Fear The Walking Dead, Season Six: Who ISN’T The Worst?

2) Dakota

Honestly, up until the season finale, I was certain, absolutely certain, that Dakota was going to be the most irredeemable villain of season six. But, at just the last second, she managed to convince me otherwise. Because of that, it made me go back and reassess her actions leading up to that point.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: I still think that Dakota is a serial killer. My opinion about that hasn’t changed.

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense: By the time Dakota was probably nine or ten years old, everything went upside down, dead people were walking around and eating living ones, and people were killing each other left, right, and center. Hell, even her “sister” had murdered their parents for, seemingly, no reason. Growing up like this, of course she would see killing as just part of living in the apocalypse, as she so often said.

On top of that, Dakota literally didn’t understand why people had a problem with that outlook. Throughout this season, she was constantly saying that she didn’t understand why people were so bothered and put off by what she believed was “just how things are”. This caused her to crave someone who would accept her warped outlook on things, which, not coincidentally, made people distrust her, and therefore, reject her, beginning a vicious cycle.

Part of this falls on Virginia, first for not explaining why she killed their “parents” (In actuality, Dakota’s grandparents), and then, for not trying to curtail or correct Dakota’s behavior when she had the chance to. While Dakota’s sociopathy wasn’t curable, Virginia could have at least gotten her to understand that killing people should only have been a last resort to protect oneself or others from harm, not because someone’s going to tell on you about sneaking out (Her reasoning for killing Cameron). Dakota was not like Lizzie, she understood that the dead were dead, so she could easily have understood when to use lethal force and not to, if someone had bothered to teach her.

Once she’d become a teenager, however, I think the die had been cast. Dakota was just going to see murder as just a way of life in the apocalypse, regardless.

For her part, Dakota wasn’t malicious, per se, in her killings (At least so far as we know), simply someone who saw it as a means of removing an obstacle. Furthermore, Dakota wasn’t completely callous, either. She never seemed like she wanted to kill Cameron, or John, but simply saw it as the quickest way to deal with a problem. Hell, even the person she wanted dead, Virginia, she couldn’t bring herself to kill, instead, wanting Morgan to do it, suggesting that she had some capacity for compassion, or as close to it as she could reach.

As evidenced in the season finale, when she realized that Teddy was using her, the only reason Dakota gravitated to him was his willingness to feign accepting her, and, had Morgan’s group grown to forgive her earlier, maybe they could have steered her away from the dark path she was walking. They would have had to watch her closely, and teach her what not to do and when not to do it, but, I think she could have gotten better.

Too bad she didn’t really have much of a chance.