Fear the Walking Dead’s Jenna Elfman Breaks Down “Blue Jay” (Exclusive)

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for Sunday’s Fear the Walking Dead episode, “Blue Jay.”] June Dorie (Jenna Elfman) found something to live for on Sunday’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead. Unfortunately, she also lost something: her trigger finger. Like her late husband John Dorie, a traumatized June ran away to a solitary cabin to live her life in total isolation after escaping PADRE. The island community named after its unseen leader coerced June into conducting human experiments to find a cure for walker bites, so she spent the past few years hunting down PADRE’s Collectors and taking their fingers.

That included PADRE’s Shrike (Maya Eshet), the woman who once held June at gunpoint to force her to administer radiotherapy on zombie-bitten test subjects like Adrian’s (Jonathan Medina) young daughter Hannah. “She said as long as her finger was on the trigger, I had to keep the experiments going, or other people would pay the price,” June told Adrian, who spent the past five years searching for his daughter taken by Collectors. Because PADRE couldn’t do the experiments without June, she severed Shrike’s trigger finger and stayed away from the island — and away from people — so that no one else she cared about could get hurt.

When we meet June after seven years, she’s trying to “find the constitution within herself, to have the courage and knowledge within herself, to pull herself up by the bootstraps after a lot of trauma,” Elfman told ComicBook. “And to find a steady faith in herself that she can knowingly keep going despite all the things that happened to her that she’s witnessed.”

Other people have always triggered Naomi/Laura/June’s fight-or-flight response. But in “Blue Jay,” Adrian tells June to find someone to live for — advice she finally heeds when June accepts her place as part of Dwight (Austin Amelio) and Sherry’s (Christine Evangelista) family with their seven-year-old son, Finch (Gavin Warren). But is June, code name Blue Jay, still a flight risk?

“I think healing is a process. And as you know, I’m sure we don’t just change overnight. We have epiphanies, we have realizations, and then you put it into motion. But it’s gradual, it doesn’t happen overnight,” Elfman explained. “And of course, that’s in the most perfect of environmental circumstances with so many beautiful friends and not a continuous threatening environment.”

She continued: “So, I think that it’s going to be a process for her as we go through season 8, and she encounters many experiences that’s going to [impact her]. It’s a work in progress.”

New episodes of Fear the Walking Dead premiere Thursdays on AMC+ and Sundays on AMC. Stay tuned to ComicBook/TWD and follow @CameronBonomolo and @NewsOfTheDead on Twitter for more TWD Universe coverage.