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| “ | Look, this place works because everyone plays their part. If you can't or won't, it hurts everyone else. That's when the system breaks down, and we can't let that happen. | „ |
| ~ Hornsby's philosophy. |
| “ | We're going to remake the world. | „ |
| ~ Hornsby's most famous line. |
Lance Hornsby is the secondary antagonist in the 11th and final season of AMC's The Walking Dead. Specifically he served is a major antagonist in the first part, the main antagonist in the second part, and the secondary antagonist of the third part altogether.
He is the deputy governor and high-ranking member of the Commonwealth who is in disagreement with the current government of Pamela Milton and wants to take over all the community to expand across all the country.
The character was portrayed by Josh Hamilton, who also portrayed Hank Foxx in American Horror Story: Coven.
History[]
Background[]
Lance's family serves the Miltons even before the world ends, resulting in Lance knowing Pamela Milton ever since childhood. Lance subsequently helps to found the Commonwealth, becoming the Deputy Governor and the Director of Operations. However, Lance is often shoved aside by Pamela and not given credit for his accomplishments, leaving him with ambition to take power for himself.
Seizing an Opportunity[]
Nearly a decade into the apocalypse, it's discovered that someone is illegally communicating with an outside community. Although Lance fails to identify the culprit, he dispatches troops to the planned meeting location where they capture and interrogate Eugene Porter, Ezekiel Sutton, Yumiko Okumura and Juanita Sanchez. After discovering that her long-lost brother Tomi is in the Commonwealth, Yumiko applies for expedited processing into the Commonwealth which is ultimately granted. Seeing Eugene as the weak link and identifying him as the person at the other end of the radio, Lance seizes the opportunity and has one of his spies, Shira, pose as "Stephanie," the woman that Eugene was talking to in order to manipulate Eugene into revealing more information about his communities.
During the start of the group's time in the Commonwealth, Lance presents himself as an ally to them, getting them out of trouble after they sneak into the radio room to communicate with Alexandria and arranging for Ezekiel to receive medical treatment for his thyroid cancer. After Eugene assaults Sebastian Milton, Lance takes the chance to leverage Eugene's freedom for the information that he truly wants, a ploy that is successful. Eugene leads Lance and the Commonwealth Army to Alexandria which has been nearly destroyed by the Whisperers and left in dire straits. Lance addresses the people and offers the Commonwealth's help in rebuilding the town and residency in the Commonwealth itself for anyone that wants it.
Over the next several months, Lance dedicates his efforts into building a relationship with Alexandria, the Hilltop and Oceanside, pouring a great deal of resources into rebuilding Alexandria. During this time, Carol approaches Lance with a deal to do work for him using her unique talents if he will get Ezekiel moved up the list to get the surgery to remove his cancer. Lance accepts the deal and, after Carol helps him with a rogue farmer named Moto, arranges for Ezekiel to have the surgery, saving his life.
However, things start to go badly for Lance's plans when Pamela accompanies him on a tour of the communities. Maggie Rhee is hesitant to accept the deal despite the dire state of the Hilltop, knowing that there will always be a cost and Oceanside intends to follow her lead with only Alexandria being committed to the trade deal. Lance opens up to Maggie, revealing that he sees the communities as the start of an expansion of the Commonwealth, a way to rebuild society. However, Maggie declines the deal in the end followed by Oceanside. Pamela agrees to let Lance continue his efforts with the communities, recognizing his ambition, but warns Lance not to get too far ahead of himself. Lance lets out his aggression and frustration by putting down walkers and tells Aaron that Pamela is on board, vowing to bring even more people in and remake the world.
True Colors Exposed[]
During this time, having gotten what he truly wanted, Lance has Shira end her charade. However, this arouses Eugene's suspicions that there's a rogue element in the Commonwealth which he believes has targeted "Stephanie." Eugene's investigation leads him to discover that Lance is the head of this rogue element, seeking power for himself. Lance reveals the truth about Shira's deception to a devastated Eugene and shames and manipulates Eugene into keeping quiet about his discoveries.
