SEAL Team Recap: Did the Truth (and Blasts From the Past) Set Jason Free?
This week on Paramount+’s SEAL Team, Jason was finally presented with a hard truth about a past mission. How did he at first respond, and what path did he take toward finding a greater peace?
Picking up some 16 days from where last week left off, times are still tense in Bravo’s makeshift base — and they’re about to get worse, when Jason confronts Clay and Ray about the watch schedule being designed to always have one of them looking over his shoulders.
Disappointed to see Ray succumb to Clay’s theories, Jason suggests that this is still about leaving the mine probe he almost left behind in North Korea. But Ray and Clay spell out for him the hard truth about Mali, and how it was Jason’s forgetfulness, not an enemy RPG, that collapsed a building and landed all of Bravo in the hospital. Jay dismisses the claim as “bulls–t,” dismisses his two brothers as disgraces to the Trident, and then storms off.
Ray and Clay later find Jason sitting on the edge of the rooftop — with a gun. They also find him having accepted the truth, and thus apoplectic that his 20-year career will end in “the worst way possible,” with the loss of his bird. That he is supposed to be leading his brothers, not nearly killing them. That he might end up as broken as Swanny.
Clay points out that brotherhood is about knowing when to step up and help each other out, that science is moving fast in the treatment of TBI. Jason, though, refuses to be a lab rat, and instead is resolved to “going out on my shield, on my terms.” The next morning, Ray reached out to Jay again and offered to take them for a breakfast burrito; Jason agrees, as long as Ray doesn’t say a word to him.
After eating, they end up at small, remote home, where Ray introduces Jason to Marc Lee (hey, it’s Animal Kingdom’s Shawn Hatosy!), a former Ranger who deals with his own TBI and PTS with the help of psychoactive plants such as the haumuchu cactus aka “San Pedro” (a real thing!). Jason is skeptical, but upon hearing Marc talk of achieving “enlightenment” by “dissolving away the ego” with psychedelics, says to hit him up.
