WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead Season 6, Episode 12, "In Dreams," which aired Sunday on AMC. This article also discusses sensitive topics involving pregnancy, including infancy loss.
Fear the Walking Dead co-showrunner Ian Goldberg discussed why Season 6's latest episode, "In Dreams," ended with the shocking revelation that Grace's baby Athena was stillborn.
"It was very important to us to honor and be truthful to Grace's experience and what she'd gone through at the power plant and her radiation exposure that we played as part of the story in Season 5," Goldberg told EW. "We wanted to be realistic with the truth of what would happen."
The showrunner continued, "In our research into pregnant women that had been part of radiation exposure and events like Chernobyl, we found that often the radiation did get absorbed by the baby and the baby didn't survive."
While Goldberg admitted that baby Athena's passing was a gut-wrenching ending to the episode, he noted, "It felt like, unfortunately, a very true ending to the story and also gave voice to something that I think a lot of people go through just in life. We wanted to tell that story, that's [a] difficult and heart-wrenching thing that a lot of people go through and tell it through this prism of Grace and Morgan's relationship, seeing how this dream that they had, that we've been building since the beginning of the season, doesn't come to fruition the way that they'd hoped. So, that was sort of the genesis of it."
Season 6, Episode 12, ("In Dreams") found Grace in a sort of dream world set 16 years in the future. In the dream, Grace met her now-teenage daughter Athena and visited her own grave. After encountering future versions of several friends, Grace realized that she was unconscious. Soon afterward, Grace returned to reality expecting not to survive the birth of her daughter. However, Grace survived childbirth and it was revealed that Athena had absorbed the radiation that impacted Grace during her time working at a nuclear plant.
Fear the Walking Dead stars Lennie James, Rubén Blades, Colman Domingo, Danay Garcia, Maggie Grace, Garret Dillahunt, Jenna Elfman, Alexa Nisenson, Karen David, Austin Amelio, Mo Collins, Zoe Colletti and Christine Evangelista. New episodes air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. CT on AMC.
Source: EW