Fear the Walking Dead Answers What Happened to Daniel’s Cat Skidmark

Spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead Season 6 Episode 10, “Handle With Care.” Skidmark might have nine lives after all. The cat companion adopted by Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades) in Season 5 has been missing since last season’s finale, “End of the Line,” where Ginny (Colby Minifie) separates Daniel from his pet when splitting up Morgan’s (Lennie James) group at Humbug’s Gulch. When Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) reunite with a seemingly amnesic Daniel earlier in Season 6, Ginny suggests Daniel’s feline friend met an unfur-tunate fate when she reveals “things got ugly” because the battered Daniel was “just hellbent on getting that darn cat of his.”

What happened to Skidmark is finally answered in “Handle With Care,” where Rangers Strand and Samuels (Bobbi Grace) hand-deliver a cat carrier to the new dam community Daniel is building with Morgan. Strand reveals Ginny sent Skidmark to the Super Lanes bowling alley to take care of a rat infestation, but the cat was “sitting around all day just licking his… unmentionables.”

The exchange is a callback to Daniel and Strand’s first reunion back in Season 5 Episode 2, “The Hurt That Will Happen,” where Strand says a purring Skidmark “has good taste” when the cat cozies up to him in Daniel’s warehouse hideout. A scoffing Daniel retorts: “He licks his own ass.”

After Daniel and Skidmark’s separation in Season 5, showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg teased to EW that “maybe we’ll see the apocalypse from the point of view of our own Milo and Otis,” referring to the 1986 animal-starring film about a cat and dog who befriend each other before embarking on a human-free adventure.

The fan-favorite orange tabby cat, played by animal actor Raja Afghani, might even star in his own episode of in-the-works Walking Dead anthology spin-off series Tales of the Walking Dead. The spin-off, which could reveal the hinted-at friendship between Daniel and The Walking Dead‘s Abraham Ford (Michael Cudlitz), is exploring a variety of genres and could even feature animated and music-driven episodes.

“A Skidmark the Cat episode does not necessarily need to be animated. We’ve had lots of Milo and Otis-style conversations for a while,” Scott Gimple, Walking Dead chief content officer and the developer behind Tales, said during 2020’s virtual New York Comic Con. “No, we have had serious conversations about a deeper dive into Skidmark.”

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.