Fear the Walking Dead Answers What Happened to Alicia Clark

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Sunday's Fear the Walking Dead, "The Portrait." Seven episodes into Season 7, Fear the Walking Dead reveals answers about the absence of Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey). The season premiere saw Strand (Colman Domingo) setting out to search for Alicia with Will (Gus Halper), returning to the underground bunker where Teddy (John Glover) left her to lead a "new beginning" in the fallout of detonated nuclear warheads. But Strand and Will found the bunker beneath The Franklin Hotel abandoned, nothing left behind but a note pointing towards Alicia's destination: PADRE.

In Season 7 Episode 7, "The Portrait," Strand's Tower comes under siege by The Stalkers: the group garbed in chemsuits who Will saw stripping the dead back in "The Beacon." After being turned away by Strand, Stalkers leader Arno (Spenser Granese) threatens to make The Tower uninhabitable unless Strand gives his people "a new beginning" and a place to call home. 

Arno's ammo backing his ultimatum: contaminated walkers loaded with radioactive material from the undetonated warhead the Stalkers found in Episode 4, "Breathe With Me." 

When Morgan (Lennie James) shows up at The Tower to get help for his sick daughter, he convinces Strand to let him get a message out to Grace (Karen David) and Sarah (Mo Collins) to fend off the Stalkers outside the building. Poisoned by a small dose of Methylene Blue, Strand tells Morgan to find Alicia, confessing to him, "I don't think she'd want me to find her. But with you... I know she would think different." 

Working together to get the message to Grace, Strand realizes he'll need Morgan's help to find Alicia. His instincts tell him "that you will," Strand says. "That we will." 

RELATED: What Happened to Alicia on Fear the Walking Dead? 

It's revealed Morgan poisoned a since-recovered Strand, who orders Morgan thrown off the roof to join Will as part of his walker moat below guarding The Tower. If he spares Morgan, former power plant worker Grace will help Strand find and remove Arno's contaminated walkers who got loose and joined the horde surrounding the building. 

Banished from The Tower, Morgan is found alone on the beach by Dwight (Austin Amelio) and Sherry (Christine Evangelista). Now riding as the Dark Horses, the couple takes Morgan to an encampment on the coast to meet with the leader of the group they met some weeks back in Episode 5, "Till Death." 

Removing their full protective garb, the leader unmasks: it's Alicia in her first appearance this season. "I brought you here because I need your help." 

Alicia tells Morgan she was "safely underground while the rest of the world burned," locked away in Teddy's bunker with Arno and the rest of Teddy's followers. "Those aren't my people," she says of the so-called Stalkers who attacked Strand's tower. "Not anymore." 

Walkers encroach on the camp with explosive material embedded in their insides. Alicia's people instinctively fire on the infected dead, their bullets turning the contaminated walkers into busting bombs — triggering a radioactive red cloud of guts and gore that washes over the beach. 

To be continued. 

"When Morgan meets Alicia, I think there are a lot of questions hanging over that. Where has she been, why isn't she in the bunker, what happened in the bunker, and who are all these people she's with?" co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss said on AMC+'s Fear TWD: Episode Insider. "And those are all some pretty big questions, but Morgan doesn't get a chance to answer any of them. Before he can, some of those walkers who we were warned about — who had escaped from the tower who were packed with nuclear material — they show up at the encampment, and they end up exploding before Morgan can get a single answer to any of the questions."

"And what that really means," Chambliss teased, "is that Morgan and everyone else is just gonna have to wait until the next episode to find out."

Fear the Walking Dead's mid-Season 7 finale, "Padre," is streaming now on AMC+ and airs December 5 on AMC. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter and ComicBook's @NewsOfTheDead for TWD Universe coverage all season long.