FIRE COUNTRY Post-Mortem: The Cast Breaks Down That Engagement, the Big Secret Revealed, New Bosses, and More

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Friday, February 16 season premiere of FIRE COUNTRY.]

There was good, bad, and jaw-dropping news on the season premiere of FIRE COUNTRY…leaving the characters in a very messy place for season 2.

With Bode (Max Thieriot) getting increasingly despondent in prison, his friends and family tried to reach him. But when he and Sleeper (Grant Harvey) were set to fight, Jake (Jordan Calloway) came through with a big reveal that gave Bode a reason to fight for himself: Cara, Bode’s ex, had a daughter.

But just when things were lining up for Bode—thanks to everything being revealed about why and how he sacrificed his freedom back in season 1, and with his release back to Three Rock—his most recent ex, Gabriela (Stephanie Arcila) came to share some news with Three Rock’s new leader, Eve (Jules Latimer): Gabriela is now engaged to her new boyfriend.

So what comes next? The FIRE COUNTRY cast breaks down the big season 2 opener…

Love and marriage?

Despite only dating each other for four months, Gabriela quickly agreed to Diego’s (Rafael De La Fuente) proposal.

Though the two have bonded over work, their bond goes deeper than that. “I think Diego has the family she’s never had,” Arcila explains to Give Me My Remote. “So I think when she sees that, she falls in love with this life, and yearns [for] that. Her dad recognizes it and sees it, as well. It’s one of those things when you’re in love with a genuinely good human, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the best person for you.”

“So I think she’s kind of caught in making what decision is best for her,” she continues. “But I don’t know if she fully knows, if she’s fully processed and actually sat in her feelings…But she’s very much in love with this world. They have a connection. They work so well together. They’re in these high-stakes situations so they get this hero high together. And culturally also, it’s familiar to her.”

Manny (Kevin Alejandro), meanwhile, may be in a bit of denial about his daughter’s new relationship. “I don’t believe that Manny’s fully dealt with it,” Alejandro says. “I believe [he’s] bottling it up, and only going through the fatherly motions of support, and knowing it’s her decision and letting her know that he supports her. But I would love to see a moment where Manny truly comes out with how he feels about it, because I honestly don’t think he knows just yet.”

“I think he prepared himself that Bode would be his son one day, and now it’s changed,” he continues. “I don’t think he’s dealt with it yet. But I would love to see it on screen, the moment that he goes, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking. Here’s how it’s affecting me.’ But who knows?”

For Gabriela, who was blindsided by Bode’s confession that sent him back to prison, the eventual reveal he was just trying to help a friend (and hadn’t lied to her) will also be a mixed bag.

“I think with him she has these little mini-heartbreaks of, ugh, he should have told me,” Arcila explains. “[She thinks,] ‘I can be there for you. I’ve wanted to be there for you. I’ve wanted to help you. I’ve been here no matter what. I’ve told you that I am.’ So I think it’s been just a really hard mourning process for her. And that connection, when you have a connection…you have it, it’s always been there. So when they speak, I know her heart hurts and yearns, and I know that she feels, ‘I have to do what’s right. I haven’t seen action yet. I haven’t seen any of that. And right now, this is my family. This is what is good for me, you broke my heart and I love you, but we have to see [what you do now].’”

A new boss at Three Rock.

“I remember when I read the first script, I was very intimidated,” Latimer acknowledges. “Manny, and Kevin, is so great with Three Rock. The first day of filming was really weird because I was with all these guys and we didn’t really interact last season…And that sort of feeds into what happens for the rest of the season: what was happening in reality for me and what is happening for Eve is how do I navigate telling all these men what to do and doing it in a convincing way?”

“This season has been so challenging for me, physically and mentally,” she continues. “And I can only imagine what it is in real life for some of these like wildfire firefighters, especially women who are in power, and how they navigate respect and how they navigate not serving the whole and making sure that we achieve the goal of safety and security for our community. But then also feeling like I’m safe and I’m secure in my position. I think it’s a constant battle, and I’ve had to do a lot of meditating of late, because it does personally affect me. Eve’s very self-conscious and insecure this season. She does not have her friends around her that often. And it’s very interesting to navigate like being alone and having to call the shots and not knowing who to lean on.”

One person Latimer has leaned on, on- and off-screen, has been Alejandro. “[Manny] and I spend a lot of time together this season,” she says. “He becomes like an advisor for me. At first, he’s a bit pissed about his position, obviously, but then he becomes this mentor. He is guiding me and being sort of like my guru.”

 “I am very resistant at first, because I feel like I can handle it on my own; I try to talk to others about it, but I feel really so insecure and isolated,” she continues. “And not only that, but I’m trying to keep Three Rock open; I’m having to deal with the DOC in Sacramento. I feel like Eve feels really stuck. She’s trying to follow her compass, but I think the hardest part is she doesn’t know if she’s heading in the right direction. This season is really mentally draining for her and physically.”

