“It certainly doesn’t go how Bode is anticipating it’s going to go,” Max Thieriot says of Bode’s attempt to rescue Danny (Mike O’Malley), the same man whom he’d attacked years earlier and who wants him to turn himself in and likely face more prison time as a result. He also wasn’t happy when Bode and Jake (Jordan Calloway) showed up at his house at the end of the penultimate episode, with massive flooding heading that way. The Fire Country Season 4 finale, airing May 22, faces that catastrophic dam failure head-on.
“I think it goes worse and then it goes better for Bode and for Danny. But I think the two of them really made a profound impact on each other in this new time they’ve spent together. And I think the thing is that Bode doesn’t blame Danny for feeling the way that he’s felt going into any of this and Bode wants to take full responsibility. And so I think obviously, it takes a while for Danny to hear Bode,” Thieriot continues.
The star, executive producer, and co-creator also raves about working with O’Malley: “Mike is awesome. The guy’s incredible, just an amazing actor, so much fun to be around, and what a joy to have him on the show.”
TV Insider has an exclusive first look at how production created the catastrophic flood sequence: by building a massive water tank directly into a sound stage. Check out the photos below. Thieriot is proud of what they were able to accomplish.
“It was awesome. We built these tanks on the stage, and then we sort of just flooded them. Every day, we increased the water level. One of them, we did totally practically — the interior of the house, we flooded all the way up to the roof,” he explains to us. “Then we built a second piece. Basically, we built these kind of giant containers that could hold water, and we had all these pumps outside the stages, and then we were filling them with water. We built it all, which is an amazing achievement by our construction, just really the whole team, honestly, our production designer, the stuff that they engineered and came up with and drew up and were able to pull off was very impressive.”
The second part was the roof and trees, the set for which was shallower, about three feet at the top of the roof. With the interior of the house, “we had divers in there, especially in the deeper tank. We even had divers in the shallow one,” Thieriot continues. “It’s all about using your imagination and those things, I think, are really fun for everybody to figure out how to pull off because everybody comes together and says, ‘Well, what if we do this? Could we do this? What if we did this part here and this part here?’” Adding in rain and a dark environment allowed them to “cheat” a bit so you can’t tell they’re on a stage.
Thieriot shares that he was “the push behind” making this happen. “I had done underwater work when I did [the 2008 film] Jumper,” he says. “I was going, ‘Guys, I know we can do this.’ Yeah, Jumper spent, on the movie, what we do in a season, but I also know there are clever ways cinematically to pull off these things. I had been pushing this early, of saying, ‘Hey, you give me a roof, we have a set extension, you got people on a roof and a boat by a roof. And if you’re seeing background and you’re seeing trees and everything else, well, now my mind tells me I’m on the roof of a house, and that water isn’t three feet deep, but it’s 30 feet deep.’ So yeah, it was a lot of fun to do.”
Check out the photos below, then head to the comments section to let us know what you’re hoping to see in the finale.
Fire Country, Season 4 Finale, Friday, May 22, 9/8c, CBS
