Warning! This article contains spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead season 8 episode 7. If you've yet to catch up, and don't want to know what happens, turn back now.
Troy Otto has returned in Fear the Walking Dead, and his comeback brought with it some devastating news for Kim Dickens' Madison Clark. In season 8's midseason premiere, the villain – who Madison was thought to have left for dead several years prior – told her that he killed her daughter Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) in revenge, and left her to wander around as a walker after stealing her prosthetic arm.
"I took it off her corpse after I killed her," Troy asserted. "I would've put her down, Madison. After all the wandering around I did in Mexico, I thought it was only right that Alicia should do the same. Maybe one day you'll find her. Or maybe she'll find you, or maybe not, and finish the job."
Last time we saw Alicia, she had seemingly somehow survived a nasty walker bite and the subsequent infection, and set off in a hazy daze to find other people looking for PADRE. In the seven-year gap between those events and the zombie spin-off's current timeline, a now partially-blinded, bitter Troy (Daniel Sharman) found her and took her out – or so he claims, anyway. Fans aren't so convinced that's what really happened and fortunately, they won't have to wait long to find out either way...
"Whether Troy is telling the truth is something that you're just going to have to watch the rest of the season to find out," Fear the Walking Dead co-showrunner Ian Goldberg told ComicBook, as Andrew Chambliss added: "We will definitely find out whether or not Troy's story is true, and what actually went down between Troy and Alicia."
Given that the next episode's promo suggests that "no one's gone until they're gone", and the fact that we've never seen Alicia's body, there's always a chance she could still be out there. For years, it was assumed that Madison was a goner after she was trapped in a stadium full of infected back in season 4, so it'd hardly be the first time a Clark returned from the dead.
"From the beginning of the series, everything for Madison has been about her family," Goldberg noted. "I think as we get into the final episodes of the series, Madison's in this place where she no longer has her own children and she's wrestling with how she can honor them by this family at PADRE. Both the kids that are left behind in the wake of Madison taking over PADRE, but also the family that she has built along the way with all the characters that we all love. It really is just extrapolating her motivation for her kids and her family and applying it to this new family that she's created."
Fear the Walking Dead airs on Sundays on AMC and AMC+ in the US. Want to explore the entire Walking Dead saga? Check out our guide on how to watch The Walking Dead if you're keen to dig into the main series and all its spin-offs.
