Bravo Team looks a little bit different — and not in ways you expected — as the results of multiple twists deployed by SEAL Team‘s series finale on Sunday.
With Nozario in custody and Curtis taken out (by Drew, after Jason considered the turncoat not worth it), Bravo returned to Vah Beach — only to promptly have to spin up for a mission to Afghanistan, which Ray tagged along for. (Really?) Once that delivery was completed, Jason took a side trip to make peace with the wife of his very first kill. Sonny and Ray accompanied their brother, but afterward, their exfil went very sideways, and Bravo was bombarded with gunfire and shoulder-fired missiles. One seismic explosion made the screen go black… which then dissolved into a church ceremony with everyone in dress uniforms.
Funeral?!?! Nope. Wedding! For Emma and Brad, with a very much alive Jason walking the bride down the aisle. At the reception, Lisa and Sonny fretted some more about the Decker dilemma, and Sonny informed Stella that he has earmarked half his med kit earnings for her and Brian.
A series of narrative misdirects then kept viewers very much on their toes.
Davis got her promotion to D.C.-based admiral’s aid, after seeing Sonny slip out of a meeting with her bosses. Rumor has it he gave his med kit to the Navy, in trade for the Decker issue going away…? There was a “yard out” ceremony at the Bulkhead for Bravo’s two departing team members — Jason and Ray, right? And Ray was seen welcoming Ben to Spenser House, so it looks like it will work out for him working there with Naima, yes?
Nope, nope… and nope.
Turns out, Ray took the position in Warfighter Health. Sonny, he confessed to slugging Decker and in doing so ceded his trident, clearing the way for Lisa’s promotion. And Jason is staying inside the wire, having cleansed the figurative blood off his hands.
Lisa was last seen driving up to D.C… with Sonny riding shotgun, and the two of them holding hands. And Jason? He spun up with Omar, Drew and the rest of the reformulated Bravo. “Easy f–king day!”
In a can’t-miss, in-depth interview, TVLine asked SEAL Team showrunner Spencer Hudnut about his original finale plans, serving up that final salvo of twists, and why a series vet didn’t RSVP for Emma’s wedding.
TVLINE | How long ago did you start forming an idea of what a SEAL Team series finale would look like?
I’ve always kind of tried to have it in the back of my mind, going back probably to Season 4, when we made that move to Paramount+. There was a minute where it felt like maybe the show was ending, yet I felt like the audience deserved so much better than that. Every season since then, we’ve tried to end it in a place where we’d be happy to leave the characters, where they feel like they’ve made some progress or feel settled.
I will say that when we broke this season, at the point it was 90% written, I did not have an inkling that this would be the last one. So, it really wasn’t until very late in the process that I realized this was going to be it, and I really only had three acts of the final episode to “land the plane.” Now, they were definitely rounding third base in their stories and their careers, so we didn’t have to do too much rejiggering. But certainly for Jason, it was a different ending than what I intended at the outset of the season.
That was going to be largely dictated by the contractual things you run into when you get to an end of a Season 7, the actors who have to come to a decision…. But when I originally broke this season, the end of the season was Jason and Mandy arriving in Afghanistan to go on this journey, this road to atonement for Jason, which we had to then kind of cram into the episode in a different way. My hope was to set them off on a path where Jason was on the road to figure out a way to forgive himself, and wipe the stains of war off of him, but also land in a place where we could get them into trouble to start a potential Season 8 in a really big way.
TVLINE | This season was very introspective. Characters were having a lot of heart to heart, talking about a lot of “thinky” things….
The downtime that Jason had allowed us to get into something that I’ve been talking to a lot of special operators about, how once the “Crazy Train” slowed down, things from the past started creeping up — and the shame that comes with that. We don’t spend a lot of time talking, as a society, about what these guys are actually doing when they’re at war, which is killing, and that it does bring not guilt, but shame. So, we knew we were going to get into that with Jason. We just didn’t know that we were going to maybe tie it up — not with a bow, definitely — but that we would have to tie it up so quickly.
