Does Alicia Clark Die On Fear The Walking Dead?

"Fear the Walking Dead" is the first spin-off of the popular AMC zombie series, "The Walking Dead." While the original show takes place on the east coast of the United States, "Fear the Walking Dead" is set on the west coast as the zombie plague spreads throughout the country (and world). It gives audiences a look at another part of the country, another group of survivors, and how alike and different their experiences are as they fight for survival. 

Alicia Clark is one of the main characters of the series. When the show begins, she's a teenager trying to understand what's happening in the world. But when her time on "Fear the Walking Dead" comes to an end in Season 7, she's comfortable wielding a balisong to kill walkers and has survived several near-death illnesses and situations. If Alicia looks familiar, it's because the character is played by Alycia Debnam-Carey, who is known for portraying Lexa on "The 100."

While a character dying in a series about a zombie apocalypse isn't new, Alicia's death took audiences by surprise and marked the end of an era for "Fear the Walking Dead." But did she actually die? Here's everything to know about Alicia's death in the original "Walking Dead" spin-off.

At the beginning of the "Fear the Walking Dead" timeline, Alicia is a 17-year-old trying to get to her boyfriend, Matt, after he has been bitten by a zombie. By the end of the series, she's helping rebuild Los Angeles after years of being on the road and experiencing firsthand the aftermath of the undead apocalypse across the southwest United States and Mexico.

Over the course of the show, she leads several different survivor settlements, including the Broke Jaw Ranch in Season 3 and the Dell Diamond Baseball Stadium group in Season 4. She also assists Morgan (Lennie James) in leading his band of survivors in Season 4. Alicia helps ensure the survival of her family and friends throughout the series, allowing herself to be captured by a cult in Season 6 so other people can escape, and even destroying a tower that same season after the death of her friend. Alongside politics and survival, she has romantic relationships — eventually. After Matt's death in the show's second episode, Alicia doesn't take a chance again until Season 3, when she meets Jake (Sam Underwood) at the Broke Jaw Ranch. Unfortunately, he dies later in the season from blood loss while trying to prevent his turn into a zombie.

In Season 7, Alicia loses her arm due to a walker bite. She amputates it to prevent the virus from spreading through her body, replacing it with a prosthetic that doubles as a weapon. In her final episode, she hallucinates a young girl, a manifestation of her subconscious, who prevents her from carrying out her plan to die by suicide to save her friends from Strand (Colman Domingo) in Texas. Alicia has an infection caused by yet another walker bite, and it's implied the bite will kill her as the season ends.

In an Instagram post from May 2022, Alycia Debnam-Carey shared that her reason for leaving "Fear the Walking Dead" was that she needed a change. "I was 21 when we began this crazy journey but now at 28, after 7 years and 100 episodes, I decided it was time for me to move on as an actor and as a person," the actress wrote in the caption. "As is the nature of our jobs I needed to seek out new challenges, new opportunities and carve out a new chapter for myself." She thanked everyone, from the cast and crew to the showrunners and fans, for the chance to grow and learn on the series, describing her time on the series as "the most extraordinary training ground."

"Fear the Walking Dead" isn't the first show that Debnam-Carey left for other opportunities. She originally appeared as Lexa in The CW's "The 100." A fan favorite, her character was killed because she couldn't appear on both "The 100" and "Fear the Walking Dead" at the same time. Lexa's death enraged the sci-fi show's fan base because Lexa and the series' main female character, Clarke (Eliza Taylor), had just entered a relationship, and Lexa's death seemed to reinforce the "bury your gays" trope seen on too many television series. Showrunner Jason Rothenberg confirmed in an interview with Variety in 2016 that this wasn't their intention, acknowledging that he hadn't anticipated the reaction because of his privilege as a straight man.

After experiencing what was her implied death from a walker bite in the previous season, Alicia makes an unexpected return to "Fear the Walking Dead" in the series finale. The show's last episode boasts several returning characters previously assumed dead, but Alicia wasn't revealed until the final few minutes.

While her mother, Madison (Kim Dickens), was committed to finding her daughter in order to give her a proper burial, Alicia was still alive. Instead of succumbing to the walker bite, she escaped from Texas with another group of survivors. In the years since then, Alicia moved around, trying to help other survivors, though she let her people continue to believe she was dead. Alicia did hear about the PADRE conflict and thought her mother died in the battle in a sacrificial manner, but she learns this isn't true when she stumbles across Madison in her big return to the show. The two share a moment, and they both decide to maintain the façade that they're dead. They head to Los Angeles, determined to help any survivors there rebuild after it was bombed. Strand, now one of the members of Madison's group, does see the two, but doesn't share that he knows they're alive.

Though she didn't return in the flesh until the final episode, Alicia was present in spirit throughout Season 8. Thanks to Madison's flashbacks, her mother continued to see Alicia, and, at one point, even thought her daughter was a walker she came across.

After leaving "Fear the Walking Dead," Alycia Debnam-Carey continued to work in television. Switching gears from sci-fi to psychological drama, she starred in the Hulu miniseries "Saint X." The show follows Emily, a documentary editor who is trying to discover what happened to her older sister, Alison (West Duchovny), who went missing during a trip to the Caribbean two decades before. It turns out that she was killed, and the family never received any closure.

The project marked a genre shift for Debnam-Carey, who was known for her sci-fi roots at that point in her career, and she continued to explore drama with the miniseries "The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart." Starring alongside Sigourney Weaver, the Australian show chronicles the story of Alice, a child who moves in with her grandmother after the death of her abusive father. As an adult, portrayed by Debnam-Carey, she learns more about the secrets her grandmother, played by Weaver, is hiding from her.

The actor also returned to her roots in horror cinema with the 2024 film "It's What's Inside." A combination of sci-fi, comedy, and horror, the movie features a group of college friends reuniting nearly a decade after last seeing each other and participating in body swaps as a party game. Debnam-Carey also continues to act in miniseries and is set to appear in the 2025 Netflix drama "Apple Cider Vinegar," which is based on the true story of a wellness coach who claims to have holistically cured her cancer.