Fear the Walking Dead who was Ofelia?

In January 2023, AMC announced that the eighth season would be the last for Fear the Walking Dead. Throughout its storyline, many characters have come and gone, and it is always interesting to look back at favorites and ones who impacted current characters. One of those is Ofelia Salazar, played by Mercedes Mason.

Ofelia was introduced in season 1, episode 2, “So Close, Yet So Far.” She and her family, Daniel (Ruben Blades) and Griselda (Patricia Reyes Spíndola), give shelter to Travis (Cliff Curtis), his son Chris (Lorenzo Henrie), and his mother, Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez).  They were trapped on the streets during a riot at the beginning of the outbreak, where Travis discovered that the virus victims “come back.”

Viewers enjoyed the early seasons of Fear the Walking Dead as it showed the outbreak from the start and was a new perspective of how people would acclimate to the dead rising.

Fear the Walking Dead – Ofelia

The Salazar family is a tight-knit group; when Griselda dies, it is a significant blow to both Ofelia and Daniel. In season 2, when Ofelia believes she loses her father in a fire at the Abigail Vineyard, she leaves the main group and wanders alone in the desert. She was discovered by Qaletaqa Walker (Michael Greyeyes), chief of the Black Hat Reservation.

Nothing is seen of her until season 3 when she is reunited with Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), who visits the reservation. By this time, Alicia and her family live on the reservations rival’s Broke Jaw Ranch. Although they try to work for peace, it is never to be.

Eventually, Madison (Kim Dickens) discovers Daniel survived and arranges for Ofelia to reunite with her father. Along the journey, Ofelia was bitten on the shoulder by a walker and succumbed to the wound before she could see him again.

The story of Daniel and Ofelia is a heartbreaking one. Daniel kept his past involvement in the Salvadoran Junta and CIA a secret from his daughter, making her feel she never really knew him.  The fact that he wasn’t with her when she died was something Daniel carried with him even into season 7 in the episode titled “Ofelia.”

In this episode, Daniel was experiencing some significant mental health and memory issues. Luciana (Danay Garcia) did her best to help him overcome with cognitive exercises. He was fixated on finding Ofelia and endangered others’ lives while searching for his long-dead daughter.

In a recent season 8 episode, Daniel confronted Madison for the death of his daughter Ofelia after she put Charlie’s (Alexa Nisenson) life in danger which resulted in her death. Daniel tells her “There is something fundamentally wrong with you” and decides to leave with Luciana instead of assisting Madison in protecting PADRE. He had already lost two people dear to him and doesn’t want to lose Luciana also.

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