Did ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Just Doom a Major Character?

When last week’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead left most of the main cast in dire straits, I noted that we haven’t seen a major death on the show in a good, long time. Well, looks like that particular finger of the monkey’s paw may have curled up on this week’s “Still Standing,” as the episode ended with one character resigned to their impending demise. And if it turns out that they are, in fact, doomed: we all riot at dawn.

Spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead “Still Standing” past this point.

That character is none other than Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), the one remaining original character left in the cast of the show (Colman Domingo’s Victor Strand didn’t show up until the fifth episode of Season 1, “Cobalt”). Still reeling from the deaths of her mother, adoptive father, brother and, like, thirty other characters last season, Alicia is looking for redemption by saving the group of kids who created the Red Rover Walkers — zombies tied together by their own intestines.

The kids have decided they want nothing to do with Alicia’s group, or their plan to escape their temporary home on a shoddy plane. Why, they reason, should they trust these people when they crashed their plane the first time? Two problems, though. One, a nuclear reactor is about to melt down in the area. And two, perhaps because of how Alicia hacked her way through the Red Rover walkers, they all break free of their intestinal web and go to eat the kids.

That’s when Alicia steps in and decides to kill as many of the undead as possible, to give the kids time to escape. They agree, and in the meantime Alicia hacks and chops her way through a horde of walkers. While this is happening, she gets noticeably splashed with some zombie blood in slo-mo. You can see her resigned reaction as it happens, and later while talking to Morgan (Lennie James) over a walkie-talkie right after washing off her face in a stream, it’s clear she has no plans to reunite with the group.

The reason being, the blood she was splashed with sure looked like it came from one of the radioactive zombies that have been wandering through the woods. Those are the same zombies Strand and Charlie (Alexa Nisenson) very pointedly reminded us one should not be blood-splashed by, right at the top of the episode. Rather than giving the splashee super-zombie powers, that blood is — we’ve been told — a death sentence.

If this is how things are going to go, it’s honestly a tragedy. The Clark/Manawa family was the start of Fear the Walking Dead, the point of the spinoff. Where Walking Dead was — and is — about family found, Fear was originally about family broken apart. Do they get back together in the face of the end of the world? Can they work past their issues? Shows evolve, and change, but the rapid-fire deaths of Travis (Cliff Curtis), Nick (Frank Dillane) and most of all Madison (Kim Dickens) left the show temporarily without a rudder. Said rudder could have been Alicia, but she’s been wandering in an angry haze for two seasons now.

Morgan has jumped into that lead role, sharing the crown with Alicia though honestly mostly wearing it himself. Still, Alicia is the legacy, and her story is ideally seeing her fight past this funk to become the hero we know she can be. Part of that is because her family was destroyed, we want her to win over her demons. Part of it is because Debnam-Carey is such an enigmatic actress, and an incredible action lead as we’ve seen both on this show, and on The CW’s The 100.

Fear has become something very different over the past season. It’s a new show, much more in line with the mothership series than where it started. Nowhere is that clearer than with the addition of Dwight (Austin Amelio), turning this into Also, The Walking Dead instead of the family take we started with. Maybe that means it’s time for those last vestiges to exit, and let the new cast take over. Heck, maybe Debnam-Carey wants a new experience after spending five years on the same series. That’s understandable, if so.

I’d also fully expect this is a feint, that Alicia will think she’s dying of radiation poisoning, and when she survives it’ll give her a new lease on life — the kick in the pants she needs to step up as leader. It could also be a way of working the helicopter people back in: Althea (Maggie Grace) happens to know about a technologically advanced group that has massive medical resources that might be able to help. But if it’s not, if Alicia is really going to die, it’s a massive loss for the show, and another big change going forward. Here’s hoping she gets zombie powers, instead.

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.

Where to stream Fear the Walking Dead