Fear the Walking Dead Recap: “Keeping Her Alive”

Last week’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead ended with Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) revealing his plan to save PADRE: using Troy’s (Daniel Sharman) daughter as leverage to keep the island safe. Complicating this is June (Jenna Elfman), Dwight (Austin Amelio), and Sherry (Christine Evangelista), who don’t trust Strand after his actions at the Tower cost people their lives. “We’ve all done things to build and survive,” says Strand, who thinks survival means keeping Troy’s daughter on the island; the others argue it makes them more of a target. But PADRE is Strand’s last chance to do good on what he promised Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey), so he bites the bullet and agrees to go with them to surrender the girl to her father.

June, Dwight, and Sherry plan to hand Strand over Troy along with his daughter Tracy (Antonella Rose), who they’ve blindfolded so she doesn’t know the way to the island that is “impossible to find.” Strand fears what will happen when they return Tracy to her father — “a sociopath on a revenge tour,” as Strand puts it — but Sherry counters that Strand is really looking out for himself. “This isn’t about me,” he insists. “It’s about her. It’s about PADRE. It’s about building the place that Alicia wanted me to build.”

But they’ll do that without Strand. June raises Troy on the radio and tells him they’ll bring him his daughter — and the man who took her — if he assures them he won’t attack PADRE. Troy and his army can keep the hotel they took from Strand, and Madison went AWOL from PADRE, so whatever vendetta he had against her isn’t with them. It’s a deal, so Strand removes Tracy’s blindfold and tells her to remember her surroundings. If they hand her over to her father, she’ll give up PADRE’s location. Strand and Tracy jump overboard and make their way to shore, where Strand notices she’s wearing the Saint Christopher’s medallion he once gave to Alicia.

The PADRE group have made their way on land in search of Tracy, so there’s no time to explain. Strand takes the girl to “the one person who can help both of us”: Madison Clark (Kim Dickens). She’s bludgeoning walkers with her sledge hammer to the tune of Motley Cue’s “Live Wire” when Strand (somehow) finds her in the woods. She wants Nick and Alicia to be at rest, but first, she needs to find the zombified Alicia and put her down. 

Madison assures Tracy she won’t make her pay for her father’s crimes — killing Alicia and a lot of other things he probably didn’t tell her about. “He told me everything. How you killed his father, how you turned his brother against him, how you left him for dead at the dam,” Tracy tells Madison. “You also killed my mother.”

Madison doesn’t know Tracy’s mother, and she doesn’t know why Strand bothered to bring her here. The medallion means she can help them find Alicia, and finding Alicia means they can save Tracy from her father. Madison is angry that Strand is giving away PADRE’s location and the one thing keeping Troy from attacking it, but he argues that it’s the only play he had. And it’s what Alicia would have done. “Madison, you’re the only person who knows the man who I used to be andstill believes that I’ve changed, so believe me when I say this: thisisn’t about saving my own skin,” he says, earnestly. “It’s about saving hers, too.” 

Tracy has no choice but to lead Madison and Strand to Alicia, so they stop at one of the way stations that Luciana established throughout the state. They’re somewhere near Milledgeville, Georgia, and eavesdropping on radio chatter reveals that they’re far from Troy’s people. On another channel, they hear women looking for Madison and following the coordinates she broadcast over the radio earlier in the season, but they don’t recognize the voices. Tracy reports that Troy’s fight with Alicia happened farther north, so Strand leaves his walkie-talkie and digs around for a larger map. A slipper Tracy snatches the walkie and manages to report to her dad that she’s at a gas station off Route 204. “Do you even know where Alicia is?” No answer, so a furious Madison growls: “Don’t make me ask you that again.”

Before Tracy can reveal what she knows about Alicia, a trucker convoy of Luciana (Danay Garcia), Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades), and their people arrive. They heard the radio chatter, and they heard Tracy give away the location of the truck stop. Madison asks Luciana to let her pass so they can use her road network to find Alicia and put her to rest. Luciana doesn’t want to risk her people getting into a fight, so she wants Madison and Strand to hand over the girl so they can return her to Troy. Daniel rightfully figures that Troy already knows about the truck stop and will attack them to take everything they have, so he tells her to set up a defensive perimeter. Meanwhile, he’ll ride along with Madison and Strand to find out if they cut a deal with Troy. He does this under the guise of wanting to help Madison find and bury Alicia, but Strand figures out that what Daniel really wants is to get his revenge on Troy for causing his daughter Ofelia’s death.

Strand tries to take Tracy with him, so Madison ditches him on the side of the road and peels off with Daniel. Tracy leads them north to a herd of walkers literally frozen in their tracks. As Tracy tells it, the zombified Alicia was in the herd that followed them as they traveled before the weather got cold. He didn’t want the walker herd to get near the hotel and, knowing the mud would freeze them in place when the temperature dropped, marched them to this frigid stomping ground. Troy told Madison that he didn’t know where Alicia is, but he lied: “He didn’t want you to find her,” Tracy says. “He didn’t want you to bury her.” Tracy looks at Alicia’s medallion around her neck, but how it came to be in her possession goes unanswered as they make their way into the herd.

Meanwhile, the stranded Strand is surrounded by walkers when he’s saved by the machine guns of the MRAP SWAT van that once belonged to Althea. Driving the armored vehicle is a woman with a bladed gauntlet that she uses to stab a walker through the brain and save Strand’s life. The mystery person is… not Alicia Clark. “I get that a lot,” says the unnamed young woman (Nona Parker Johnson) accompanied by Della (Julia Wackenheim-Gimple) and Sara (Sasha An).

