WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead Season 6, Episode 14, "Mother," which aired Sunday on AMC.
While John Dorie Sr. enlightened the Fear the Walking Dead protagonists about Teddy's past as a twisted serial killer, Episode 14, "Mother," provides even more of the cult leader's backstory. Now trapped at the Holding, Alicia crosses paths with Dakota. Together, they accompany Teddy on a "special mission." When they wind up at a graveyard, it seems Teddy has few things in common with Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock's iconic film, Psycho.
After Alicia sacrificed herself to free her friends from the Holding, Teddy desperately tries to convert her. He's convinced Alicia is vital to his mission to destroy and rebuild the world. As such, he invites her to tag along on a special mission. Right before they leave, a bus arrives with new recruits, and Dakota emerges. Claiming she wants to make things right with Alicia, Dakota joins the mission at Teddy's insistence.
The trio ends up at a graveyard where Teddy asks them to remove his mother's coffin from a crypt. As if it isn't strange enough, Teddy proceeds to open the coffin to touch and even kiss her corpse. He tells Alicia his mother was taken way before her time, but "it doesn't mean she can't be a part of our new beginning." He then loads the corpse onto his truck. As the episode continues, Teddy seems obsessed with his mother. When the truck spins out with a flat tire, it throws his mother's body from the vehicle. He screams, "Mother!" and runs to check on the corpse as if it's a living person.
The whole situation is eerily similar to Psycho's Norman Bates, right down to how Teddy refers to her as just Mother. However, later, Teddy reveals the woman they dug up isn't his mother. He declares -- not for the first time -- that Alicia reminds him of Mother, to which she responds, "Did she think you were a nutjob too?" The question enrages Teddy but prompts him to confess that Mother found his journals while he was at mortuary school and thought he was "disturbed" for wanting to end the world. When she threatened to have him committed, ending his "sick thoughts," he killed her and buried her body in the backyard.
Teddy's confession draws even more similarities to Norman's story. In Robert Bloch's novel Psycho -- and later in the film adaptation -- Norman grows extremely jealous of his mother's relationship with her fiance. Believing she abandoned him for her new lover, Norman poisons them both, staging it as a murder-suicide. He later digs up her body and mummifies it, continuing to speak to her as if she's still alive. Not only do Teddy and Norman share a fetish for mummification, but they also both communicate with their mothers after death. This is exemplified in the opening scene of "Mother," when Teddy speaks out loud to his mother's picture.
One can also argue that Teddy's reasons for killing his mother more closely resemble Norman's motive in Bates Motel, the A&E's prequel series to Psycho. Although he shared his film incarnation's unusual jealousy, Bates Motel Norman never quite forgave his mother for having him committed for a short period. Either way, the similarities between Teddy and Norman are uncanny. Much like Psycho, Fear the Walking Dead seeks to tell a story about a toxic, obsessive mother/son relationship that resulted in murder.
Fear the Walking Dead stars Lennie James, Rubén Blades, Colman Domingo, Danay Garcia, Maggie Grace, Garret Dillahunt, Jenna Elfman, Alexa Nisenson, Karen David, Austin Amelio, Mo Collins, Zoe Colletti and Christine Evangelista. New episodes air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CT on AMC.