This ‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Character Is Not What She Seems, According To Morgan

Spoilers for the June 3 episode of Fear The Walking Dead. Morgan is a stranger on Fear The Walking Dead, having crossed over country and narrative from Virginia and The Walking Dead. However, Sunday's episode poses a potential (and surprising) new connection between his character and this strange new world. How does Morgan know Al on Fear The Walking Dead? Morgan recognizes Maggi Grace's chracter from somewhere and that is intriguing. Who is she, really?

"Hey Al," Morgan says, right before they bust her vehicle into the ashen stadium at the end of the episode. "I think I know who you are. I think I've seen it." Althea smiles, possibly in a knowing way, and replies "You definitely don't know who I am. Because I am a chick with layers." What does that mean? What's with her mysterious tape labeled "The Bog 17-24," and why has she kept what's she's kept in that van of hers?

Al isn't a character from The Walking Dead, that's for sure. Fans would definitely remember if Grace had shown up on the original series before. So that's not how Morgan knows her. Is she famous? Is her face... on the baseball stadium? Like on a billboard, perhaps? Althea says she was a journalist. Maybe she was on television as a broadcast journalist. Maybe she was a journalist turned politician. Maybe she was a well-known blogger, or hosted a celebrity news show, or worked as a war correspondent.

“Althea is someone who is uniquely qualified to survive — to thrive, even — in this world because of who she was before the apocalypse,” co-showrunner Ian Goldberg said about Al on Fear in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “When we meet her, we’ll find she has, in many ways, picked up right where she left off before the world collapsed." He also said that she was part of a larger mission.

That would make sense with the war correspondent theory. It is interesting to think about international relations in an apocalyptic wasteland where all conflicts are extremely local. It's also just interesting to think of Morgan remembering and recognizing anyone from the past. He's so far removed, in more ways than one, from what the world used to be before the outbreak.

Then again, "who you are" has been something of a theme in the past couple of weeks on Fear The Walking Dead. Cole (whose fate in the present timeline is still unknown, by the way) accused Strand of showing him who he was in a negative way by revealing his escape plan in a previous episode.

"I'm not part of this story," Al insists to Morgan early on in the episode. Maybe, by the end, Morgan just recognizes what her role is meant to be. "This story's almost finished," Morgan says to her, urging her to help save John Dorie. "It doesn't have to be that way for John."

This season, Althea has been living her Mark Cohen from Rent dreams, trying to document real life when real life's getting more like fiction each day. During the fight this week, she stays behind her camera. Now, she's with Morgan, Charlie, Naomi, and an injured John in a pretty tight spot, surrounded by smokey walkers in the stadium. If Al is going to reveal her mysterious identity, now is as good a time as ever. In an interview with TVLine, co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss promised answers about Al soon.

Next Sunday's midseason finale should finally explain what the heck happened to Madison on Fear The Walking Dead, but smaller mysteries like this one are equally important to the story going forward — especially as not many characters seem to be making it out of the final showdown with the Vultures alive. Althea wants to know everyone's story, but what's hers? Cleary there's more too it than the documentarian would have us believe.