10 Worst TV Villains Of The Last 10 Years
4. Pope - The Walking Dead
AMC’s zombie epic has produced a glut of brilliant baddies, from The Governor to Alpha and Negan, and the budget and imagination of the show has allowed them to go to some wildly inventive places. The show has also been going for a terribly long time, though, and each of us has only so many ideas. To that end, by season 11, we wound up with Pope.
The leader of the fiendish Reapers and a highly trained military vet, Pope isn’t a bad character, just a seriously uninspired one. His gimmick is religious fanaticism, a trope that any long running drama will reach for eventually. He believes that his group is chosen by God to survive the zombie plague, and that he in particular is obliged to enact the Lord’s wrath on the rest of humanity’s survivors.
This amounts to a load of speeches about fire, brimstone, destiny, and so forth. They’re delivered with gusto by actor Ritchie Coster, but after some of the singular baddies we’ve seen in the show thus far, the combination of disturbed army guy and religious nut doesn’t do much to excite.