This post contains spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead Season 4, Episode 10, “Close Your Eyes.”

Although Fear the Walking Dead aired only one episode on Sunday night, longtime fans of the franchise who tuned in to watch “Close Your Eyes” could see two things simultaneously: the actual events unfolding on-screen, and a parallel timeline of things that could have happened. Last week, Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) left Morgan behind, forging a path of her own through a harrowing thunderstorm. She was shattered and furious; after all, this season she lost her last two remaining family members—her brother, Nick, and her mother—thanks to a traitorous little girl named Charlie. What a horrifying coincidence, then, that Alicia chose to hole up in the storm in the same spot as Charlie herself.

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Obviously, this could go one of two ways: Alicia could find a way to forgive the person who took everything away from her, or she could kill her. Throughout the episode, Alicia considered both possibilities—and the way things unraveled was both powerful and evocative. This episode was Debnam-Carey’s most powerful performance yet, one that proved Alicia still has a lot of story left.

Unlike The Walking Dead, which loves heavy foreshadowing, Fear the Walking Dead has a knack for making its untimely deaths truly surprising. Nick’s death, in this season’s third episode, was made even more devastating by how sudden it was. Madison’s death later in the season, however, proved more controversial. Critics wondered whether doing away with Madison—the show’s protagonist from the beginning—was truly necessary; some accused the show of ageism. While the show has not necessarily proved the doubters wrong, it has shown that even without the rest of her family, Alicia still has an important role to play. More importantly, it seems that this season’s newly installed show-runners, Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg, recognize that.

From the beginning, Nick and Alicia were, in many ways, the show’s emotional anchors—especially Alicia, whose insistently open heart was a welcome presence in this cruel world. Understandably, Alicia is a bit colder of late; having lost her family, she met Charlie with pure rage on Sunday night, screaming at the silent girl. Later on, Alicia realized that Charlie was clutching a gun not because she intended to murder Alicia, but because she wanted to commit suicide.

We saw Charlie teetering on that edge earlier this season when she almost let a zombie get to her. Now we know why. As Charlie told Alicia, she’s not only wracked with guilt over what she did to the Clark family; she’s also haunted by the image of both her parents, who turned into walkers as well. In fact, she can’t even remember what her mother and father looked like before they became grotesque monsters. Faced with this knowledge, Alicia finds herself conflicted—unable to forgive Charlie for what she’s done, but also unwilling to let her die.

Debnam-Carey expresses that inner turmoil with every aspect of her performance. Her Alicia is both relentlessly committed to surviving and unsure what the point of survival actually is. And although she refuses to relent to Charlie’s frantic pleas for her to kill her, Debnam-Carey expresses Alicia’s confused conscience with such aplomb that it’s never quite a given that Alicia won’t change her mind.

There are two points in the episode when it seems very possible that Alicia could kill Charlie. The first comes when they’re trapped in a rapidly flooding cellar. Charlie begs Alicia to end her life so she doesn’t turn like her parents did. The second time—when the two were riding in a car and Alicia told Charlie to close her eyes so she could describe a beach scene to her—seemed to directly reference Carol’s iconically tragic “look at the flowers” moment on The Walking Dead. Although the two appeared to have mended things, for a brief moment it was possible to imagine another ending: one in which Alicia had been faking empathy all along, painting a beautiful picture in Charlie’s mind to ease the pain just as she shot her.

That she let Charlie live seems to indicate that Alicia is truly committed to continuing her mother’s legacy of offering people redemption. And although it’s still not the same as having Madison around, it’s at least a clear indication that, should show-runners Chambliss and Goldberg let her, Alicia can still carry this story—even with all of its new characters. As the last remaining Clark, she is the series’s strongest throughline—and as Debnam-Carey just proved, she can also still be the most fascinating to watch.