Showrunner Scott Gimple explained what he envisions the Governor’s mindset to be and what we’ll see from him in the next episode:
-So what can we expect to see in the next episode?
GIMPLE: We will be really getting into who this guy is, to further define this guy. He did something very pronounced at the end of the season that defines him a certain way that affected him a great deal. That’s changed him a great deal. So we will see who this man is now. There will absolutely be a flashback element to filling in some of those blanks. More so, I would say, than we did with rejoining the prison.
-The Governor truly went off the deep end last time we saw him. What can you tell us in terms of where his head is?
GIMPLE: We know what he did. He killed those people. We know that Rick welcomed basically the remaining people in. That town did very much make up that man’s identity. And his purpose. And everything he was fighting for. And asking the question, what’s left after that?— we’re gonna see. We’re gonna answer that question. We’re gonna show that.
David Morrissey, who plays the Governor, gave a little bit more detail on what we’ll learn about the Governor in upcoming episodes:
What you see at the end of this last episode is that he’s fit, he looks well, he looks healthy — so he’s ready for confrontation in whatever form that takes. So our questions are piqued at the end of episode 5 and that’s where we’ll go in episode 6. We’ll see a bit more of where he’s been in the ensuing months. I think it’s fair to say that at the end of season 3 we left him in a very difficult space. He had turned on his own people and he didn’t do that with any pleasure. He’s not somebody who was doing that in any premeditated way. It comes out of him in a quite spontaneous anger. It’s like a red mist has descended on him and I think what we’ll see in the coming episodes is someone who is coming to terms with that new person that we saw at the end of season 3 — whether he’s embracing that person or fighting that person. That is what we will see. He’s changed. He’s definitely changed. That is fair to say. And what we will see is where that change has taken him.