Emboldened, Lance begins putting his plans more and more into motion, including by moving a secret weapon's shipment disguised as supplies for Alexandria's rebuilding efforts. However, the soldiers guarding it are killed and the shipment is stolen. Suspecting that a community called Riverbend is responsible, Lance assigns a first contact mission and attaches Gabriel and Aaron to it. In secret, Lance assigns Toby Carlson, a former CIA assassin, to take out the people of Riverbend and recover the guns, sending a number of soldiers to help Toby. Things go awry as the Riverbend residents are actually innocent and Gabriel and Aaron manage to escape. Negan, now a resident of Riverbend, sends one of Lance's envoys, Jesse, to the Hilltop to ask for Maggie's help. Although Jesse is killed, he manages to relay the distress message. With the help of Maggie, Lydia, Elijah, Aaron, Gabriel, Negan and his wife Annie, Toby and his forces are wiped out, although not before they massacre most of Riverbend's residents.
In the aftermath, Aaron and Gabriel cover the incident up as Riverbend and Lance's forces killing each other. Suspicious and determined to find the Riverbend survivors and his shipment, Lance forces an inspection of the Hilltop which Daryl convinces Maggie to allow. Lance's aggression towards Riverbend and the Hilltop fully exposes his true colors for the first time to everyone. When Lance can't find anything, he goes so far as to intimidate Maggie's son Hershel, leading to a standoff after Daryl and Maggie pull guns on Lance and force him to leave.
Power Grab[]
With his plans falling apart, Lance makes an open grab for power over the communities. After learning that Leah Shaw is responsible for the weapons' theft and is looking for revenge against Maggie, Lance hires her as an assassin to kill Maggie and provides her with men as support while simultaneously assigning more of his soldiers to kill Daryl, Aaron and Gabriel. However, the group anticipates Lance's move and kill his men while Maggie, Elijah, Lydia and Marco lay a trap at the Hilltop, killing several more of his men, much to his frustration and rage as Leah had purposefully sacrificed them to spring the trap. Leah kills Marco and abducts Maggie, but Daryl rescues Maggie and kills his former lover. As Lance and his forces approach Leah's cabin, Daryl shoots at Lance, but only succeeds in grazing his face.
Enraged at his injury and the failures, Lance orders his men to seize all three communities by force. In Oceanside, Lance sadistically flips his lucky coin to determine whether or not the residents will be massacred, and it is left unclear what their ultimate fates are. Only Luke and Jules manage to escape, having been away on a scavenging run when the invasion happened.
Lance begins hunting for Daryl's group through an abandoned city while assigning Shira and Roman Callhoun to go after Daryl's adopted kids in an effort to draw them out. Daryl and Negan ambush Lance and his soldiers, killing several and wounding Lance in the arm. Stealing a vehicle, Negan makes his way to the Commonwealth to warn the others of Lance's actions and enlist Pamela Milton's help in stopping him. Daryl's group manages to lure Lance's forces into the sewers, but they end up in a standoff with Daryl holding a knife to Lance's throat and Lance's men holding everyone else at gunpoint. However, Carol and Negan arrive with Pamela and General Mercer who order Lance's troops to stand down. Pamela and Mercer keep Daryl from killing Lance as Pamela needs him alive to pin her son's crimes on. After Carol urges Daryl to comply, he allows Pamela to arrest Lance, but stabs him through the hand first as a form of vengeance.
Imprisoned[]
Despite his arrest and defeat, Lance remains smug, convinced that Pamela still needs him, going so far as to threaten to expose "certain alliances." However, Pamela tells Lance that he truly has gone too far this time and that Lance will be tried for treason against the Commonwealth. As part of her deal with Carol, Pamela agrees to return the communities that Lance had seized control of.
While imprisoned, Lance is visited by Eugene and Max Mercer who seek his advice in what to do against the Miltons corrupt rule. Lance points out that despite Sebastian's crimes being exposed, the Miltons still hold power and now have the Commonwealth singing their praises. Lance suggests that Eugene and Max need to burn down the whole corrupt system to succeed. Lance subsequently arranges for Shira and Roman to murder ten Commonwealth janitors and leave them to reanimate and attack the Founders' Day celebration to prove a point to Pamela that Daryl and the others are dangerous, and that she needs him. However, Lance's actions have the unintended consequence of causing Sebastian's death, Sebastian having tried to feed Max to one of the walkers in revenge for her exposing him and then having the walker accidentally shoved into him by Eugene.
Having never intended for Sebastian to die, Lance expresses his remorse and Pamela decides his fate with a flip of his lucky coin which causes Lance's life to be spared. However, Pamela has had Roman executed and brings both his corpse and a zombified Sebastian into Lance's cell. Providing a horrified Lance with a machete, Pamela orders him to cut up the corpse and feed it to her son.
