[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Countdown Season 1 Episode 8 “The Nail in the Chair.”]
Hold on a moment: Has Countdown just killed off the task force’s leader?!
The latest episode ends with Blythe (Eric Dane) bleeding out after arriving for a late-night meeting in an alley and running into some serious trouble. Elsewhere, Oliveras (Jessica Camacho) tries to convince Meachum (Jensen Ackles) to tell their boss about his brain tumor, and the two share a moment outside his house. Plus, Shepherd (Violette Beane) gets a visit from her sister.
Below, stars Jensen Ackles, Jessica Camacho, and Bogdan Yasinksi, and creator Derek Haas break down those key moments.
Did Volchek Just Kill Blythe?!
Astapov (Pasha D. Lychnikoff) from the Belarusian consulate finally agrees to cooperate with Blythe with Volchek (Bogdan Yasinski) intending to set off a dirty bomb in Los Angeles. But when Blythe arrives at the meeting, in an alley that Astapov chooses, he finds the other man dead — and then Volchek stabs him in the side. He flees at the sight of headlights and leaves the knife in Blythe. But Countdown isn’t about to kill off Eric Dane’s character, right?!
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“You’re going to see in the first two minutes [of Episode 9] the strength and resilience of a guy who obviously had a military background, has been on multiple task forces, has gone through FBI training, and it’s going to take every ounce of his strength to even try to put up a red flare for help,” Haas says. “You’re going to see in those first two minutes Eric’s acting is off the charts. And I like a show where we keep the audience on its toes and you think that everybody’s going to make it through, but they don’t all make it through.” After all, the task force already lost one member, Jonathan Togo‘s Drew, in Episode 4.
As for why he wanted to raise the stakes like this at this point in the season, “It feels like both the villain’s storyline and the task force’s storyline were getting on a collision course anyway. And I hadn’t really had a chance to get Blythe out of the office too much,” the creator explains. “I always described him as he could wrangle politically as well as strategically on the task force. I wanted to see that he could be in a senator’s hallway, but also down in the grit of Los Angeles, so it was really my first chance to get him out of the office and then it was not a great first chance for him. But I wanted a one-on-one with Volckek and it doesn’t go so well.”
We can’t help but wonder if Volchek has specifically targeted Blythe in addition to Astapov, or if it’s just happenstance that the agent shows up.
“It’s not a coincidence,” confirms Yasinski, pointing out that he waited after killing Astapov. “He must’ve been tracking them, following somehow. He’s got a whole network and he’s got some capital behind him. He can do some stuff, he can hire [people]all kinds of things. I think this is his chance to not only take revenge on this threat, but also play that next-level chess move: whoever I can get. Maybe he didn’t know it was going to be Blythe, but I think that’s a good BOGO deal. If you’re going to be in that alley, that’s a solid offer.”
Meachum Keeps Tumor Secret From Blythe
After Meachum tells Oliveras about his brain tumor, she insists he tell Blythe. However, just as he’s about to in this episode, they’re called to the scene when a Gallagher truck — which they’ve traced to Volchek — is found outside a federal building. (There’s no bomb, but there are cameras.) Sure, Meachum doesn’t want to be benched, but it’s not like that would keep him from working the case. But that’s not the only reason he’s keeping quiet.
“I don’t think he wants the sympathy,” Jensen Ackles tells us. “I don’t think he wants the pity that could come with telling somebody about your situation. I think he wants to keep that as close to the vest as possible because he doesn’t want people to look at him differently. So I think he used kind of being benched as the external excuse, but I was really believing — and trying to play — that it was much deeper than that, that it was the turn that people would start to look at you different or treat you differently now that they know what’s going on with you. And he does not want that.”
Adds Haas, “I actually think that what Oliveras says to him gets through to him and he is going to come clean. I don’t think that would ever stop him from pursuing the investigation, even if he is sidelined; he doesn’t really follow people’s orders anyway. But I do think he wants to come clean because what she said makes a lot of sense and it is selfish what he’s doing.”
Jessica Camacho has said that Oliveras would probably do the same thing Meachum is, not just sitting on a beach to leave out his final days but trying to save the city, so does that mean she’d also keep a diagnosis from her boss like he is?
