SEAL Team Season Finale Recap: Always Improve Your Fighting Position
Paramount+’s SEAL Team closed out Season 6 with a daring escape, a sorrowful visit to Clay’s grave, a bit of Bulkhead revelry, and then a medal ceremony that teed up one wild twist.
Picking up right where last week left off, with Bravo’s exfil downed by a rocket and the team stranded on a bombed-out street with tangoes arriving, Jason & Co. quickly worked the problem. With Ray and Brock as overwatch/snipers, Jay and Omar headed to the downed copter, per orders, while Sonny and Trent set out to secure a vehicle. At the copter, Jay and Omar found one pilot OK, and the other badly wounded but breathing. Things got very intense when Sonny and Trent found themselves pinned down just feet away from a crowd of baddies, and though Sonny (not himself, in the wake of the Clay news) nearly went rogue to pick a fight he (and likely others) surely wouldn’t win, Ray talked him down. And when most of the baddies cleared out, Bravo cleared the rest of the playing field and united at the chopper. There, with the female pilot in urgent need of care, Sonny whopped out a backup med kit he started packing under his vest ever since Clay almost died in Mali.
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Bravo didn’t make it back to the States in time for Clay’s funeral, so they instead gathered at his headstone, where Ray looped in everyone on the circumstances surrounding Clay’s death. (“What’s that vet going to do with the years that Clay won’t get?” asked Sonny; said Ray, “I hope he makes the most of them.”) The team let Sonny have a moment alone with Clay, where he recalled “all those times you swim buddy’d me and I left you vulnerable to the sharks.” Sonny then said he would make good on the promise he made after Clay was wounded in Mali: “I’m going to look out for Stella and Brian, don’t you worry about them.” Stella herself then arrived at Sonny’s side, and explained that the funeral couldn’t be delayed since Command couldn’t say how long or short Bravo would be. Sonny invited Stella to a sendoff they were having at the Bulkhead, but she admitted she wasn’t ready to face all those memories just yet.
At said Bulkhead gathering, Mandy met Omar, and Clay’s dad Ash jabbed Jason a bit about “having a memorial today” for his son, but tomorrow Jason gets the Navy Cross for saving Clay’s life. “How’s that for irony?” But Jason made clear he too feels the situation is “bulls–t,” the men cooled off, and Clay’s photo was hung on the wall near Swanny’s, where Ash noted that Bravo gave Clay the family and support he couldn’t.
Elsewhere at the Bulkhead: When Lisa arrived, she fended off Sonny’s latest jag about her not doing right by Bravo by relaying the intel she literally just obtained: Mali went sideways because the battle space commander, Col. Decker, had failed to change the comms channels as frequently as he should, so SGS had been listening in and knew that Bravo was coming. And with Decker about to be upped to brigadier general, the “oops” was being swept under the rug. Sonny sought his own small bit of justice later, though, by finding Decker in a packie parking lot and then laying him out with one punch. “You suck at security, Colonel. At least no one died this time.”
The next day was Jason’s Navy Cross ceremony, where Stella waved off the honoree’s misgivings. “If you hadn’t saved Clay that day, I would have had even less time with my husband, and he would never have had a chance to be a dad, which he loved so much,” she said. “I never took a second of that time for granted, and I’m here to see you honored for giving it to us.” (As my eyes well up an umpteenth time, just recapping that exchange.) Blackburn meanwhile informed Davis that Decker had been assaulted the night before by someone who knew him, and if the attacker was military, there would be hell to pay. Lisa then went to sit with Sonny, noting his bruised knuckles — and took his hand, smiling.
Blackburn made a swell speech about Jason’s heroics, then invited the Navy Cross recipient to say a few words. And words he did say!
Jason admitted that Clay would have never been in that ambush if he hadn’t made a point of joining the op in order to keep an eye on his TBI-impaired team leader. So while Clay was watching his team’s back, “I was watching my own back, worried that command would discover what this war had done to my head,” Jason told the crowd. “I hid my brain injury; Clay Spenser paid the ultimate price for it.” Jay noted how Clay once tried to fight the good fight against TBI suppression but was told to stand down. “So today, I’m taking up that fight for him, because this war machine has to stop ignoring the problem and start protecting the protectors.”
A montage that followed Jason’s declaration tricked us into thinking that things had gone badly for everyone afterward. We saw Stella take down a photo of Clay with Bravo… Ray removed the signage for their vet center from the arrival area… and Jason, at the beach with Cerberus, was seen racing toward and diving into the ocean… and not surfacing.
But then we saw what was really going on, as Stella re-hung the Bravo photo in Brian’s nursery, to watch over him… Ray replaced the sign with one that rechristened his and Naima’s facility Spenser House (sob!)… and Jason emerged from the water.
We then jumped to a meeting room, where Jason was being called on the carpet by Blackburn and other superiors for what he disclosed in public. “You created one hell of a mess, and left us no choice but to stand you down,” Blackburn announced. Ray interrupted the proceedings to “amend” his character witness statement by revealing that he has been suffering PTS since his kidnapping. And just as Blackburn dismissed Ray’s gesture and what point he thought it would prove, EVVVVERYBODY filed into the room — Sonny, Brock, Trent, Omar and two dozen other operators, each recounting what impairs them. Near-constant headaches. Tinnitus. Breacher syndrome. The inability to sleep. Blurry vision. Memory lapses. You name it.
“Thanks, brother,” Jason said to Ray beside him. Ray scoffed, “What’s command gonna do, pull all our birds? Like you taught me, boss dog: Always improve your fighting position.”
What did you think of SEAL Team‘s latest season finale?
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