Fear The Walking Dead Season 7B Will Deal With Alicia’s Fever & Infection

The second half of Fear the Walking Dead season 7 will deal with Alicia’s (Alycia Debnam-Carey) fever caused by her mysterious infection. Debnam-Carey stars as Alicia Clark in the prequel spin-off series of the long-running zombie horror show The Walking Dead, one of the few remaining survivors from the show’s first season. Debuting in 2015, Fear originally followed Alicia and her blended family as they attempted to survive the zombie outbreak and its immediate aftermath, but as the show continued, their paths crossed with The Walking Dead’s Morgan Jones (Lennie James), merging the timelines of both shows together.

Season 7A centered on Morgan’s group of survivors after they were scattered following the nuclear explosion caused by the murderous fanatical zealot Teddy Maddox, a serial killer who started a doomsday cult with the aim of cleansing the earth with a holocaust and rebuilding it years later following the fallout. Teddy chose Alicia to lead his underground community of cultists following the nuclear blast, claiming that she is better suited than he is for their future survival. Teddy locks Alicia in a bunker and unleashes the nuclear weapon, killing himself and poisoning the land. During her effort to escape shortly thereafter, Alicia is bitten by a zombie which forces her to amputate her arm. When she reunites with Morgan, Alicia is afflicted by a fever, claiming that perhaps she did not cut off her arm before the zombie infection spread into her body.

Per a recent interview with EW, co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss explained that Alicia’s fever caused by her infection will play a major role in the remainder of Fear the Walking Dead season 7. Although Alicia amputates her arm shortly after she is bitten, it is not clear if she was able to cut off her limb in time. She soon develops a fever, but it is unknown whether or not the symptom was caused by the zombie infection or by Alicia’s crude amputation. Chambliss revealed that her upcoming struggles with this infection will dictate her decisions throughout the rest of the season. Read more of what the showrunner had to say below.

“As we saw in the end of 7A, she was suffering from a fever caused either by the walker bite she sustained or by the way in which her arm was amputated. And that fever and its accompanying infection is going to be something that will be with her over the course of the season. It will be something she’ll be struggling with and will also define kind of her course of action and who she becomes going forward.”

The showrunner leaves the door open for other causes of Alicia’s infection such as sepsis, due to her quick amputation. Regarding the severity of the fever, Chambliss explained that Alicia will be “pretty sweaty.” The showrunner joked, “I think Alycia Debnam-Carey got tired of being spritzed down with a spray bottle.”

Although Alicia was relatively absent for the first half of season 7, she appears to be a driving force for its remainder. On top of battling the infection that is slowly weakening her, Alicia must care for the survivors of Teddy’s doomsday cult who see her as their leader, as well as wage war against her old friend Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) who now runs a well-protected community out of a high-rise called The Tower with his armed militia. Whether or not Alicia’s infection was directly caused by the walker’s bite remains to be seen. Fear the Walking Dead returns to AMC on April 17.