Fear The Walking Dead bosses tease “a difficult road” ahead for Alicia

Fear The Walking Dead gave us quite the episode this week as Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) faced an unwelcome blast from the past. “Mother” was basically a flashback episode sans actual flashbacks. It was more of a legacy episode that found Alicia looking back on her mother’s life as characters from her past returned.

Sadly, these characters haven’t quite done a lot of good with the extra time Madison (Kim Dickens) gave them after she sacrificed her life to save them. It’s this jarring realization that places Alicia in a predicament, not only with herself but with the elusive Teddy (John Glover) who has plans to destroy the world the first chance he gets.

Entertainment Weekly spoke with Fear The Walking Dead showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg about Alicia’s journey. Especially now that she’s been locked up by Teddy, who plans to use her to “recreate the world,” things are hard. EW also asked the showrunners if there is ever a chance that Dickens will return as Madison. I mean they have been mentioning her more than usual in season 6, so you never know!

“Well, we certainly know what Teddy wants from [Alicia],” Goldberg said. “He wants her to rebuild the world after he destroys it, or at least that’s what his plan is. But we also know that the last thing she says to him is I’m not going to remake the world the way you want it. And he says, ‘I know, that’s what I’m counting on.’ So I think the question is just how is Alicia going to move forward? Given the fact that she has been essentially imprisoned in this place and placed with people she doesn’t want to be with, apart from the people she cares about. It’s going to be a difficult road for her. But I think it’s safe to say that she’s not going to be doing exactly what Teddy hoped.”

Following up on that, Chambliss suggested that Alicia is “where she knows she’s got to become her own person in some ways,” and that “being locked behind that door is perhaps the beginning of her transformation.” This is going to be a huge test for Alicia, and I have a feeling she won’t succumb to the Teddy’s creepy wiles.

The wily ways of Teddy

Side note: Glover killed it during this week’s episode of Fear The Walking Dead. We’ve had our fair share of villains in The Walking Dead universe, but Teddy’s manipulative way of doing things is more frightening than a lot of the villains we’ve seen so far.

And perhaps that’s why Teddy foresees Alicia being the right person for his mission. According to Chambliss, “he needs someone who is kind of the complete opposite of him, someone who despite kind of being dragged through the trauma of the apocalypse is still maintaining kind of some shred of hope.”

With everything that goes down in this episode, including Alicia taking someone’s life despite it going against everything she believes in, “Alicia’s still in a position where she is trying to hold onto her morality, trying to build some world that’s better than this place that we’re in right now — that is what he wants.”

If we’ve learned anything this week, it’s that Teddy is a clever, clever man who knows exactly what he’s doing when he picks Alicia to be his guiding light. As we approach the penultimate season 6 episode in a couple of weeks, we’ll find out just how well that will turn out for him.

And as far as that Dickens cameo goes? The showrunners tell us that this episode wasn’t a tease for a potential appearance but more so “about seeing how Alicia’s relationship with her mother kind of very much informed what Teddy’s looking for from her.”

But I’m still holding out hope.

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