Helping Daryl and Carol[]
Shortly after sending Sebastian to Lance's cell, Pamela has all of the Coalition residents kidnapped and disappeared like she and Lance have done with hundreds of other people in the past. Daryl and Carol manage to escape and reluctantly realize that Lance is the only one who can help them find their missing friends. As a result, they break into the jail, only to find Sebastian amongst Roman's dismembered remains and a traumatized Lance in the corner staring at his lucky coin and muttering to himself that there's always a way out. Daryl puts Sebastian down and the two demand that Lance tell them how to find their friends. Lance agrees to lead them to the others and Daryl stays behind to cover Lance and Carol's escape. Before leaving, Lance smashes open Sebastian's head and leaves his lucky coin behind in Sebastian's spilled brains as a calling card for Pamela.
As he travels with Carol, Lance expresses his respect for both her and Daryl, claiming that his previous actions were a mistake and that the man who had done them died in his cell. Lance is aware that Carol and her friends are likely to eventually overthrow Pamela and points out the logistical problems that come with such a revolution, offering his own ideas for reform and clearly angling to be a part of comes next. Lance helps Carol to dodge a patrol, but they encounter a herd of walkers in a tunnel which Lance leaves Carol to fight alone, afterwards claiming that he thought that Carol was right behind him. Encountering more soldiers on the other end, Lance and Carol are saved by Daryl who eliminates the soldiers.
Death[]
Lance eventually leads Daryl and Carol to a hill overlooking a train depot. Lance reveals that the missing people are being used as forced labor to help expand the Commonwealth's influence across the continent and that there's a supply train that they can follow to the others. Fed up with Lance's manipulations and no longer needing his help, Daryl and Carol attempt to exile Lance for his crimes, noting that it's more than he deserves for all of the things that Lance has done. Lance continues to insist that he's not the same person anymore and that he can help them both with rescuing their friends and rebuilding the Commonwealth into something new. However, both are uninterested in Lance's words and order him to go. Instead, Lance grabs a rifle from the group's stolen jeep and turns it on them, prompting Carol to shoot Lance in the neck with an arrow. With barely a glance at their fallen enemy, Daryl and Carol drive off, leaving Lance to die as he chokes on his own blood and neither bothering to prevent Lance from reanimating.
Subsequently, Daryl and Carol's plans to follow the supply train to the labor camp fail, but they eventually discover that the camp is actually in Alexandria, still under Commonwealth control following Lance's takeover of it. Combined with a rebellion led by Ezekiel, Daryl, Carol, Maggie, Rosita, Gabriel and Connie are able to liberate their home and its people from Commonwealth control for the first time since Lance's power grab.
Zombified[]
As Daryl and Carol don't destroy his brain, Lance eventually reanimates and joins a massive herd that is lured to the Commonwealth by Pamela Milton in order to trigger a lockdown. However, due to the presence of variant walkers in the herd, it is able to get into and overrun the Commonwealth.
After Pamela is overthrown and placed under arrest by General Mercer, she spots the zombified Lance at the front of the herd, pushing against the gates to the Estates with Carol's arrow still in his neck. Recognizing her former friend, Pamela approaches Lance and bares her neck to him, intending to have Lance bite her as a form of suicide to avoid prison. Recognizing that prison is a fate worse than death for Pamela, Maggie shoots Lance in the head with a sniper rifle, putting him down and saving Pamela. His body is presumably destroyed when the Estates are blown up to destroy the herd and save the Commonwealth.
Legacy[]
With the destruction of the herd and the imprisonment of Pamela, the corrupt government that had provided Pamela and Lance with their power is destroyed. The Hilltop and Oceanside join Alexandria in being liberated from the Commonwealth's control, bringing an end to the reign of terror that Lance had wrought upon the communities, although it is left unclear if the residents of Oceanside survived Lance's power grab or not. Ezekiel ends up becoming the new Governor of the Commonwealth while Carol takes over Lance's old job as Director of Operations and is stated to have improved the job.
Personality[]
Lance initially seems to be a fair, intelligent, and charismatic man who wants the best for the Commonwealth. When the group first encounters him, "Stephanie" tells them that he is trustworthy and can protect them from being banished. He is usually described by many as a very bold and ambitious man, something he is sometimes both praised and berated for, mostly by Pamela Milton. However, over time, Lance's true nature is revealed, and his nice guy façade slowly fades, revealing a power-hungry, manipulative, and psychotic side.
