‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Season 3B: Will Daniel Side With The Nation?

“Fear the Walking Dead” star Rubén Blades thinks that Daniel would side with The Nation over the Ottos if he’d find out that his daughter Ophelia is still alive and well.

In a recent interview with BT TV, Blades said that Daniel’s priority is always his family. So even though Daniel doesn’t know the history between the Nation and the Ottos, the actor said that he thinks his character would stand by The Nation, in which Ophelia (Mercedes Mason) has a senior role.

“[Daniel’s] concern has always been his family,” Blades explained. “He is going to go wherever they go. Everything else is secondary. He will stick by Ophelia no matter what.”

While Daniel will surely be thrilled when he discovers that Ophelia is still alive, the same can’t be said when he finds out about how vicious she has become since the last time they were together.

“I think he is going to be in shock,” Blades said of how Daniel would react when he learns that Ophelia poisoned dozens of people in Season 3A. “He left a violent country and went to a better place … in the hope that he could raise a family in a safer environment so I don’t think he expects a daughter — after all of his efforts to bring some peace and normalcy to their lives — to act like that. I think he will be completely surprised at her actions.”

Showrunner Dave Erickson told Yahoo TV last July that Daniel would actually be “upset” once he finds out about how capable Ophelia has turned out to be. “She was responsible for the death of a lot of people at the ranch,” Erickson said of Mason’s character. “And I think her father, who really went to great lengths to shelter her throughout her life and went to great lengths to protect her from his story and his violence, would be devastated.”

Erickson added that Daniel would also be disappointed with himself if he realized that his daughter has seemingly been repeating his sins during the Salvadoran Civil War. “I think he’d be crushed by that, to find out that he was not able to prevent her from becoming him, because that’s the last thing that he wanted for her,” Erickson said.

While it remains unclear whether the father and daughter will finally be reunited in Season 3B, Erickson told Entertainment Weekly last July that he has always planned to reunite the original crew together by the end of the current season. “We’ve been doing sort of a slow crawl toward reuniting our dysfunctional blended family, so what we can look forward to is hopefully reconnecting more of our characters,” Erickson said. “And what I always hoped to do was to get to a place by the end of this season, by the end of episode 16, where we’d kind of brought this motley band back together.”

“Fear the Walking Dead” Season 3B premieres on Sunday, Sept. 10, at 9 p.m. EDT on AMC.