that something is going to happen and his bloodthirst for revenge will consume him.

This is a very complex character and is being portrayed and played damn well.

 

I know we can't talk about the source that shall not be named but I think what I love about the TV series vs. said source is best showcased by an episode like this week's.
Whereas in the [redacted] the Governor is a silly and ridiculous stereotypical baddie, I love that this show has the ability to take the time to really flesh the character out.
I find him much more intriguing because, as someone here posted, you can legitimately believe he'd be a genuinely nice guy had not all this crazy shit gone down.
The thing I'm looking most forward to is how this Governor will respond if the face-turn is for real when he inevitably interacts with the group again. Got to imagine he'd be conflicted at least between his old and new self.

 

The episode wasn't bad, but it wasn't great.
The musical segment bugged me.

It filled in some of the storyline, so it moved the story without simply 'setting up the next episode nicely.'

It had some action and tension. There has to be action and tension. There's nothing wrong with a fan wanting to see action. It's not gore porn; it's an integral part of the show.

It was slow, but it wasn't the type of navel-gazing-passed-off-as-character-development in which they sometimes indulge.

I want to know if they're going to resolve the Gov.'s motivation for the massacre. That's what still doesn't sit with me. That's the action that made him a comicbook villain - doing evil for the sake of evil rather than real motivation.

 

My guess is that Martinez and his crew saw four people running from walkers and he then saw two of those people fall into the pit. Almost immediately after the governor falls into the pit, you hear machine gun fire so those guys were pretty close. I'm not sure why they were there, but Martinez looking into the pit didn't surprise me.

 

Didn't the timeline go backward in this episode?

 

I did love this scene:



It was just awesome seeing the Governor standing there like that, not giving a shit that he burned his town to the ground.