Fear the Walking Dead Season Finale Ending Explained: What Happens to Morgan Jones?

Morgan Jones doesn’t die. After he was shot point-blank and left for dead by Virginia (Colby Minifie) to end Season 5, Morgan (Lennie James) lived to tell his enemy at the start of Season 6: “Morgan Jones is dead. And you are dealing with somebody else now.” At the end of the season, Morgan is once again somebody else: he’s the adoptive father of Baby Morgan, the orphaned infant daughter of Isaac (Michael Abbott Jr.) and Rachel (Brigitte Kali Canales). But his second chance at fatherhood with Grace (Karen David), still grieving the loss of her stillborn baby girl Athena, might be short-lived: the season ends with Morgan and Grace as survivors of the nuclear zombie apocalypse ushered in by Teddy (John Glover).

“Even if we survive the initial blast, the radiation, the fallout — we’re not going to want to live in that world,” Grace, a former power plant worker, tells Morgan. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl: the radiation exposure from the 10 warheads about to detonate is “going to be a lot worse.”

Morgan and Grace survive the initial blasts by ducking for cover beneath a tank truck, and the season ends with Morgan cradling baby Morgan as multiple warheads detonate in the distance.

Now this nuclear family, and the other survivors going into Season 7, are “going to have to deal with devastation, nuclear fallout, ash, unbreathable air, destroyed structures, limited resources, all these new environmental factors that are going to make survival just exponentially more difficult for them,” showrunner Ian Goldberg said on Talking Dead.

“They’re in a very interesting place. They finally shared their feelings for each other — it only took nuclear missiles in the air for Morgan to finally tell Grace how he felt about her — but I think the interesting thing is really where they’re going to be going in the future,” added showrunner Andrew Chambliss. “Morgan and Grace both had this dream that they were building around the baby that she sadly lost. And by the end of this episode, in some way, it feels like the universe kind of gifted them with a second chance at that. And that’s definitely how Morgan saw it, as we saw, he said, ‘I think this might be a gift from Athena.’ But I think the real question is whether Grace is going to be on the same page as Morgan.”

Grace has “a lot of grief still to go through,” Chambliss continued. “How they deal with that, what it does to their relationship, we’re just going to have to look to Season 7 to find the answers for that.”

Unlike the Season 5 finale — which ended on a cliffhanger leaving Morgan’s fate unknown until the Season 6 premiere — Morgan survives the Season 6 finale, “The Beginning,” and will at least live long enough to see Season 7. It’s the fallout from the season that leaves Morgan’s fate in the air as Season 7 could mean the end for Morgan Jones.

“I don’t know much about Season 7, but I have learned one thing that Morgan does in the next season that is so unlike Morgan,” James teased on Talking Dead. “I’m really looking forward to navigating his journey to that point.”

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.