🚨 The following contains spoilers from the April 25 Season 3 finale of CBS‘ Fire Country.

🚨 It also involves a pair of un-casting spoilers for Season 4.

During his recent visit to TVLine’s New York video studio, Fire Country lead and co-creator Max Thieriot teased the Season 3 finale thusly:

It wouldn’t be Fire Country if we didn’t leave you hanging to some extent — in a big way this time. I think it’s gonna hit.

A big cliffhanger indeed was served up, as Bode (played by Thieriot) helplessly watched as the roof of his grandfather’s memory care facility, engulfed in flames, collapsed — with both of Bode’s firefighter parents, Sharon and Vince, as well as Walter, all still inside.

There was also a smaller cliffhanger in which Bode’s ex-convict girlfriend Audrey confessed to shooting Gabriela’s stalker, Finn, in an act of self-defense, to spare Gabby further harm. Last we saw, Audrey was being led away by LEOs, Finn’s fate TBD.

News of two cast member exits, reported on Friday night after the two-hour finale drew to a close, seems to spoil one character who doesn’t emerge from the collapsed memory care facility alive, and suggests a surprise outcome for the shooting storyline.

Without further ado (and after one last SPOILER WARNING), let’s talk about those two exits, the well-teased sendoff that apparently won’t be happening, and the devastating loss suffered in the finale.

Even though Audrey took the rap for shooting Finn, it appears Gabriela will have left town when Season 4 opens — given that original cast member Stephanie Arcila isn’t returning as a series regular. This exit shocked me, if only because it seemed from Day 1 that Bode/Gabriela were “endgame.” Then again, Gabby has gone through it over the three seasons, and she truly spiraled this year after veritably leaving Diego at the altar and watching her dad get imprisoned for assault. I enjoyed seeing Gabriela come out the other side of that spiral, and even befriend Bode’s new romantic interest, Audrey. It will be odd to have her absent, but if the producers sincerely intend to “bring Gabriela back at some point in a really satisfying, beautiful way for the audience who I know cares as deeply about that [#Bodiela] relationship as we do,” I’m willing to wait and see how that pans out.

Deadline’s Q&A with the producers posits that Billy Burke was among a group of series regulars asked to reduce their episode counts (and thus income) for Season 3, but the cast locked arms and said no. So, maybe just writing out both Burke and Arcila was a way of not trying to meet the actors in the middle any longer. This exit, especially if a death, also caught me off guard, partly because Burke and TV wife Diane Farr always speak warmly of working together; they both felt like “lifers” here. That said, as a Burke fan dating back to The Closer, I’m excited to see where he turns up next. As far as Vince is concerned, I believe this could fuel some good storytelling, for Bode but especially a widowed Sharon. Not to mention, it vacates 42’s battalion chief gig for…

Plot twist! After establishing Jake’s impatience with the immovable pecking order at Station 42, and going so far as to have him give his two weeks’ notice (to join up with a Butte firehouse), losing Vince would seem to pave the way for Jake to get what he wanted, and thus stay put in his hometown. I applaud this fake-out, because that would have been a pretty weak way to write out Jordan Calloway’s character after so much development.

Ex-convict Audrey’s self-defense argument may hold up, given that the producers have said that “the meat of early next season” involves how she and Bode will navigate the aftermath of Finn’s shooting and her role in it. This works for me, since we’ve only gotten a hint of the Bode/Audrey relationship — and certainly nothing as steamy, yet, as he and Gabby shared. But I was also kinda into the idea of Audrey being sent back to prison for having defended Bode’s ex; there would have been something beautifully altruistic about that.

Guys, this is the loss that gutted me as the second hour of Friday’s finale came to a close — especially to see the sad reactions of the devastated, largely nameless inmates under Eve’s purview. Did I think that the bucket brigade that involved a suddenly 200 yard-long line of prison campers, who lobbed dollops of water that fell absurdly short of the burning cabin, was going to save the day? Ha, far from it. I was hoping for a water drop. But no, Three Rock is cinders now. And though the producers have said that “Eve’s big arc in Season 4 is how to reconstitute” the camp, it will be sad to have the fire camp absent to any extent when Fire Country returns.

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