Is Charlie going to die on Fear the Walking Dead?

Fear the Walking Dead has finally returned for the second half of its seventh season. Once again, our characters are left to survive in the harshest of environments. Not only is the land crawling with zombies, but now they have to deal with radioactive fallout from a nuclear blast.

The latest episode, “Mourning Cloak,” was all about Charlie (Alexa Nisenson) telling a story of young love, betrayal, and tragedy. The ending has left fans worried about her fate. To recap (beware SPOILERS), Charlie agreed to join ranger-in-training Ali (Ashton Arbab) on a mission to help fix Strand’s (Colman Domingo) tower, meaning they’d have to go outside the walls together.

Love is definitely in the air as Charlie and Ali grow closer…that is, until Charlie’s true motive is unveiled: to turn off the tower’s beacon so Morgan and his group can sneak inside. However, the mission fails and is Ali is thrown off the tower and killed.

Charlie could survive her radiation poisoning on Fear the Walking Dead

Charlie joined the show in season 4, infamously killing fan-favorite Nick (Frank Dillane) in her first episode. Now, she has radiation poisoning, so it seems like her fate is sealed. Or is it? Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg weighed in on what this sudden turn of events means for the character.

“I’ll just say that Charlie is very sick,” Chambliss said. “And we mentioned earlier wanting there to feel like there’s a cost to this world and this punishing nuclear landscape, and Charlie is definitely suffering because of it. And also, it’s a symbol of the cost of the war with Strand.”

"And the divisions are a bit complicated in the sense that Charlie wanted so badly to have a normal life as a kid, and she really did want to have the normalcy that life in the tower would provide for her. And this was driving her, and now she’s suffered consequences because of it. So it’s going to be a difficult road for Charlie. Now we know that radiation poisoning is very serious."

On a happier note, when Charlie and Ali share the stirrings of young love when they’re working together. For the first time, Charlie gets an idea of what her life could’ve been like before the apocalypse. They even visit a bowling alley!

As Chambliss puts it, their adventure is “kind of a first date in the nuclear zombie apocalypse.” The idea of taking Charlie and putting her in a situation like this was something that the team had discussed for a long time:

"It’s something that we had been kind of toying with for a while in regards to Charlie. And we’d been talking to [Nisensen] for a long time about it. And she had expressed interest in playing opposite someone her own age and playing a romance. And it felt like if we’re going to do that, we need to balance out kind of the innocence of that by putting it up against the nuclear apocalypse. So that’s why this felt like the right time."

Will Charlie survive? We’ll have to wait and see. In any case, it sounds like she’s going to put up a fight. It was nice to finally get an episode focused on her.

Fear the Walking Dead season 7 continues Sundays on AMC. Fans who subscribe to AMC+ can stream new episodes one week early.

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