The end is the beginning for Teddy (John Glover) when Fear the Walking Dead flashes back to the start of the zombie apocalypse. Some three years before present-day Season 6 — where John Dorie Sr. (Keith Carradine) partners with June (Jenna Elfman) and Morgan (Lennie James) to put an end to Teddy and the cult behind “the end is the beginning” — the murderer mortician is behind bars and decades served into a life sentence. Imprisoned since the 1970s when Detective Dorie brought him to justice for the murders of 22 women, Teddy finds his life sentence commuted at the onset of the apocalypse in the opening minutes from “Mother.”
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“He’s very Charles Manson-like, in terms of his hypnotic power over his cult,” Carradine told CinemaBlend about Dorie Sr’s archnemesis, Theodore Maddox. “But that’s the nature of cults in general, isn’t it? I mean, these personalities have undue influence over people who might have a particular weakness to be influenced in that way. I think John Dorie Sr.’s weakness, if he has one in particular, would be his passion to solve a crime and to prevent the criminal from going on.”
“It’s an obsessive ask,” added Carradine, “and I think that obsession is what has been so damaging to him. But it’s interesting now that at this point in his life, he might actually have connected with somebody, and with a group of people — as we learn by the end of [‘J.D.’] — who can help him actually complete this task.”
But it might be too late to stop the escaped Teddy, who sets off on a freaky field trip with potential recruit Dakota (Zoe Colletti) and his prized prisoner Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey) in Sunday’s “Mother.” Teddy’s twisted crimes were revealed in “J.D.,” where the glimpse of a newspaper clipping documents Teddy’s capture in ’70s Texas:
Theodore Maddox has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in a Galveston courtroom Thursday. He had previously been found guilty in the deaths of twenty-two women and for trespassing on a local military base. This caps the end of a killing spree that terrorized much of southeast Texas and embarrassed authorities, led by detective John Dorie, up and down the Gulf. … Despite the sheer number of victims, authorities had difficulty producing the evidence required to convict Maddox. His methods of embalming his victims left little in the way of DNA with which to convict … the damning piece of evidence was a purse belonging to Cindy Hawkins, a waitress at Delphi’s Country Cookin’, which was found in Maddox’s home by Dorie. Miss Hawkins is still considered missing, but presumed dead.
“Mother” is streaming early on AMC+ and premieres Sunday, May 23, at 9/8c on AMC.
Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. New episodes of Fear the Walking Dead Season 6 premiere Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.
