The following contains all the spoilers from SEAL Team Season 7/series finale, now streaming on Paramount+.
Bravo Team looks a little different — and not in the way you’d expect — as a result of the many twists SEAL Team pulled off in Sunday’s series finale.
With Nozario in custody and Curtis taken out (by Drew, after Jason decided the traitor wasn’t worth it), Bravo returned to Vah Beach — only to quickly return for a mission in Afghanistan, with Ray tagging along. After completing the transfer, Jason took a side trip to make peace with the wife of the first man he killed. Sonny and Ray join their brother, but then their trip goes off course, and Bravo is bombarded with gunfire and shoulder-fired missiles. A seismic explosion cuts the screen to black… then turns into a church service with everyone in full dress.
Funeral? No. Wedding! For Emma and Brad, with a very animated Jason walking the bride down the aisle. At the wedding reception, Lisa and Sonny worry more about Decker’s dilemma, and Sonny informs Stella that he’s given half of his medical kit earnings to her and Brian.
A series of diversions follow to keep viewers on their toes.
Davis is promoted to admiral in D.C., after Sonny is seen sneaking out of a meeting with her bosses. Rumor has it that he’s given his medical kit to the Navy, in exchange for solving the Decker problem…? There was a “walkout” ceremony at Bulkhead for two of Bravo’s departing team members—Jason and Ray, right? And Ray was seen welcoming Ben to Spenser House, so it looks like he’ll be working there, right?
No, no, and no.
Turns out, Ray took the Warfighter Health job. Sonny, he confessed to beating Decker up and in doing so gave up his trident, clearing the way for Lisa’s promotion. And Jason was inside the fence, symbolically washing the blood off his hands.
Lisa was last seen driving up to D.C.… with Sonny in the passenger seat, and the two of them holding hands. And Jason? He was back with Omar, Drew, and the rest of Bravo. “Easy day!”
In an in-depth interview that can’t be missed, TVLine asked SEAL Team showrunner Spencer Hudnut about his original plans for the ending, delivering that final twist, and why a veteran of the series didn’t give interviews for Emma’s wedding.
TVLINE | How long have you been formulating ideas about what the end of SEAL Team would look like? I’ve always tried to keep that in mind, probably going back to Season 4, when we moved to Paramount+. There was a minute where I felt like maybe the show was coming to an end, but I felt like the audience deserved more. Every season since then, we’ve tried to end in a place where we’re happy to leave the characters, where they feel like they’ve made some progress or felt like they’ve settled down.
I will say that when we ended this season, at the point where it was 90% written, I had no clue that this was going to be the last season. So it wasn’t until really late in the process that I realized this was going to be the last one, and I really only had three acts of the finale to “land the plane.” Now, they’ve definitely done third base in their story and their career, so we didn’t have to do too much rearranging. But certainly for Jason, it’s a different ending than where I was planning at the beginning of the season.
TVLINE | If this isn’t the last season, what does Bravo look like going forward? That’s going to be largely dictated by the contractual terms that you have when you end Season 7, the actors have to make decisions. But when I originally broke down the season, the ending of the season was Jason and Mandy going to Afghanistan to start this journey, this path of redemption for Jason, which then we had to cram into the episode in a different way. My hope is to put them on a path where Jason is on a path where he can find a way to forgive himself, and clear the stain of war from him, but also land in a place where we can get them in trouble to start off a potential Season 8 in a really big way.
TVLINE | This season has been very introspective. The characters have had a lot of heart-to-hearts, talked about a lot of “thinking” things… The downtime that Jason has allowed us to engage in something that I’ve talked to a lot of special operators about, about how once the Crazy Train slows down, things from the past start to surface — and the shame that comes with that. We don’t spend a lot of time talking, as a society, about what these people are going through.
TVLINE | This season was a little light on action. Was your thinking that when you do have action, it would be big, as in the last two episodes?As this show gets older, it gets more expensive. During these long downtimes we have, we’re still paying for our stages, so less and less the money goes onto the screen. And anytime we go out of Los Angeles, when we do action, we do it as authentically as possible, and we do it big. So, yeah, there’s a financial component to how much, or how little, action we could do in the front half of this season, which also mirrored Jason’s reluctance to run into the fire. But that was because we did want to end really big, and we knew that the last three episodes would be kind of a sprint.
Some of the action that was going to be in [Episode] 10, we had to dial back. The helicopter chase that ended 9 was originally in 10, but we needed as much real estate as possible for the finale to cram everything in. The Curtis showdown was going to be a bigger set piece, but at the end of the day, we needed to get these guys home, to start resolving their issues.
TVLINE | When in the process did you decide to “flip the script” with several of the series-ending outcomes? Ray took Jason’s Warfighter Health job, Jason didn’t retire, Sonny did turn himself in… Because some of those misdirects hit me like a ton of bricks, man.I appreciate that. Truthfully, the Ray aspect, that was always going to be his journey this season; he was going to struggle with Spencer House feeling tainted because of the Clay connection, and realizing that Naima has it up and running perfectly. There was not a lot of value that he can add there, and he had this concern about how he’s going to look after his his teammates. That felt like a corner I could happily paint us out of, if Ray was called to action.
Sonny was always going to step up and do the right thing when it came to Davis, by “walking in Clay’s footsteps,” you know. I think Sonny is the most evolved character on the show from Season 1 to the end. But we definitely wanted people to be surprised at what Sonny decides. Did he just go give away his med kit [to the Navy]? It turns out, no, he actually had to sacrifice his trident for Davis’ advancement, so you have the irony of the guy who spent all season trying to hold the team together, being the one who could actually walk away.
TVLINE | And Jason, I guess he arrived at a certain peace with what he is and what he isn’t? And decided he has more Bravo days in him? With Mandy’s help, yeah. What’s so great about their relationship is she has lived it. She has her own shame, her own guilt from what she’s done in this war, so she really helps him open his eyes. A lot of the work he’s done over the last few seasons allows him to get to the where he gets to at the end, which is sort of seeing himself in a different light and understanding that he was doing his job. Understanding that he shouldn’t give up on himself. He shouldn’t hear Curtis’ “war [has the last word”] wail. He’s got the last word. He should understand that there is hope. But now he has to keep working on himself.
