[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Fire Country Season 2 Episode 16 “Dirty Money.”]
“Man, Leones are stubborn,” Fire Country star, co-creator, executive producer, and director Max Thieriot reminds us. In other words, it’s not going to be so easy for Bode and Sharon (Diane Farr) to see each other’s side when it comes to their conflict at the end of the latest episode.
Following the reveal that chemical company Oxalta was behind the poisoning of the well water that made all the Three Rock inmates sick (and killed one), Eve (Jules Latimer) and Sharon met with their lawyer (J. August Richards) and other representatives to see what could be done. Once Jake’s (Jordan Calloway) girlfriend Violet (Nesta Cooper), in a new job with the company, slipped information to Eve about how Oxalta has done this before, Sharon used that to get a deal: Oxalta paid to clean up Three Rock, and Manny (Kevin Alejandro) got released early, in exchange for everyone signing NDAs. As Bode saw it, it was dirty money — and Oxalta can just go and do the same again.
“For the most part, [Sharon’s] always kind of been [Bode’s] protector, and she’s always been Mama Bear,” Thieriot tells TV Insider in the video interview above. “Storytelling-wise, it felt interesting to be able to see a little bit different side of their relationship and what happens when these two people don’t agree on something. It certainly has a different look and feel to when Bode and Vince [Billy Burke] aren’t seeing eye to eye.”
And it’s not going to be quite so easy for that to change due to the aforementioned stubbornness of this family. “There’s usually not a lot of meeting in the middle,” admits Thieriot. “I think the way that it unfolds is really fun, but I think it’s safe to assume that most disagreements are only really realized when somebody ends up being the winner in the situation.”
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We also saw how stubborn this family can be on the other side of it for Sharon, with her sister Mickey (Morena Baccarin, set to lead the Sheriff Country spinoff next season) and Mickey’s father Wes (W. Earl Brown). One of the men who worked for him in his criminal business tried to kill him in this episode, leading to Bode and Mickey teaming up to investigate and save him. But when Mickey asked him to “go legal” so they could have a relationship (since she’s the sheriff), he refused.
Thieriot confirms they left that relationship like that because the spinoff is coming. “We have to have a huge arc for those two in this series and just maintain that sort of conflict of having a father who is the epitome of everything that she’s not and what he represents versus what she represents and why she became a sheriff and the childhood that she had,” he says.
Elsewhere in the episode, Jake began worrying about whether or not he’ll be able to grow at Station 42 like he wants; everyone knows that the “keys to the kingdom,” a.k.a. Vince’s job, is Bode’s at some point. Vince overheard him talking to Gabriela (Stephanie Arcila) about it, but when Jake tried to talk to the battalion chief, he just brushed it off with the cliche “I’m not dead yet” line.
“It puts a little strain on Vince and Jake’s relationship, but more than anything, I think it’s not about being upset with somebody, it’s more one of those situations where people are a little hurt and disappointed,” explains Thieriot. “I think that everybody sort of knows, certainly once Bode was hired by Cal Fire and showed up at 42, that Leones have run that station for decades. And so I think that Jake isn’t blind to that, whether he hears Vince say it or not, but I think at the same time it really is forcing Jake to take a step back and sort of look at his own life and look at his own aspirations and where he wants to be and what he wants to be doing.”
Watch the full video interview above with Thieriot for a complete breakdown of this episode and what’s still to come.
