Fear the Walking Dead Star Reacts to Bombshell Season Finale Death

Spoiler warning for the Season 6 finale of Fear the Walking Dead. Exiting Fear star Zoe Colletti reacts to Dakota’s demise in “The Beginning,” revealing she learned about her character’s explosive ending when reading the episode’s script. Introduced early into Season 6 as the younger sister of Virginia (Colby Minifie), the second half of the season came with revelations: that Dakota is an unrepentant and cold-hearted killer who murdered Ranger Cameron (Noah Khyle) and then John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt) for figuring it out, and that Dakota is actually Virginia’s daughter — a well-kept secret she learned just moments before her mother was gunned down by vengeful widow June Dorie (Jenna Elfman).

Dakota found a kindred spirit in escaped serial killer Teddy (John Glover), who affectionately nicknamed her “Sioux” after his favorite city in the Dakotas. Teddy is “the first person that didn’t look at me like I had something wrong with me,” Dakota says in the finale. “Didn’t try and make me change. Told me that it was okay to be who I am.”

It made the wayward teen willing to die for Teddy if it meant getting the “fresh start” she failed to find at the dam community home to Morgan Jones (Lennie James) and Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey), and Dakota ultimately helped bring about “the end”: Teddy’s plan to launch 23 missiles, each loaded with 10 warheads. Because of Morgan, Teddy only fired off one missile in the penultimate episode of the season, but it was enough to turn Texas into an almost uninhabitable but still zombie-plagued nuclear wasteland that will be the setting of Season 7.

“The Beginning” ends with June and John Dorie Sr. (Keith Carradine), an ex-cop who put Teddy behind bars decades before the zombie apocalypse, exposing the cult leader as a hypocrite planning to hole up in a secret bunker despite preaching about being an “ending.” Feeling betrayed and used, Dakota shoots and kills Teddy just moments before she’s vaporized by the blast of a nearby detonating warhead.

“I kind of found out like a similar time to everybody else, as I was reading the script. I figured after everything my character had done, that I assumed she would kind of meet her demise by the end of the season — rightfully so,” Colletti said on Talking Dead. “I think she had a kind of noble way of going out. I feel like she had the chance to kind of see June and Dorie Sr. off, and I think for her it was a form of peace for herself, as having that be her ending where she just kind of got to watch the world come to be what it was going to be.”

“I think it was a nice way for her to go out,” Colletti added. “She got a little bit of a redeeming moment at the end, and then she kind of laid back and kind of let it happen. So as much as I’m sad to go and leave all my wonderful people at Fear, I think Dakota had a cool way to go out.”

Fear the Walking Dead returns with new episodes later this year on AMC. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things The Walking Dead Universe.