Fear the Walking Dead Reveals Who Saved Morgan From Virginia

“You don’t know me, but I heard your message. You need to do the same. You still have things left to do.” That’s the blood-stained note a left-for-dead Morgan Jones (Lennie James) discovers after Virginia (Colby Minifie) shoots him point-blank in Fear the Walking Dead‘s Season 5 finale, “End of the Line,” where Morgan radios his followers with a final message to “just live.” But Morgan survived, and in October’s Season 6 premiere, “The End is the Beginning,” Morgan encounters new ally Isaac (Michael Abbott Jr.) and reveals the only clue to his mystery rescuer’s identity — one of the sixth season’s most well-kept secrets. Spoilers for Sunday’s midseason premiere, “The Door.”

“I was shot. I was barely hanging on. Walkers were about to tear me apart, and I heard gunshots,” Morgan tells Isaac when recounting what happened after a cut to black in the Season 5 finale’s cliffhanger. “Walkers dropped, I blacked out. Woke up later and… I was patched up. And whoever did that, they left me this [note].”

When John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt) comes across Morgan and Virginia’s defecting younger sister Dakota (Zoe Colletti) in “The Door,” he’s surprised to see Morgan alive after his message from Humbug’s Gulch. Morgan is once again on the mend: his gunshot wound has opened up after crossing and corralling a herd of the dead on a nearby bridge.

Asked how he survived the Gulch, Morgan tells John: “Had some help. I came to, I was already patched up, but they’d moved on.”

Morgan’s mystery rescuer is revealed only after John takes a bullet to the chest for figuring out who murdered one of Virginia’s Rangers inside the Lawton settlement: Dakota. Now the two-time killer demands Morgan bring her to the place he’s building far from her sister.

“I am the reason you are alive! I saved you at the Gulch,” Dakota reveals. “Ginny, she left you to die. You dragged yourself up to the church. The dead followed you. They were on top of you, about to eat you. But I was there. I killed them. I followed Ginny and the Rangers to the Gulch ’cause I wanted to see her go down.”

Dakota stitched Morgan up, stopped him from bleeding, gave him antibiotics and painkillers, and left him food and supplies.

Morgan doesn’t believe her until she recites the note word-for-word. “I wrote it. I wrote that note. I left it for you. And I was right to, because that thing that you have to do, you’re gonna have to do it now: kill my sister.”

“You’re not breathing because you have some silly little paradise that you have to build,” a shaky-voiced Dakota tells him, “you are breathing because you are the only person left that can end her! And it is the only reason that you are still here.”

With Dakota captured by Morgan for killing John, he’ll have his standoff with her sister when an outgunned Virginia returns in next Sunday’s Episode 609, “Things Left to Do.”

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. New episodes of Fear the Walking Dead Season 6 premiere Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.