SEAL Team said goodbye to a few characters over the course of its seven-season run, which ended on Paramount+ with its finale on October 6, but the one that still left viewers heartbroken was Clay Spenser, as Max Thieriot moved to Fire Country.
His death—while trying to help a vet at Ray (Neil Brown Jr.) and Naima’s (Parisa Fakhri) shelter—sent shockwaves through the rest of Bravo’s sixth season and all of season seven. But we could still see him again, in a flashback or some other way. However, executive producer Spencer Hudnut told TV Insider that he wasn’t even trying to bring Thieriot back for the final episodes.
“Honestly, keeping Max from doing his job in Season 6 was so difficult that I wasn’t even going to open that can of worms,” he explained.
Still, he notes, “Clay exists. Clay is definitely going to haunt the season. I mean, obviously he’s inspiring Sonny [A.J. Buckley] in a lot of ways and he haunts Ray on a number of levels. And I think we honor Clay in the end, through Stella [Alona Tal] and through Sonny’s actions. I think even in death, Clay really helped Sonny become the best version of himself. And so, to me, that’s enough.”
Hudnut didn’t realize this would be the final season until breaking it; he said he found out around the ninth script. If the producers had known earlier, “I’m sure we would have gone down different rabbit holes and brought people back from the past,” he said. Among the possibilities? Vic (Lucca De Oliveira), who was with Bravo in Season 3 until the others took away his trident when he was ready to hold Ray accountable for a mistake he made. “When our guys are struggling with what happens after the surgery, a guy with a trident that they took could have an impact on them,” Hudnut explained. “But 10 episodes is such a small amount of time. I mean, I get a lot of messages on social media about just introducing a new character, and people are upset about it. So to bring people from the past in when every moment needs to be so valuable…”