And since Manny was skeptical of Eve shadowing him last season,  he has early reservations about her taking the job now. “[His] thoughts [are,] ‘Okay, now she’s taken over—was it all a plot?” Alejandro says. “I think he struggles with trying to understand where that came from, was she always intending to do that? But with him having to step back, watching her make decisions differently from the way he would, he is also struggling.”

“You’re gonna find him constantly biting his tongue or sticking his foot in his mouth and having to back up,” he continues. “He has a captain mentality. He’s done it for so long; it’s instinct, right? There are moments where he’s like, ‘Oh, here’s what I would do, but it’s not my choice. Sorry. Sorry, my bad.’ So it’s a really cool dynamic within himself to see him struggle with.”

And getting to a place where he can mentor the younger firefighters—”I wouldn’t call it captain advice; I’ll call it fatherly advice; I feel like he’s one of the older ones.”—has its perks. “To step back and be able to mentor is a really cool, interesting thing that we can play around with this season,” Alejandro says. “But it’s also hard on him, because I think he’s now questioning what he wants. Does he want to be a captain again? Does he want to go back to Three Rock? We’re really going to explore what his possibilities are. And who knows what his choice is going to be.”

Saving Bode from himself.

With Bode alienating most of the people in his life, Vince (Billy Burke) and Manny teamed up to try and talk some sense into him during an emotional prison visit.

“If I’m not mistaken. I think that was the very first thing on the very first day we started shooting,” Burke recalls. “We were just immediately thrown back into the family drama, which is what I prefer. Going out on incidents and saving people and being heroes and all that kind of stuff is great, but the stuff that I really enjoy doing, and watching, is the [relationship-centric] stuff.”

Though Vince had been visiting his son for a bit, Manny’s inclusion was meaningful for everyone involved. “Manny is so connected to the Leone family, that Bode feels like a son, right?” Alejandro says. “And I think Vince embraces that; Manny knows his place in that family. But because he’s so passionate, he’s gonna step over that line and try to parent him, too. They all know that dynamic. And I’m just loving the fact that I get to play with Billy a little bit more this season, because I learned a lot from him as an actor. And I’m just looking forward to many more beautiful moments with those three. I just think that it’s a really cool dynamic to have—one son with two dads who love him the same.”

Ultimately, it was Jake’s big gamble in a secret phone call to Bode that motivated Bode to literally and figuratively fight back. Calloway credits director Bill Purple—and the cast’s tight bond—with helping get the scene just right. “With those types of scenes, we’re typically doing it without the other actors there unless we’re in close proximity—and then that’s the great thing about our cast: we’ll be there to support one another,” he says. “This secret being the thing that Jake holds—he’s trying to be respectful to Cara and her wishes, but also he sees his friend, his best friend, who he considers his own blood. He has to try and find a way to save him because he sees that Bode is going into this dark abyss of prison life, which is basically survival. He’s trying to survive and protect, as we said, doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.”

“That scene was one of the biggest for me, because it is finally being able to grab my friend and bring him back to reality,” Calloway continues. “And before he does something that is irreversible…Max called me when he saw the dallies. He was like, ‘It is perfect, it’s spot on.’ It’s always nice to have that. [While filming it, I was] putting Jake in that situation of, ‘I need to save my friend. What is the best way to do it?’ I kind of equated it to the suicide hotline: if I know my friend is going to do something that is going to ultimately end in his own death or even longer time in prison, I’m going to do everything that I can. That’s who Jake is. Who was there, that had his back when everyone turned their back? It was Bode. Who’s there when everyone turns their back? It’s Jake. That’s my brother.”

But with Bode out now, how much has he changed in those six months away? “I think Bode has always had a very thick shell that he puts around himself,” Burke allows. “That’s part of who he is. It’s part of who he became when he went to prison [initially] and spent so much time there. So making small cracks into that from the outside is what both Vince and Sharon have been trying to do constantly. But now Vince is trying to do it with a softer approach, with [an acknowledgment,] ‘Maybe some of this stuff is my fault, because perhaps I wasn’t the greatest dad in the world.’”

However, it may take a bit of time before the duo have any real heart-to-heart: “We have yet to really have that sort of proper reunion because there’s so much going on all the time,” Burke says. “And that’s the great thing about this show: we have to sort of disperse the emotional emergencies throughout the actual emergencies, and so they get shortchanged, and they get undercut. That’s kind of what happens in real life. I know that we’ve got this really s—ty thing that we need to work out with each other, but there’s this [bigger problem] going on.”

FIRE COUNTRY, Fridays, 9/8c, CBS

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