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Fear the Walking Dead: [SPOILER’s] Fate Explained
[Warning: This story contains spoilers from Fear the Walking Dead‘s “King County” episode.] “I lose people, I lose myself.” Morgan Jones (Lennie James) finally moved on from the people he lost on The Walking Dead: his zombified wife Jenny (Keisha Tillis) and son Duane (Adrian Kali Turner). But Sunday’s “King County” episode of Fear the Walking Dead ended with Morgan facing another major loss: Grace (Karen David), who revealed that not only was she bitten by a walker, she’s suffering from radiation sickness after being exposed to nuclear radiation zombie blood back in season 5.
The first time Grace feared she was succumbing to radiation sickness turned out to be pregnancy — her stillborn daughter, Athena, absorbed the radiation in Grace’s body. (In the season 5 episode “The Hurt That Will Happen,” former power plant worker Grace told Morgan she was “exposed to more alpha emitters than most people see in a lifetime” while hunting down radioactive walkers after the plant’s reactor melted down.)
“The radiation’s caught up with me,” Grace tells Morgan, who reminds her that she was wrong about being terminally ill with radiation poisoning before. This time she’s confirmed it with a scan at the hospital. Grace is “paying the price for chasing the dead,” she says, trying to get Morgan to stop chasing his undead son Duane.
Grace may not survive the sickness, but she can be treated for the bite if Morgan gets her to June (Jenna Elfman) in time. June has been treating zombie-bitten patients with radiotherapy to halt the infection — a treatment that saved Finch (Gavin Warren) from an otherwise fatal walker’s bite. A bite to the midsection would normally signal imminent death — unlike limbs, there’s no way to amputate — but June discovered a way to treat bites with radiation. The thing that’s killing Grace just might save her life. For now.
June’s radiotherapy treatments are “akin to kind of a more advanced form of amputation. It’s trying to remove the infected tissue before the infection can spread,” showrunner Andrew Chambliss explained to Insider. “So even if what they’re doing in that train ends up working, it’s not a cure. It’s not going to end the zombie apocalypse. It would certainly be a very useful tool to have to allow people to survive, particularly if you get bit somewhere where you can’t just chop off an arm or a leg.”
New episodes of Fear the Walking Dead premiere Thursdays on AMC+ and Sundays on AMC. Stay tuned to ComicBook/TWD and follow @CameronBonomolo and @NewsOfTheDead on Twitter for more TWD Universe coverage.
