Would take tremendous foresight to bring out Naomi's/Laura's backpack with perfect timing to pull it off. so I'm thinking Alicia is telling the truth.

 

Yeah they had no idea that Laura = Naomi so i'm not sure how they would have planned that.

Unless @TDogResurrected you mean she decided to do it in the moment he realized they knew her.

 

I really don't think that storyline is closed (I think she's alive). Otherwise, the writers on this show are taking tremendous risks. With Nick dead but "living" through the flashbacks, Naomi dead but well and alive in the flashbacks, and Madison (dead? at least absent but leading the group in the flashbacks), this whole thing becomes way too anticlimactic. Narratively, it's a stunt that might be very interesting to attempt, but the chances of it working with the audience are way too slim.

 

I think what they're doing is working because it's got us all discussing it, but in a good, speculative way. My money is on both Madison and Naomi being alive, but I think they could pull it off with one of them being dead. It would all depend on the delivery of it.

 

I think it might work, as long as there's a payoff, but it's a risk and I'm surprised they went that way. If they're both dead, I'll be very impressed by the balls on these writers.

 

Spoilers: Naomi and Madison are currently hiding beneath a dumpster at the stadium

 

She is not dead—she’s got like 15 episodes in her IMDb for this show (that’s the full season not counting the Morgan-centered first episode where here character is yet to be introduced). I’d find it hard to believe that her screen time would be limited to flashbacks for almost an entire season’s worth of episodes...

The one thing that did throw me off was the fact that they had her name (names—Laura/Naomi) as a part of the “in memoriam” during The Talking Dead.

But since Talking Dead noticeably left out any footage/images of the character’, and just showed the names on the screen, I’m left to think that her name is probably neither Naomi NOR Laura, therefore allowing the aftershow to suggest a goodbye to “Naomi/Laura” as we knew her, while knowing the character posing under those aliases is still alive and that the next time we see her she will have revealed either her real name or another fake one.