The following contains major spoilers from the November 6 episode of SEAL Team, now streaming on Paramount+.
In the eighth episode of SEAL Team Season 6, life outside the fence starts to look really good for Clay Spenser (Max Thieriot), when he suggests to his wife Stella (Alona Tal) that they blow up their family’s three-foot world, put Vah Beach in the past, and start a new life away from him, Green Team, and everyone else.
But ever since Clay told Jason before the Mali operation that he planned to take a break from operations, a red flag has been flying. Clay’s sweet conversation with Stella is interrupted by a call from Ben, the depressed guy he met at Ray and Naima’s vet last week. Clay goes out at night and finds Ben about to vandalize an Army recruiting center. And when Clay convinces Ben not to vandalize the place, Ben pulls out a pistol and shoots himself in the head.
Clay cleverly convinces Ben not to end his life, and takes the gun from him. But then a security guard’s flashlight suddenly illuminates the men, revealing a gun in one hand of Clay, and a terrified Ben in the other. The guard quickly fires two shots at Clay, who falls to the ground and dies instantly, while Ben slides into the night.
“Easy Day.”
After screening this week’s episode, TVLine caught up with showrunner Spencer Hudnut to talk about how Thieriot’s new role on Fire Country affects Clay’s fate, and how Bravo will handle the bombshell as they head into a dangerously long missing person case in the two-part season finale (streaming November 13 and 20).
CBS ordered the first episode of Max’s Fire Country in early February, and it was scheduled to air in mid-May. At what point in the development process for that show did this SEAL Team “exit” start to take shape? It really started at the end of Season 5; there was some question about whether Max would return for Season 6, so the cliffhanger ending of Season 5 [in Mali] was a little bit driven by that. And as Fire Country kept passing each development check, it became more and more clear that there was a real possibility that we were going to lose Max at some point. So for the storyline that we were coming up with for Clay this season, we knew that we were going to have to separate him from the group to maximize what we could get out of Max before he left. As for the decision [to kill Clay]…. I actually put this off for as long as I could, hoping that Max wouldn’t leave the show and we’d keep him. It wasn’t until a month after Fire Country was picked up [to series] that it became clear that Max was leaving. People had been talking about him doing both shows, but it was very clear that wasn’t the case.
That as ambitious as Max was, it just wasn’t possible.
It wasn’t. He was shooting [Fire Country] in Vancouver, he was the star of that show, we were second…. Our seasons didn’t match, and now we’re doing short orders…. Right now I’m sitting here breaking down Season 7, so how am I supposed to bring Clay in without knowing if/when/how we’re going to bring him back? It wasn’t really until after Fire Country was greenlit for series that we had to face this reality, and by that point we had already broken most of the season and written half of it. We were a little strapped.
