SEAL Team Boss Unpacks Series Finale Twists, Reveals Original Ending for Jason (and What Season 8 Would’ve Looked Like)
The following contains allll of the spoilers from the SEAL Team Season 7/series finale, now streaming on Paramount+.
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.
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With Nozario in custody and Curtis taken out (by Drew, after Jason deemed 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 complete, Jason took a side trip to make peace with the wife of his very first kill. Sonny and Ray accompanied their brother, but afterwards, 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 aide, 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 did not 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 deserves 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.
TVLINE | If this had not been the final season, what would Bravo look like moving forward?
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 figuring 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 hearts, 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” slows down, things from the past start 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, necessarily — but that that we would have to tie it up so quickly.
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 Spenser 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 [in a Season 8].
Sonny was always going to step up and do the right thing when it came to Davis, by “walking in Clay’s footsteps.” 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?
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 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.
TVLINE | I greatly enjoyed Davis’ arc in this final season, because her strategic prowess really paid off for her — and, merely as a bonus, she also got the guy in the end.
We wanted her to have one last whale to tackle. Seeing her navigate through the minefield that is that “old boys club” was interesting, seeing how she is advancing while Bravo is kind of taking a step backwards, at least at the outset of the season. One change that we did make: she was always going to join them down in Honduras, but we had her come an episode earlier, just because this was going to be the end and we wanted to have that old-school feeling, and have her in proximity to Sonny even more.
TVLINE | Give them that little dance club undercover op.
[Laughs] Yeah, we knew that was going to be happening all along. All of the writers were very excited about that.
TVLINE | What continually impressed me throughout this final season is how much you got out of your non-series regulars. I’m thinking about Judd [Lorman as Blackburn], Jessica [Paré as Mandy], Alona [Tal as Stella], Kerri [Medders as Emma]…. Acknowledging, like you said, the financial constraints you were under, is it just that these actors love being on the show so much?
Oh my gosh, yes. We would be so screwed without them. I mean, Jessica, for instance, she had every right to tell us to kick rocks after [being let go after] Season 3, but she’s always come back, and she became such an anchor for Jason, really. With his wife dying, and without Mandy, I think Jason’s character would not have resonated the way he did.
Same for Alona, who played Stella. And Kerri Medders, she grew up so much on this show. She had to be a daughter, but also the voice of reason for her father, so many times. And anytime you see Judd on the screen, you feel calm. You know that a level-headed SEAL has walked into the room. And I know how much our fans appreciate seeing them.
Same with Brock and Trent (played by Justin Melnick and Tyler Grey). Tyler actually wasn’t supposed to be on-camera this season. He and I had for a long time had been trying to get him into the writers’ room, and we finally made that happen at the beginning of Season 7. The tradeoff was, once you’re in a writers’ room, it overlaps with production, so you have to be there. This is not a buffet where you’re a writer one day, an actor the next. But when I found out it was the last season, it was like, “All right, the audience is going to want to see Trent, who’s been here since the beginning, and Tyler has done so much for the show.” It just felt right having him there.
TVLINE | Did you get everything done that you would have you ideally wanted to? Were there any Ts left uncrossed, any character you didn’t get to bring back?
I mean, there are so many more issues facing our men and women in uniform, and our vets, that we would have loved to have tapped into.
We were really building up Drew and Omar over the season to the point where next season Omar was going to take steps to start reconciling with his son. And there was a whole bunch of other stuff with Drew and his backstory, where with Jason and his teammates’ help, he was going to start making amends with his own family. So, those two characters, I was excited to see where we could take them.
We had 114 episodes to get to tell a lot of great stories, and I’m very proud of the show, but yeah, there’s a little bit of melancholy that as of Sunday, that’s it.
TVLINE | What do you hope the show’s legacy will eventually be?
I hope the legacy is that we told an authentic story. It wasn’t a recruiting video, but it also wasn’t a politically slanted view of the military. We tried to tell the real story of our men and women in uniform, and the true meaning of sacrifice. Sacrifice is not just giving your life, or your limbs, it’s how it impacts every aspect of your life. And I think, hopefully, that we were able to shine a spotlight on TBI, PTS, maybe destigmatize [those issues]. I and everyone in our cast have been fortunate enough to hear from people in that community that we impacted, in a positive way, with some of that messaging. So, I hope that’s the legacy.
TVLINE | Last question… and it’s all been leading to this, man: Why wasn’t Cerberus (Dita the Hair Missile Dog) at the wedding?!
Cerberus! Oh my gosh, good question. That is a really good question….
TVLINE | It dawned on me when I was talking to Kerri [Medders]. I was like, “Wait a minute — Cerberus could have carried the ring down the aisle!”
[Heavy sigh] Missed opportunity. I guess it’s too late to go do a VFX shot of that…. I mean, there was so much business to take care in that wedding scene, but I think probably that was an oversight on my part.
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