The question as to whether or not Jason Hayes (David Boreanaz) dies in the final series of SEAL TEAM seems to have been answered: he isn’t killed on camera. But in a conversation with the series star for the release of the SEAL Team: The Final Season DVD, Boreanaz indicated it’s not that cut and dried.
“You don’t see him die on camera,” Boreanaz agreed with Parade. “But if we ever do this movie, maybe you open up on a tombstone of him. Hey, listen, on television anything can happen. Any show you look at across the board, writers are so smart they can change anything at any time.”
One of the issues that SEAL Team didn’t shy away from exploring as it followed the most elite unit of Navy SEALs as they trained, planned and executed the most dangerous, high stakes missions our country asked of them, was the mental health of the operators, which is why Boreanaz isn’t sure that Jason Hayes doesn’t die at some point.
“[In the series finale], he leaves that chopper, and he goes out with his team doing what he loves to do, knowing for seven seasons we’ve shown him struggle and do all these crazy missions and how traumatic it can be to his brain and how his obsessiveness and sacrifice to the country is so loud and proud. And then we end with him going off on a mission, knowing that we’ve seen these types of missions and what can happen.”
The beauty of that ending is it can be whatever you want it to be. For me, Jason survived; for Boreanaz, Jason’s fate was more nebulous.
“I think that’s the beauty of a show like this, is I don’t think you could have ended it any better,” he continued. “This is like 50-50. Is the glass half empty or is the glass half full? So, that’s what I love about it, and I think that it was just done the right way.”
Now that it’s wrapped, SEAL Team’s legacy will be two-fold. Definitely it will be noted for the light it sheds on the darkness of the world of its operators and veterans who served have their country and are struggling with the resulting trauma, but also its authenticity.
To meet real operators that have gone through this and say, “Thanks, you really depicted it authentically,” is something Boreanaz takes pride in. He says, “Listen, we could have done this, and it could have been horrible, and these guys could have been, ‘That’s nothing like what we could have done, it’s completely candy coated, it’s like a soap opera or a pinup calendar type of a show.’ We just didn’t do that from the start. The legacy will be giving back to those that have served and are serving.”
SEAL Team launched on CBS before moving to its streamer Paramount+, which was a better fit for the series and gave it the opportunity to tell the kinds of stories that needed to be told to give it legitimacy.
And Boreanaz agrees, saying, “The authenticity, the realness of it, the hand-held shots, the production value, what we shot on a shoestring budget, what we gave to the network and the studio and how we were able to succeed on a network, where I don’t think we fit as far as the type of show we were, which is why we went to a streaming platform.”
In addition to Boreanaz, the show also stars Neil Brown Jr. (Ray Perry), AJ Buckley (Sonny Quinn), Toni Trucks (Lisa Davis), Raffi Barsoumian (Omar Hamza), and Beau Knapp (Drew Franklin).
SEAL Team: The Final Season is a three-disc collection, which includes every episode of the final season and more than 35 minutes of special features, including deleted scenes, a gag reel and two featurettes.
