‘Fear the Walking Dead’ EP & Colby Minifie on That Shocking Murder & Spilled Secrets

[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead Season 6, Episode 9, “Things Left to Do.”]

The second half of Fear the Walking Dead‘s sixth season is really starting to ramp up for our favorite post-apocalyptic survivors. In the April 11 midseason return, the AMC zombie spinoff said goodbye to the sweet sharpshooter John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt), and in the series’ most recent installment, “Things Left to Do,” another major player exits the game.

After a will-they-won’t-they hour where leader Morgan Jones (Lennie James) deliberates the pros and cons of killing the business-like baddie Virginia (Colby Minifie) himself or handing her over to the two other groups itching for the chance to off the offender, Morgan makes a decision that only Morgan can make. The constant do-gooder finally chooses to keep Ginny alive and forces her to reconcile with the young murderer Dakota (Zoe Coletti) inside the new community Morgan’s been putting together in his spare time. His plan? Make Ginny be honest (for once) and spill her biggest secret, revealing to her troubled kin that she isn’t her sister, but actually her mother. And unsurprisingly, that doesn’t go so well.

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“Everything Ginny does this season is informed by [the fact that she’s Dakota’s mother],” says Minifie, who explains that co-showrunners Ian Goldberg and Andrew Chambliss clued her into the familial twist at the start of Season 6. “[Ginny] felt she had to keep Dakota at a distance her whole life. She wasn’t allowed to show her a mother’s love and didn’t know what sisterly love looked like. And so when Dakota starts displaying worrying behavior, Virginia blames herself, of course, and tries to fix it in the way she knows how.”

After Virginia and Dakota have their moment of (kind of) resolution, the former changes the deal with Morgan. She’ll leave, but Dakota has to stay in Morgan’s idyllic camp, in hopes that they will do a better job raising the budding serial killer than Virginia ever did. Morgan accepts, and then makes the worst possible choice — he allows newly widowed June (Jenna Elfman) to be alone with Ginny.

Ryan Green/AMC

June, a former mother herself, blames Ginny for Dakota’s murder of her husband John and raises her gun at a chained-up Virginia. (“She knew she couldn’t talk her way out of this one,” Minifie says of Ginny, who tries to beg for her life.) Without a glimmer of remorse, June shoots Ginny in the head and ambles away, wearing her late hubby’s cowboy hat.

At least we don’t have to feel bad for Ginny. “I think she learned her biggest lesson right before her death,” notes Minifie. “If only she had been truthful with her daughter and open with the people in her communities, she would have survived and thrived. She used fear as a form of control and that only creates a culture [that’s] bound to implode. Being honest takes vulnerability and she couldn’t muster the strength for that until the very end.”

June shooting Ginny is a major, shocking (and yet, not all that surprising) move. And it’ll pit her against her former family, as she has directly broken Morgan’s creed for no bloodshed in the new, still-nameless community. “June almost immediately violating that covenant is going to have huge ripple effects and cause fractures between her and Morgan, and lead to greater fractures between characters on a greater scale,” Goldberg teases.

The moral of the story? Honesty is (probably) the best policy. And yet, we still have a million questions as we prepare for next week: What’s next after June’s cold, hard revenge? Will the group understand June’s actions or shun her? How will Virginia continue to affect the group even after death? And what about Dakota?

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Goldberg does offer us one nugget of intel: “June’s got a lot of soul searching to do – a lot of rebuilding. I would say she’s not done grieving John Dorie yet, either. She has quite a hole to dig herself out from in a lot of ways.” Indeed.