Fear the Walking Dead Brings Back [SPOILER] From the Dead

[This story contains spoilers from the Fear the Walking Dead midseason finale.] Troy Otto (Daniel Sharman) looked dead as a doornail when Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) bludgeoned him with a hammer in the “Things Bad Begun” episode of Fear the Walking Dead. Then his corpse washed away when her son, Nick Clark (Frank Dillane), blew up the Gonzalez Dam in a standoff with Proctor John (Ray McKinnon) to end season 3. As Madison washed ashore, the “Sleigh Ride” season finale left the fates of Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Victor Strand (Colman Domingo), and Daniel Salazar (Rubèn Blades) unknown. But the last-surviving Otto was dead.

Fear eventually revealed that the Clarks, Strand, and Salazar survived the dam explosion. As it turns out, there’s another survivor of the Gonzalez Dam: Troy. Sunday’s “All I See Is Red” midseason finale ended with the exit of Morgan Jones (Lennie James), who went off to find Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) with his daughter Mo (Zoey Merchant) in tow. With Morgan gone, Madison’s mission is to reunite the children she collected for PADRE with their parents and make the island “what it was meant to be in the first place”: a safe-zone to seed new settlements across the country.

In a stinger that aired before the credits rolled, Madison could be heard announcing herself through the static on a radio tuned by a mysterious figure. “My name is Madison Clark. If you can hear this message, you are in the territory PADRE once patrolled. PADRE has fallen. They are no longer a threat to you or your children. If you lost a child, come to the following coordinates and send an SOS on this channel: 31 degrees, 51 minutes north. 81 degrees, 10 minutes west. We will find you. We will do our best to reunite you with your children. We’ll make up for all the damage PADRE did to you.”

The mystery listener jotted down the coordinates in a notepad before packing up an assortment of familiar items. Among them are Strand’s sunglasses, Alicia’s arm prosthetic (with the bony remains of her zombie-bitten arm inside), a hammer — and a map tracking a route that begins at the Gonzalez Dam’s location in Tijuana, Baja California.

It would seem that Troy Otto somehow survived and has unfinished business with Madison Clark. The last time they met in season 3’s “Things Bad Begun,” Madison (seemingly) killed Troy after the revelation that he led the walker horde that overran Broke Jaw Ranch, the survivalist settlement where he once lived with his brother, Jake Otto (Sam Underwood), and their father, border militiaman Jeremiah Otto Sr. (Dayton Callie).

With Morgan’s exit, the second half of Fear‘s final season will return focus to the show’s earlier characters co-created by original showrunner Dave Erickson: Madison, Strand, Daniel, Luciana, and — it seems — Troy Otto.

Read our midseason finale postmortem Q&A with Lennie James about Morgan’s final episode of Fear the Walking Dead. Season 8 returns with new episodes later in 2023 on AMC and AMC+.

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