Alicia’s Apostles — as we’ll call them because the group isn’t given a name — tell Strand that Alicia told them about him before she died. Before Troy killed her. They don’t just dress lke Alicia. “We’re keeping her alive,” they say, explaining how Alicia passed through all of their lives: she saved Della’s settlement from bandits, found antibiotics for Sara when she came down with pneumonia, and offered their leader shelter when she was turned away from Strand’s Tower. She was with her father when they heard Alicia transmit a message telling the survivors of nuclear fallout to come to the Tower, but by the time they got there, it was destroyed. Dozens of people arrived at the Tower and were then shuttled to safety by Alicia, using the MRAP to drive them out of the wasteland. Her father eventually succumbed to radiation poisoning from exposure, a revelation that causes the remorseful Strand to apologize. Why did she save him? “It’s what Alicia would have done,” she says.

By her own admission, they didn’t spend much time with Alicia. The fevers she was suffering from apparently stopped, but once Alicia got their group settled, she went off to help more people. That’s the last they ever saw of her. Alicia became an avenging nomad, never staying in one place for too long. “Word spread about her. It gave people hope,” Sara explains. “We’re trying to spread some of the same.” Strand asks the leader her name, but she doesn’t answer. Because they want Alicia’s legacy to continue, “It’s better if people believe she’s still out there helping.” They heard Madison’s message on the radio, so they tracked her down to help take down Troy. They don’t know why Troy killed Alicia, but they know that she’s not the only one he killed: There used to be more of them.

Strand radios Troy to tell him he can save Tracy — but to find her, Troy has to tell him where he hid Alicia. But first, Troy and his men get into a standoff with Luciana and her men at the truck stop. Daniel’s plan to surround Troy worked. Luciana wants Troy to stand down so they can negotiate a cease-fire, so he accepts Strand’s offer. Back at the mountain, Madison and Daniel notice that the herd of frozen walkers — most of them dressed in ranch and western wear — followed Troy from out west. They advance into the herd, where Madison finds a long-haired, one-armed walker.

Only it’s not Alicia. Madison realizes this just before Tracy shoves her into the walker — it’s Tracy’s mother, and she wanted her to make Madison pay. “She saw you and Alicia. She believed what you believed. That’s why she’s dead,” Tracy reveals. “No one’s gone until they’re gone.’ It killed her, just like it killed your kids.”

Realizing that Tracy led her on a wild goose chase that nearly got her killed, Madison tells Daniel they need to figure out what to do with the girl. “She knows where PADRE is. If Troy ever gets her back… there’s only one way to protect the island.” It dawns on Daniel that Madison is talking about killing Tracy. Ice cold! When Daniel asks if Madison has the stomach to kill a little girl, she responds that “she just tried to use her own mother to kill me.” Daniel ties Tracy to a tree, so she finally reveals the truth about Alicia: Troy killed her in an old mansion near Route 26 near Fort Worth, Texas.

That doesn’t change the fact that Tracy knows where PADRE is, so Madison uses her hammer to shove a walker towards Tracy… but before she can feed Troy’s daughter to a walker, Strand shows up with Alicia’s Apostles and tells Madison that her daughter is alive — in a sense. “Her body may not be here, but she still is. These women, they’re carrying on Alicia’s legacy,” he says, stopping Madison from going after Tracy when she frees herself from her restraints. Tracy takes off into the herd, stirring the walkers from their frozen slumber. It’s too dangerous to go after her, so Tracy escapes.

Back at the truck stop, a shootout happened off-screen. Daniel reports that Madison and Strand had nothing to do with the assault; in turn, Luciana says they had Troy’s men surrounded, but they seemed to not care whether they lived or died. Among the casualties is Hildy (Frank Hildebrand), one of the German tourists from “Anton’s” hotel. Strand and Frank want to avenge their slain friends, and Madison is on the warpath. She needs to track down Troy and kill him before he finds Tracy and then finds PADRE.

Troy isn’t going to use his men to take the island, Madison realizes. He’s going to do what he did at Broke Jaw Ranch: unleash a walker herd and destroy PADRE. Luciana says she’ll take Madison to Fort Worth after they finish this fight with Troy — a fight she’ll finish herself. Alicia’s Apostles say they watched Madison’s video interview so many times they wore out the tape; on that tape, Madison told Althea the story about Amina, an injured bird that her kids once nursed back to health. “I can’t imagine that part of them dying,” Madison said on the tape.”I’ll do whatever it takes to keep it alive.”

That was then, and this is now. That Madison is gone. “Alicia’s not here. Nick’s not here. None of what I said on that tape means anything,” Madison tells the Apostles. Strand reminds her that it does mean something, and she needs to hear it. She almost killed a little girl! “To protect everyone else,” Madison spits back, telling Victor she doesn’t have a family left to disappoint. “I can get my hands dirty.”

To that, Strand tells Madison why he gave Alicia the medallion: “I gave it to her so she’d remember who she was because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to. I thought I was protecting her, but I was wrong, Madison. It wasn’t about protecting her. It was about giving myself an excuse not to be the better man. I don’t want that to happen to you. I won’t let that happen to you.”

But someone has to stop Troy… and no one is going to get in her way. Not Strand, not Daniel, and not Troy Otto. “I can help you one way right now: by finishing what I started 10 years ago at the dam.” Madison slams the MRAP door shut and drives off alone, ignoring Strand calling out after her: “This is not the way to end this.”

The end is near: the two-part Fear the Walking Dead series finale airs November 19 on AMC and AMC+.

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