The Walking Dead: Who Is the Governor, Really?

Tonight’s episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead raised an interesting question that we hadn’t expected: Who is the Governor?The television version of the Governor isn’t quite the man we know from the comics; he’s too put-together, too suave, too able to make himself look good when he needs to, as we saw with the way he handled the Tyreese situation when nobody else could, or wanted to bother.But that’s not what we mean–what we mean is: Is the Governor who he says he is–literally?When Milton is challenged on whether or not to kill the Governor, he tells Andrea that he knew the man Philip Blake was before he became the Governor.That’s all well and good, but fans who have read Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga’s prequel novels Rise of the Governor and Road to Woodbury know that the Governor is not, in fact, Philip Blake in those stories.Much like Yancy Fry, you see, Brian Blake assumed the name (and, in this case, parental responsibilities) of his brother and then, against all odds, rose to prominence in a way that his brother never did.Traumatized by the death of his daughter, Philip Blake became dangerously unstable, and began the “feeding dead people to Penny” program. When someone caught him in the process of killing someone, and killed him, his brother Brian (definitely not the alpha male in the family up to that point) killed Philip’s killer and took his brother’s name, as well as his odd habit of feeding the undead Penny.So, here’s the thing–if Milton knew “the man he was before all of this,” and still calls him Philip…does that mean there’s no Brian Blake in the world of TV’s The Walking Dead? That the suave, unstable version we see on TV is the brother of the deranged, violent longhair who raped Michonne and chopped off Rick’s hand? It seems an important distinction; if this version of the Governor had to survive on his own, potentially walking around a zombie daughter, without a brother as his support network, it could explain some things.