The Walking Dead Villains: Who ISN’T The Worst, Part 7

Gregory

Let’s just get this out of the way: Gregory is still a chickenshit. Period. There is no arguing: He just is.

Now that that is out of the way, let’s begin.

While Gregory is a coward, as we’ve seen with Eugene, that doesn’t, necessarily, make him a bad person. What makes a coward a bad person is if it leads to them betraying or abandoning friends or allies.

I imagine some of you may be reading this and thinking: “Well…didn’t he?”

Actually…no. I’ll be the first to admit that I was incorrect: I honestly believed that Gregory was The Rat, that he told Negan about Rick’s plans. That turned out to not be the case.

I do still think that Gregory might have visited Simon, but, at the moment, I have nothing to support that. The fact of the matter is: As season seven of The Walking Dead closed, Gregory hadn’t betrayed anybody.

That said, he certainly tried to when Simon first visited him, but, as betrayals go, it was pretty poor one. Sure, he couldn’t really afford to send Simon on a wild goose chase looking for Maggie or Sasha, nor could he afford to say Jesus was harboring them, but, if he really wanted to, he easily could have done both. With Simon and The Saviors there, who was going to say otherwise? Gregory easily could have had The Saviors take Maggie, Sasha, and Jesus to The Sanctuary and gotten all three of them out of his hair.

Now, you might say that he would have realized they could have told Negan that Gregory hired Alexandria to eliminate Negan, but, if he’d thought that far ahead, he wouldn’t have tried to betray Maggie and Sasha in the first place. My point is: If Gregory were really dedicated to betraying Maggie and Sasha, it would have been easy for him to do it.

“But, what about when he was going to stab Maggie!?” You scream into your monitor.

I answer that question with one of my own: Did he? Did he stab Maggie?

No.

True, it might not sound like much, but, did you see Gregory when he realized what he almost did? He clutched his face like a man asking himself “What are you thinking?!“.

Call Gregory what you want — Coward, chickenshit, etc — one thing you can’t call him…is a killer.

Think back to all the really despicable people we’ve seen in The Walking Dead. The one thing they all have in common is choice. They all chose to be evil. What we saw with Gregory was a man choosing not to be. In a world where so many people have either become evil, or let the evil inside them out, the good people are the ones who choose to be good.

I tend towards being somewhat optimistic. To me, it’s important in a zombie apocalypse to take stock of the little victories. When you’ve got people like David, Deserved-It Dan, and Martin around, I consider a coward like Gregory listening to his conscience as one of those little victories.

Gregory has the opportunity to come out of things as a good person, so long as he keeps making the right choices.

Next: Don't Make The Same Mistake Twice