“I honestly don’t know,” Camacho says. “She wouldn’t want to just be back at home with her feet up knowing that the people that she’s come to care about, her partners, are risking their lives in this very unique way to save so many people, and it’s a part of her DNA now, it’s in her cells to get up and go do something about it. She doesn’t know what to do because she’s like, ‘I need you. I need you by my side as my partner. We need you. But also I care about these other people, too. You’re putting them at risk. You’re putting me at risk.’”
She adds that Oliveras also looks at the situation as, “‘I got him.’ I think that’s why she keeps such a close eye on him. She’s like, ‘I’m the only one who knows what’s going on. So this is what it is. This is what he needs, this is what he wants, and we have this mission. At least I’m by his side.’ She’s got a lot on her plate. She really does.”
Meachum & Oliveras’s Moment
When Oliveras drops Meachum at home near the end of the episode, the two share a moment when he suggests she crash at his place (he’ll take the couch) and even offers to make the noises of her sound machine. She ultimately turns him down, telling him she’s not his ex-fiancée or her sister, so it wouldn’t work.
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“I thought that scene turned out dynamite,” raves Haas. When it comes to that slow burn, “What I want is these two who, in a very stressful, emotional, heightened place, don’t want to do this the wrong way and think that, did we do this just because all of our feelings were out on the table? Not to mention that Meachum’s going through what he’s going through. I just think they need to get their stars aligned prior to something more potentially they could hurt each other’s friendship.”
For Oliveras, that situation is “messy,” Camacho says, “and she doesn’t like messy. She likes clean-cut, she likes simple, straightforward, and this potential situation is anything but that. It’s vulnerable and layered. And they depend on one another. They’re partners, they work together, and you see them discovering this other kind of pull, this curiosity, this shared kind of knowledge that they have, this shared understanding, and this bond that’s kind of just naturally organically created that has its own pull. So she’s stuck. She’s like, ‘Goodnight, I gotta go.’ I don’t think she knows what to do with it all.”
Shepherd’s Sister Visits
As if dealing with the major threat to Los Angeles isn’t enough, Shepherd also has to contend with her sister, Molly (Michelle DeShon), visiting — despite her not answering her calls and telling her mother she can’t be there at the moment. The first thing Molly wants to do is go out with her sister, but Shepherd declines, reminding her she’s on a task force and telling her to think about someone other than herself (and that it’s not safe in LA). Molly, in return, says that with no audience there, she can save it for someone who doesn’t know how she used to be. Yes, Molly is named after Haas’s mother, just like the bar on Chicago Fire is.
“I named the bar after my mom because my mom is from Texas, never drank in her life, is a total teetotaler. And so I thought this would also be funny that the messed-up sister is named Molly. It’s an inside joke only to me and my family,” the creator says.
“I thought it was a cool notion to do it where the younger sibling is the one who’s gotten their life together and the older sibling is the one that needs to have some tough love. You’re always trying to flip cards on characters, especially when you do have plans for the show to continue. It was a 13-episode show and you can’t give everybody all the information right away. And I like it when it’s like, ‘Oh, I didn’t see that coming,’” he continues. “So now an audience member is going to be like, what was Shepherd like before she joined the FBI? Will that rear its head at some point? So [it’s] a little glimpse into Shepherd’s personal life.”
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It’s also about showing how family members react to a person’s job. “I think in these shows, when you’re doing a crime show, a lot of times people think that the law enforcement characters’ lives are only about what’s happening on the show, and everybody who’s ever worked a job knows that in real life, it’s not like that. Your family does not respect your deadlines a lot of the times and you’ll say, ‘I’ve got this going on.’ They’ll be like, ‘Oh, you’re being dramatic,’” Haas explains. “And that’s true of FBI agents and task force members and police, and this investigation is not a weeklong investigation. Most task forces sometimes go on for years, and life doesn’t stop. And so I just thought it would be an interesting dramatic element to have a family member who is not respectful of what’s going on in the world.”
That Flashback
In a flashback to 2021, Volchek is brought in by the LAPD for bribing a city official, and while he’s in a LAPD precinct, Meachum and Finau (Uli Latukefu) just so happen to walk by talking about a case.
“I just loved that idea that — I think about this a lot, right? I’ve been married for 30 years now and we met when we were in college and I wonder how many times our paths crossed prior to that. I worked in a mall and at a shoe store in high school and I just wonder who passed me by that I have no idea, and then our fates … and I just thought the audience would get a real kick out of seeing that they were this close to what was going to end up being their prey later,” Haas says.
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