‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Showrunners Explain Why [SPOILER] Had to Die

Since the duo of Ian Goldberg and Andrew Chambliss took over as showrunners of AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead in Season 4, the series has mostly eschewed big, shocking deaths… Until now.

As of this week’s midseason premiere, “The Door,” written by Goldberg and Chambliss and directed by Michael E. Satrazemis, we’re officially in the heartbreaking, harrowing “anyone can die at any moment” territory that mothership show The Walking Dead has lived in for years. Massive spoilers past this point, but by the end of “The Door,” beloved character John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt) is dead.

“It was something that we started talking about at the beginning of season six,” Goldberg told Decider, “and where it really came from was, in this escalating war between our characters and Virginia, we knew that ultimately, there had to be a cost.”

In the episode, John is living on his own after splitting with June (Jenna Elfman) in the November airing “Bury Her Next to Jasper’s Leg.” He’s considering taking his own life, only to be interrupted by Morgan (Lennie James) and Dakota (Zoe Colletti) who are on the run from Dakota’s villainous sister Virginia (Colby Minifie). John agrees to get them across a dangerous, zombie-infested bridge — and he does — only to discover that the reason he was engaging in suicidal ideation in the first place was essentially caused by Dakota.

Way back on “The Key,” it turns out Dakota killed Cameron (Noah Khyle) because he found out about her secret way to sneak out of town. Virginia covered it all up, and John was forced to live with his failure to figure out the culprit. Once Dakota reveals the secret to John, she shoots him, then knocks him into the river.

The worst part? John lives — or at least, seems to live, and gets a new lease on life from the event. But by the time June discovers him floating on the door of the title, he’s already dead and been turned. She has to put him down. Her own husband. It is, in a word, grueling.

That’s not the only long-standing mystery we get an answer to, though. At long last, we find out who saved Morgan after he was left for dead and surrounded by zombies at the end of Season 5, and it was none other than… Dakota, again. She thinks Morgan is the only man capable of killing Virginia, so saved his life.

It’s a lot to unpack, and if you’ve just watched, you’re probably still reeling from the revelations. With that in mind, Decider discussed all these bombshells with Goldberg and Chambliss, and delved into what it was like putting together the most gut-wrenching, heart-breaking Fear the Walking Dead episode in a long, long time.

Decider: How did the decision to kill John Dorie come about?

Ian Goldberg: It was something that we started talking about at the beginning of Season 6, and where it really came from was, in this escalating war between our characters and Virginia, we knew that ultimately, there had to be a cost. And it had to be a painful one that would have ripples and ramifications on as many of our characters as possible.

As much as it pained us, we realized that the person, the character that that should be was John Dorie. Between him and Morgan, he is the connector that built this entire extended family. If you go back to the beginning of Season 4, that’s where it all began. So that’s really how we approach character deaths on the show, just holistically as always, wanting to make them matter, and mean something, and be heartbreaking, so that the audience feels it as much as the characters do. That’s where it came from.

We saw a very different side of John Dorie leading up to this episode, and it was seeing him at his most dark and despairing, and bringing him back to a place of hope and renewed purpose, which ultimately is where it got even more tragic. Because it was right when he found his way back toward the light that it got snuffed out.

I don’t think you’ve really had what could be called a big character death on the show, pretty much since you guys came on the showrunners. When you decided to do this, how did you broach it with Garret? How did you talk about that with the cast? And how did you talk about it with Jenna Elfman, because obviously it really affects her character arc going forward.

Andrew Chambliss: These kinds of conversations are always tough, because everyone on the show, from us as writers and producers, to the actors portraying the characters, to even the production crew, who work with them every day, grow very attached to the characters and feel a personal connection to them. So when we made the decision to kill John Dorie, we brought Garret into the conversation early and really laid out the reasoning behind it, and what we thought it would do for the show.

Like Ian said, we saw a different side of John Dorie, we saw him go to a very dark place, we haven’t seen that in the past two seasons with him. While Garret was disappointed about the fate of the character, he was very excited for the journey that would get him there, and that we would get to see John Dorie really put through his paces, and see some new shades from him that we hadn’t seen before.

Likewise, when we broke the news to Jenna, and we did that very early in the process, when we started to talk to her about June’s arc for the season… She went through a similar emotional reaction, mourning the loss of a character who means so much to her character. I think what really excited Jenna was what this would do, where June would go after this. June is a character who, from the very first time we met her, her  existence in the universe was tied to John Dorie. He brought her back to people, the two of them have been on this journey together. So going forward, for June, it’s really going to be about asking who she is, where she’s going to go, who she wants to be. And that’s the journey that we’re excited about as writers, and Jen is excited about as a performer.

The scene where June has to put John down makes a lot of sense because, of course it has to be her… But I’d love to hear from your perspective what it was like when you were scripting that out.

Goldberg: After we made the decision that we were going to build his death into this episode, one of the first images that Andrew and I had was sort of a flip on episode 4×05, where we saw June, she was then named Laura, when she washed up outside John’s cabin. It was the first time that they met, and he brought her into the cabin and brought her back to life. We thought it would be beautifully and tragically poetic if we did the inverse of that.

So we wanted to work toward that image of John Dorie, washing up on the shore, and June being the one to come to him. I think what makes the moment so heartbreaking for us is that, yes, we saw John shot by Dakota on the bridge, mortally wounded, but he doesn’t give up. And he’s still fighting for life, when he finds that photo of his father at the bottom of the river bed. The thing he says when he breaks through the surface is, “it’s not too late,” and he really wants to live. That’s why it’s so devastating when we see that he just couldn’t hold on. It’s June’s nightmare to have to see her husband that way, and to have to be the one to end him. That obviously has huge ramifications for her, and all of our characters going forward. But for the purposes of the episode, we just wanted to rip everyone’s hearts out, our own included.

I do want to talk about the two other big revelations of the episode. We find out that Dakota is not only the person who saved Morgan, but also the person who killed Cameron. Were those in the works from the beginning? Or is that something you developed in the writing process? And either way, why was it important to tie both of those back to Dakota?

Chambliss: Both of those story elements were things that we landed on very early in the story-breaking process for the season. We knew that we were going to be building to Dakota killing John Dorie. And as part of that, we wanted to tie her outlook on the world into other characters’ journeys. For Morgan, he really built himself up in 6×01 to believe that the reason he was alive, the reason he was saved, as that note that was left for him said, was you still have work left to do. And he convinced himself that was purely to live so he could save Grace, he could save her baby, and he could build someplace for them to live. So learning that Dakota is the one who saved him — and not just saved him, but the reason she saved him was because she thought he was the one person who could defeat her sister, who could kill her sister, really pulls the rug out from under Morgan, and really punctures this philosophy that he’s been building everything on all season, that he can build a better world.

By that same token, the idea that Dakota killed Cameron, and really did it in a way that is casual and uncaring, just shows the kind of worldview that she has. She’s someone who came of age in the apocalypse, and who has seen her sister act ruthlessly, to create a safe world for her. Dakota is probably the closest thing to a sociopath we’ve seen on here in a very long time… She kills with impunity. And even her final words to John Dorie are, “it doesn’t have to mean something,” she can kill and think it’s just a part of survival. It really was about nailing that very nihilistic attitude, that we put all those story threads together.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.

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