Summary
“Damage from the Inside” gives Alicia an opportunity, but a chance encounter with a taxidermist — among others — forces her to question her next move.
Judging by dialogue in the cold open of “Damage From the Inside”, about a week has elapsed since the calamities of last week’s outing, in which Virginia lost her hand and a good deal of pride, Tank Town was devastatingly sabotaged by parties unknown, and John left to do his own thing. We pick this information up in a conversation between Strand and Dakota — the former is escorting the latter in a convoy that, within the first five minutes, is split up and attacked, again by parties unknown.
With Dakota now missing, Strand tasks Alicia — yay! — and Charlie — boo! — with the rescue mission. They’ve been manning a remote lookout post for the last six weeks, ever since Strand had them moved to another settlement, so Alicia is understandably not in the mood for favors. She smilingly informs Strand that he’s screwed for losing Ginny’s sister, who they reckon tried to drive away from the ambush, crashed, and then fled on foot. He’s still insisting that all this is so he can be positioned to do “the damage” that they talked about, but it’s difficult to believe a word that comes out of his mouth at this point and it’s a bit perplexing that Alicia just goes along with it.
Then again, Charlie asks this question outright, and Alicia justifies it in terms of getting someone on-side who can deal with the rangers — she’s also pretty curious to meet the mysterious group who keep sabotaging all Ginny’s operations, and she thinks Dakota might be able to tell her more about them. Out in the woods, the two of them discover a mutilated walker and an isolated hunting lodge called Buck’s Landing, neither of which bode well.
Alicia heads inside alone, leaving Charlie on lookout duty, which seems like a mistake. It quickly turns out to be a big one, since she’s promptly knocked out and taken prisoner by the demented taxidermist inside, who has been experimenting on human and animal corpses both. But maybe it’s a stroke of fortune after all since after freeing herself she finds Dakota, who explains that the hunter, Ed, saved her from the attack on the convoy and only knocked Alicia out because he thought she might have been the one who carried it out. He seems a reasonable enough guy, and apparently, his weird walker-animal fusion was just intended to frighten people who get too close. Hmm.
Nevertheless, Dakota and Ed play chess in Fear the Walking Dead season 6, episode 7, and he explains he used to come here with his wife and his daughter, Emily. It’s presumably enough for Dakota, who claims she isn’t going anywhere, but when Alicia makes her excuses and goes looking for a blanket, she runs into Charlie, who informs her that Ed has nailed the doors and windows shut. When Ed confronts her about snooping, she lets on that Dakota is Ginny’s sister, which seems to change his mind. He says they can leave at dawn, but Alicia, having seen that the walker he was working on was a ranger, thinks he might have been the one who attacked the convoy in the first place. Dakota, though, is still adamant about not going back to Ginny, who apparently killed their parents, though she claims not to know why.
In another room, Alicia finds radio equipment, which she uses to call Ginny directly. She rats out Strand — it’s all he deserves, really — and offers to take Dakota to the safe house on the assurance that she and Charlie will be allowed to leave afterward and Ginny won’t pursue them. She agrees to the terms.
That night, though, things get weird. Ed turns his music up full-blast to lure his “creations” back to the lodge. He explains how he got into taxidermy in the first place, an inherited fascination for preserving a state in time, which was his logic behind retreating here with Emily and his wife, Nancy. But Ginny’s rangers apparently killed them both, and he’s wracked with guilt about not doing enough to protect them. Now he thinks he’s protecting Dakota by flooding the exterior with deliberately scary-looking walkers and leading Dakota and Alicia upstairs at gunpoint to spend the night.
Charlie, though, manages to drug Ed when he falls asleep, giving the girls an opportunity to escape. They lower the music and settle in to wait for the walkers to disperse, but Ed catches them, explaining how Charlie apparently missed the vein she needed to make the anesthetic last. He confronts Alicia about using his radio and being one of Ginny’s “true believers”. They tussle a bit, and Ed ends up skewered by one of his own tasteful creations. The walkers at the door hear the commotion and begin to force their way inside, but Ed buys them time to escape. Taking Alicia aside, he explains that Ginny didn’t kill his family — he did. One of the walkers he was working on got free. He created them, but he couldn’t control them, and now they’re going to eat him. A poetic end in Fear the Walking Dead season 6, episode 7, really.
As things start to look a bit worrying, Morgan arrives in the nick of time to help Alicia fight off the cool-looking walkers. He tells Alicia about his spot, about Al and Dwight already being there. He also tells her — after she figures it out — that it was him who attacked the convoy. He wants to use Dakota as leverage against Virginia, to exchange her for the rest of their people, but Alicia is dead against it — she equates it to Ed creating monsters that killed the people he loved; they don’t have to do the same. For a little while, it looks as if things are going in a very interesting direction, with Morgan being positioned as something of a villain, trying to force his way of thinking on everyone else, but eventually, seeing that Alicia isn’t going to back down, he welcomes Dakota into their number.
As they’re leaving, Strand arrives, and after a tense little stand-off, he agrees to let them go, though he cautions Alicia against it. As predicted, though, he’s not to be trusted. He returns to Lawton and informs Ginny that her sister is with Morgan, at which point she leads him into a secret room that contains a very heavily pregnant Grace. She wants everyone they took from Humbug’s Gulch, including Morgan, and this, presumably, is how she’s going to get them.
Thanks for reading our recap of Fear the Walking Dead season 6, episode 7, “Damage from the Inside”. For more recaps, reviews, and original features covering the world of entertainment, why not follow us on Twitter and like our Facebook page?
