Fear the Walking Dead Reveals Teddy’s Plan to End Everything — Except Alicia Clark

Teddy Maddox (John Glover) is out to unlock his new beginning by ending everything except Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey) on Fear the Walking Dead. Spoiler warning for Season 6 Episode 14, “Mother.” Taken prisoner by the mortician murderer whose life imprisonment was commuted by the zombie apocalypse after 30 years behind bars, Alicia learns the meaning behind “the end is the beginning” when the underground cult leader reveals why he spent the season searching for the key that underling Riley (Nick Stahl) stole from Morgan Jones (Lennie James). Teddy’s plan: destroy the world and begin again.

After burning down The Holding — a self-sustainable bunker built out of an underground parking garage — Alicia is weeks into resisting Teddy’s attempted induction into his cult. Teddy’s found a safer and sturdier new home where they can “truly begin again,” but it won’t be revealed to Alicia until he’s assured she’s committed to the End is the Beginners.

Alicia is “critical for our new beginning,” Teddy tells Riley, but she’s kept in the dark. New recruit Dakota (Zoe Colletti) tells Alicia about whispers the place they’re going is stocked with so many supplies they won’t have to step outside for years, and Teddy says with ominous delight: “When we’re finished… all this will be gone.”

Freed from prison by fortuity, Teddy says the apocalypse allowed him “a chance to reshape the world into everything I believed it could be, where I could preserve everything I loved and destroy everything I didn’t.” When Alicia asks what the keys unlock, Teddy says only “our future.”

When Alicia reunites with her old friend Cole (Sebastian Sozzi) — who was believed killed in Season 4 Episode 8, “No One’s Gone” — it’s revealed he escaped their former home at the Dell Diamond Baseball Stadium with Doug (Kenneth Wayne Bradley) and Viv (Rhoda Griffis) when Alicia’s mother, Madison Clark (Kim Dickens), sacrificed herself by setting fire to an invading zombie horde.

But a year of harsh living has turned them into road-weary marauders ready to murder for Teddy’s stockpiled supplies. It’s because of “people like you,” Teddy tells Cole, “that the world needs to be destroyed.” It’s only after Alicia shoots and kills Cole that she lets go of her past, according to Teddy, who confesses to murdering his beloved Mother after she threatened to have him committed for a “new beginning.”

Teddy finally reveals his plan to destroy it all: the key will launch a missile from a beached nuclear submarine washed ashore in Galveston, Texas. Alicia radios Strand (Colman Domingo) to warn Morgan and find the submarine just before she’s taken to a hotel resort’s leftover basement bunker from the Cold War, where Alicia will finish what Teddy started.

“The beginning is the end. I’m the ending, so I can’t be the beginning. But you can,” Teddy explains to Alicia, telling her she “can do what needs to be done without losing sight of the one thing that’s going to be in short supply once this is all over: hope.”

Teddy locks Alicia inside a fallout shelter, and his prized prisoner is “going to rebuild the world from in there.” When Alicia says she won’t make the world the way he wants it to be, Teddy tells her: “That’s what I’m counting on.”

Next: in “USS Pennsylvania,” the penultimate episode of the season airing June 6, Morgan and the survivors must join forces to try and stop the zombie apocalypse from going nuclear.

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.