Fear the Walking Dead Answers What Happened to Madison Clark's Stadium Survivors

No one's gone until they're gone: the fates of characters not seen since Season 4 are revealed when Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey) reunites with old friends on Fear the Walking Dead. During a trip with Teddy (John Glover) and Dakota (Zoe Colletti) in "Mother," a blown tire gives way to a captive Alicia's coincidental reunion with a road-weary Cole (Sebastian Sozzi) just outside of the baseball stadium where they lived until the Dell Diamond fell to the dead a year earlier. In Season 4 Episode 8, "No One's Gone," Cole and a caravan of fleeing survivors are overrun by walkers in the stadium's parking lot and seemingly die despite the self-sacrifice of Alicia's mother Madison (Kim Dickens).

Madison is "the only reason I ain't one of these skinbags," Cole tells Teddy. He reveals to Alicia that "a bunch of us from the stadium are still around thanks to your mom, what she did," adding that after a weeks-long search for the others — her brother Nick (Frank Dillane) and their friends, Strand (Colman Domingo) and Luciana (Danay Garcia) — the stadium survivors believed them dead in the fire. They've been on the road ever since.

The blown tire is discovered to be a makeshift spike strip set by "unsavory types" Cole warns are in the area: bandits that take what they want and leave no survivors. He leads the trio to a nearby auto parts shop, where it's revealed what became of the stadium survivors when Alicia is ambushed by Cole and his masked marauders — among them married couple Doug (Kenneth Wayne Bradley) and Viv (Rhoda Griffis) — who have fallen on hard times since being swarmed by burning walkers outside the oil-soaked stadium.

"About a week after the fire at the stadium," Cole explains, "we were looking for a place to hole up, to regroup so we could come looking for you, and Nick, and Victor and Luciana. Went into a motel off 78, and there were some people in there waiting for us. They killed most of us."

The marauders are all that's left.

"We tried to find you, to do something more than just look out for ourselves. Then, well, most of us were gone," Cole says. "So we found this way, and we're still standing."

But not for long. When a standoff with a shotgun-wielding Cole goes sideways over his demands that Teddy gives up the location of a bunker stocked with water and supplies to last for years, Doug and Viv are bitten by walkers. "She died so you could have a chance," Alicia tells Cole at gunpoint. "You were supposed to make it mean something and you threw it all away."

When Cole tells her it's time she "just let go" of her mother, Alicia shoots him in the head. No one's gone until they're gone.

"I think what we see in this moment when she shoots Cole, I think there's this reckoning of clarity that comes to her and that clarity being where she draws the line," Debnam-Carey told ComicBook.com in a post-show interview. "And I think she's now got this ethos that is, 'I am going to give you a chance, but if you've betrayed that chance or wasted that opportunity, then I know where to put you,' and sometimes that will showcase itself in violence and sometimes that is just a means to move forward in a different direction. But I think in this case, we see it as come to a violent end."

"It's this new evolution of Alicia that is of becoming quite pragmatic and ruthless in the way that I think, actually, Madison was," Debnam-Carey added. "I think we have this idea of Madison that could be quite optimistic and would do anything to protect her family, but she was also incredibly pragmatic and ruthless and would do things at a heavy cost."

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.