Fear the Walking Dead’s New Villain Could Be a Serial Killer From John Dorie’s Past

Fear the Walking Dead digs up a long-buried past when a new threat emerges in the back half of Season 6. Spoilers for Fear’s ongoing sixth season. After the back-to-back deaths of gunslinger John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt) in “The Door” and big bad Ginny (Colby Minifie) in “Things Left to Do,” Fear will reveal the meaning of “the end is the beginning”: the cryptic mantra of a new villain group teased throughout the season. The apparent leader of the doomsayers is Teddy (John Glover), a wild-bearded madman that Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) calls the “king of the crazies” — who might be the cult leader-turned-serial killer locked away by John’s policeman father pre-apocalypse.

“I’ll just say the entire season is fascinating,” co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss told Entertainment Weekly about the remaining seven episodes. “I think people should go back and look at what John Dorie has said in the first half of the season, because it will offer a clue as to one of the big threats in the back half of the season.”

Chambliss is likely referring to Season 6 Episode 4, “The Key,” where John tells Rabbi Jacob (Peter Jacobson) about a case his father took on when John was “just knee-high”:

Women were going missing in the Houston area. Bodies showing up miles away. The term didn’t exist then, but I suppose the fella doin’ it is what we’d call a serial killer. Detectives found him living on this compound out in the desert with a bunch of people he brainwashed into thinking he was the second coming or somethin’. Really, he was just some two-bit mortician spouting on about death and new beginnings … just a bunch of nonsense dressed up to sound profound.

The local police force knew the mortician was guilty, John recalls, but “they couldn’t pin any of the murders directly to him. At least not with anything that would stick in court.” When John’s father found a missing woman’s purse squirreled away in the suspected killer’s closet, “That was enough to put that sumbitch away for the rest of his life.” (John goes on to reveal his father planted the purse, ultimately costing him his career and his marriage.)

It was enough to put the killer away for life — or at least until the beginning of the zombie apocalypse.

Trailers for the second half of the season reveal an underground community where “life will begin again,” and a monologuing Teddy telling Alicia: “I’ve been looking for someone like you for a long, long time.”

Just like John’s father’s “two-bit mortician spouting on about death and new beginnings,” this “king of the crazies” preaches about “death, destruction, decay” when he corners Alicia:

“What is happening to the world isn’t new. The world’s been breaking down since its inception. Everything is winding down, including us,” Teddy can be heard saying. “Death is inevitable. But from this death, comes new life.”

“One thing we’re going to see in the back half of this season is there’s still a looming threat out there, which are these people that are spray painting ‘The end is the beginning,’” co-showrunner Ian Goldberg told EW. “The people who took out Tank Town, the ones who were spray painting the sub in 601. That group is going to rise to the forefront in a really dramatic way in the back half. And it’s going to really test our fractured family of characters because they’re going to have to find a way to reckon with that threat.”

Goldberg added: “And yes, they’re in a place where they’re not unified, and that’s just going to make it all the more interesting when they’re facing a threat that we’ll see is just as formidable, if not more so, than Virginia.”

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.