‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Season 4: Filthy Woman Gets A Name And An Origin Story

A new villain was recently introduced into the Fear the Walking Dead landscape. Only known as the “Filthy Woman” by AMC, this character is intent on stopping the group dropping care boxes along the highway. All viewers knew about her philosophy was that she believed help was making those who accepted it “weak.”

However, Episode 14 of Fear the Walking Dead Season 4 opened with the origin story for this character as well as finally revealing her name.

In the opening of the episode, the woman’s name was revealed as Martha, and her story is that her husband died as people drove past and refused to stop and help. After her husband died, Martha dug a grave for him with her bare hands and then proceeded to go crazy.

Of interest to note in Episode 14 is the fact that Martha’s husband dies in a similar way to that of Clayton (Stephen Henderson), also known as Polar Bear, as seen in Episode 13 of Fear the Walking Dead. It is unclear if AMC used these similar deaths to draw a correlation between the way Martha reacted to the incident and the way Luciana (Danay Garcia) reacted to finding Polar Bear. However, Fear‘s showrunner, Andrew Chambliss, did reveal the following information to Entertainment Weekly about Martha’s origin story.

“We just had this idea that the fact that she thinks helping people makes those people weak came from her own kind of tragic experience, and we just wanted to see those moments where that formation happened early on in the apocalypse when she was trying to escape the city and found herself on the side of the road and her husband was near death and everyone just kept driving off.”

At some point after the death of Martha’s husband, a truck is shown stopping to drop off supplies in the familiar boxes seen in previous episodes of Fear the Walking Dead Season 4. However, Martha kills the woman dropping off the care package and then proceeds to work her way through the group, killing them, allowing them to reanimate, and then using the newly reanimated victim to kill the next person who is tasked with dropping off care packages.

Of course, Martha does not yet know that Polar Bear is dead now and it will be interesting to see how she reacts to this news if she ever finds out in upcoming episodes of Fear. However, fans will just have to tune in to future episodes to discover if Martha ever finds this information out.

Fear the Walking Dead returns to AMC with Episode 15 (titled “I Lose People…”) of Season 4 on September 23.