The Walking Dead Villains, Who’s The Worst: Part 11

The Walking Dead final season

2) Brandon Carver

As bad as Pope seemed to be, his behavior could be written off as him having slowly gone insane, the strain of trauma from years of war, and a decade in the zombie apocalypse, finally pushing him over the edge. The same can not be said, however, for his lieutenant, Carver.

Carver was one of Pope’s men who served under him during the war in Afghanistan and again in his private security company, he stayed with his commander when the outbreak began, surviving Operation: Cobalt together and serving as one of his right-hand men from that point forward.

What we learned, though, was that being Pope’s right-hand, apparently, meant being his enforcer, and a most vicious one, at that.

When Frost is captured by the Reapers, it is Carver who interrogates him, and by “interrogating”, feel free to insert the word “torture”. In fact, when Daryl (Posing as a double agent) is asked by Pope to take over interrogating Frost, Carver gets angry over the fact he’s being prevented from torturing Frost more.

Now, an argument could be made (I’m not making it, but I acknowledge that someone playing devil’s advocate could make this argument) that Carver’s behavior is warranted, knowing that Maggie and the Wardens do have hostile intent and seek to kill them for evicting them from Meridian. The problem with that is, if one were to make that argument to suggest Carver is relatively innocent, there’d still be the issue of why Maggie and the Wardens wanted revenge on him in the first place: His role in that eviction.

The Reapers kicking Maggie’s community out of Meridian wasn’t a matter of them rolling up to their doorstep and saying, “Hey! Hit the road! This is ours, now!”. No, it involved them attacking the community, killing many of its members, and trying desperately to hunt down and eliminate the rest for having the gall to survive the massacre. Carver definitely played a major role in this, as

Elijah distinctly remembered him killing his little sister, Josephine. Not only did Carver do it, but he found the fact that he did it amusing, but only after not even thinking about it at all, as memorable to him as the fifteenth breath he took that day, implying that she was merely one of many people he killed during the conquest. As if this weren’t bad enough, the show strongly implies that there were children in Meridian besides Hershel, yet, he’s the only one who makes it to Alexandria, meaning that they were amongst those the Reapers massacred. Considering how nonchalant he was about murdering a teenager, I highly doubt he would have had qualms about massacring kids.

Put simply: If Pope is bad for being an obsessed psycho who’d order the obliteration of a community just to take their stuff, then Carver, being the guy who not only carries out that order but does so happily, might just be a little bit worse.