As the Deputy Governor, Lance holds a lot of power. When asked by Carol to move Ezekiel's surgery up the list, he does so after being given a case of expensive wine and her help with Moto. Despite this, he appears to feel underappreciated, as shown when he attempts to get Pamela's approval with Carol's wine, only to be disappointed with her underwhelmed reaction. He and Pamela seem to be at odds about many things, such as Pamela believing incorporating too many new communities would stretch them thin, but Lance thinking it's a good idea. It soon becomes apparent that his motivations are a lot more sinister than they at first seem. He reveals that Stephanie (actually named Shira) is a spy to get Eugene to admit Alexandria's location. He mentions how he has a vision of a thriving network of communities that citizens can travel between. However, when Maggie refuses to ally the Hilltop with the Commonwealth, he becomes frustrated and lures walkers over to him to let out some anger.
Lance begins to use his power for more immoral purposes. When some weapons go missing, he asks Toby Carlson to go to Riverbend and retrieve them. At first, Toby refuses, but Lance threatens him, saying he has the power to take his happy life away. It is also revealed that he knew about Sebastian sending desperate residents to get him cash. He eventually shows his more manipulative, greedy, and cunning side. While at the Hilltop, trying to find the stolen weapons, he tries to manipulate Hershel into confessing what happened at the apartment complex. Lance is shown to be able to keep calm under pressure, as he keeps his cool when a standoff happens and when he finds Leah, who could've killed him at any moment.
Lance becomes progressively more unhinged as time goes on. He hires Leah to assassinate Maggie, and becomes angry when she gets his men killed and goes rogue, to the point that he angrily throws his walkie-talkie. His desire for power comes true when the Commonwealth takes over all the communities. He is shown to be a sadistic and psychotic man, and, when deciding the fate of the people of Oceanside, he merely flips his lucky coin with a smile.
After being locked up with a zombified Sebastian and being forced to dismember Roman Calhoun's corpse and feed it to him, Lance appears to have lost his mind to a degree from the trauma, holding his lucky coin and muttering to himself that there's always a way out. Lance proves to be so traumatized that he suggests cutting off his own foot as a solution to the radio tracker on it. Before leaving his cell, Lance smashes open Sebastian's head and leaves behind his lucky coin in the remains as a calling card for Pamela, possibly as an act of retribution for what she put him through. Even in this state, Lance proves to be smart enough not to give up the location that Daryl and Carol need and instead insists upon showing it to them, likely recognizing that they will have no further use for him if he just tells them what they want to know.
After escaping from the Commonwealth, Lance appears to regain his sanity and resumes his manipulations, pointing out, truthfully, the effects of the Coalition inciting a rebellion against the Commonwealth and seemingly angling for a role in what comes next. Lance expresses what appears to be a genuine respect for Daryl and his abilities to Carol despite his and Daryl's previous clashes, and his respect for Carol always being 10 steps ahead of everyone else. Lance explains to Carol that the loyalty that she and Daryl share is rare and to be treasured. Lance admits that he was once like that to Pamela, having helped her to build the Commonwealth, but he became bitter over Pamela always shoving him into the background and not acknowledging Lance's contributions to the community. Lance appears to show some possible remorse for his earlier actions, admitting that what he did to the communities was "mishandled" and the wrong thing to do.
While facing off against a herd in a tunnel, Lance displays what appears to be cowardice, leaving Carol to fend off the walkers by herself, although he claims that in the dark, he had merely thought that Carol was with him.
At the end of his life, after Lance tells Daryl and Carol what they want to know, they attempt to exile him, much to Lance's surprise, which Daryl states is more than Lance deserves after all that he's done. Lance had thought that Carol at least was listening to him, but Carol simply states that she had no other choice because Lance just wouldn't shut up. Aware of Lance's manipulative nature and no longer needing his help, Daryl and Carol are completely unmoved by his pleas despite Lance insisting that his time in the cell had changed him and he can't survive on his own. Rather than leaving, Lance grabs a gun and attempts to shoot the two, leading to his death.
Trivia[]
- While Lance has a comics counterpart, the comics Lance is a relatively minor character who was never a villain.
- Lance is the final main antagonist in The Walking Dead to be killed as Pamela is only arrested. He is also the last named undead character to be put down.
- In an Instagram post, Angela Kang confirmed that Oceanside survived Lance's actions and they originally had a scene for them planned for the series finale.
- Lance bears many similarities to the Batman villain Two Face. Both men are handsome, charismatic, ambitious politicians. Both carry a lucky coin inherited by their fathers, and use them to decide the fates of their victims. Both men are also scarred on the left side of their face and embrace a much darker personality after their injuries.
External Links[]
- Lance Hornsby on the Walking Dead Wiki
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