At the end of this week’s Fear the Walking Dead, we’re introduced to the last of four new characters in the episode, a disheveled woman played by actress Tonya Pinkins. The character is listening in on a monologue that Morgan is delivering over the radio. After surmising from that monologue that Morgan is going to Texas, the mysterious woman turns to her zombie friend — pinned against the wall with a metal post through his neck — and says, “It looks like we’re going to Texas,” as she writes, “Take what you need, leave what you don’t” across the zombie’s face.
We can’t glean anything else from the villain from that episode, but in an interview with Hollywood Reporter, Andrew Chambliss stated:
“The storm is the thing that makes the world a lot harder to live in, but there will be someone cropping up who is going to really test all our characters in ways that they didn’t expect and this antagonist — I don’t want to give away too much about who this person is — may know a lot more about our characters, or have insight into who they are and what they’re going through in ways that our characters don’t even have.”
In his theory post over on THR, Josh Wigler surmised — based on that statement — that our mysterious villain not only knows a lot about the existing Fear characters but that she might be working with someone else. The most likely person, he concludes, is a character that we haven’t seen this season, but who Fear showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg have promised would return at some point: Daniel Salazar. The last we saw of Daniel (Ruben Blades), he was nursing a gunshot wound to the face at the end of season three.
I agree that the mysterious woman is likely working with another character who has some knowledge of these characters, and it’s true that Daniel knows some of them, or at least Strand and Alicia. But Daniel Salazar doesn’t know anything about Morgan, and if Daniel doesn’t know anything about Morgan, how do we explain this, from the season 4B trailer:
“I lose people, I lose myself,” is scrawled on the forehead of Morgan, in the same fashion that another message was Sharpied onto the zombie by the mysterious woman, suggesting that it was the villain who scrawled it on Morgan’s forehead. But how would she know that Morgan says, “I lose people, I lose myself?” It certainly couldn’t be from Daniel Salazar, who has never even met Morgan.
However, there is one character who knows many of the other characters very well, and not only that, she’s been documenting their stories on tape.
What is it that Morgan told Althea in the interview he gave her in the season premiere? “I lose people, I lose myself.” And what exactly has Althea been doing with all of these tapes? Is it possible that these videotaped “stories” are more than a mere narrative device? That those tapes fell into someone else’s hands? Or that Althea passed them along to our mysterious villain?
Will those tape recordings finally pay off, and are they related to the 4b villain? Is Althea working in cahoots with the mysterious woman?
We should find out more when the 12th episode of the season airs on Sunday.
