‘Fire Country’ Showrunner Reveals What Comes Next After Explosive Season 3 Premiere
Tia Napolitano takes you behind the scenes of Gabriela’s choice, and previews what’s to come for a recently-freed Bode and the ‘Fire Country’ fam.
Fire Country kicked off Season 3 with all the action and drama fans expect from CBS’ firefighter drama. The season premiere “What the Bride Said” picks up where Season 2 left off and hits the ground running, with Gabriela Perez (Stephanie Arcila) unable to say “I do” to Diego Moreno (Rafael de la Fuente) at the altar because she’s still in love with Bode.
Then a helicopter crashes nearby, destroying local watering hole Smokey’s and interrupting the wedding. Everyone rushes to help, and Bode and Gabriela work to stabilize the wounded chopper pilot. In a highly symbolic moment, Gabriela rips off her bridal veil and uses it to bandage a cut on Bode’s hand. Showrunner Tia Napolitano came up with that image, which sets the tone for Season 3.
“That was part of the premiere pitch, the season pitch,” she tells Parade. “Gabriela uses a piece of her literal wedding costume to mend Bode.”
She is making her choice. She can’t marry Diego. She confesses to him that she and Bode recently kissed. Diego is disgusted and angry and heartbroken, because he believed Gabriela when she told him it was over with Bode. Even though we knew this was coming, and we know that Diego and Gabriela are not made for each other the way she and Bode are, we still feel bad for Diego, a decent man who has been hurt badly by Gabriela and Bode’s behavior. We want Bode and Gabriela to end up together, but we hate that other people have to get hurt along the way. He actually takes it pretty well, though.
“I love him in this episode,” Napolitano says. “I love that he was not insecure, that he chose to not be jealous prior to this moment. That he took her and Bode at their word, that he was friends with Bode. I love that he finally calls it out.”
“You are not my dude,” Diego memorably tells Bode when Bode gets a little too familiar with him.
Napolitano praised de la Fuente’s performance in this episode, because he does a great job of making sure fans remember that Diego is a person, too. “I think the most interesting thing is that you love Bodei and Gabriela as fans of this show. They’re good people who make real human bad mistakes, and they have hurt someone, and they feel terrible, and it’s messy,” she says. “But the most interesting version is that you feel for the other guy, too. I think you feel for everybody. And if there’s empathy in all directions, that’s good television, right?”
What’s next for Bode and Gabriela?
Unfortunately, Gabriela choosing Bode over Diego comes right at the moment when Bode has made a life-changing choice of his own. Bode is set on joining the Cal Fire training program, which will take him away from Edgewater for who knows how long. So Gabriela and Bode will continue to be apart for a while.
“What’s next is a little bit of what’s always been next for them,” Napolitano says. “They’ve never really been together. He was incarcerated. She was with Jake (Jordan Calloway). Even when they were both single, they couldn’t be together unless they broke rules. There’s a lot of longing, and not being able to be together has been a big part of who they are. So, will they be able to move past that? There are many, many steps to get there. There will still be longing. There’s obviously a giant connection between the two of them, but it’s complicated. She’s just gone through something, and he’s starting the rest of his life. It’s very interesting, and we’ll deal with it in every episode.”
Gabriela’s father Manny (Kevin Alexander) could be facing prison time for an assault incident in Season 2, and the fact that he got out of his handcuffs to help fight the helicopter fire–with Sharon Leone’s (Diane Farr) help, though he took all the blame for it) is only going to make his situation worse. But he’s mostly concerned with keeping Bode and his daughter apart, because he thinks their volatility together will harm them both. He asks Sharon for assistance, though her conflicted feelings about Manny’s request will help drive her story this season.
“Manny was a caretaker of her child when she couldn’t be because her child was incarcerated. So to be asked to return the favor seems really fair, but the favor is so specific,” Napolitano says of Manny’s request that Sharon keep them separated while he’s locked up. “Does she share Manny’s feeling that they could be dangerous for each other? I don’t think she’s so sure that that’s the right thing to do, so she’ll struggle with the responsibility.”
What’s coming this season on Fire Country?
The extensive damage to Smokey’s Tavern, an important gathering place in Edgewater where many Fire Country scenes have taken place, will be felt throughout the season, Napolitano says. “We’re really going to dig into what happens when a small business in a small town is just taken out,” she says. “It’s been a part of the heart and soul of Edgewater and really important for our people since the pilot. Smokey’s is one of our characters. We’re gonna get in there and really go through it with her.”
Looking further down the road in the season, Morena Baccarin will be back as Sheriff Mickey Fox, Sharon’s sister and the main character of the upcoming spinoff Sheriff Country. Napolitano says that the Sheriff Country writers’ room opened last week, and she just met the writing staff at Fire Country franchise co-creator Tony Phelan’s birthday party. “They’re blue-skying over there,” she says. “We’re all excited to play together and really expand the Edgewater universe.”
Fans are also looking forward to the arrival of Supernatural star Jared Padalecki as Camden Casey, a firefighter who takes Bode under his wing. Napolitano is excited for fans to get to see him.
“He fits right in. He made a very organic additional layer to our cast of characters,” she says. “He’s the first person in Bode’s life that we’ve seen who is sane and always good that says, ‘this maverick inside you, that’s a good thing. I don’t want to put it away. I want to bring it out.’ It feels exciting and a little dangerous. And he was just fun. Max and Jared are friends in real life, and they have so much chemistry on screen. It was a love fest in all directions.”
And more than anything else, the biggest story this season is that Bode is free. The impact of Bode’s freedom on Fire Country cannot be overstated. The first two seasons were leading up to it, and now it’s here, and the show has to evolve. While Bode got out at the end of Season 2, the magnitude of the change didn’t really hit Napolitano until she started writing the premiere.
“I called one of our writers, panicked, and I said, ‘Bode’s out. This changes everything,’” she says. “It changes writing him. It changes the scenes he can be in, the things he can consider doing or wanting or dreaming. So it was a big shift in the show, and now we’re in the rhythm. We’re deep into the season. It feels really exciting, but I was surprised at how new it would feel simply because he’s a free man.”
