‘SEAL Team’ Goes Beyond the War on Terror in Season 5’s Network Return
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The boys are back! Team leader Jason Hayes (David Boreanaz) and his patriotic, do-or-die Bravo unit were last seen on CBS in 2021, in Season 5 of SEAL Team’s fourth episode, before the military drama moved to a new home on Paramount+.
Now the network is running all 14 action-packed hours of that fifth installment, starting with an explosive premiere (the first of a two-parter) that follows the guys on a covert operation to help a weapons expert defect from North Korea. If they don’t get in and out in 24 hours, they’re toast.
(Credit: CBS)
“This [mission] felt different and exciting in a way that we haven’t done before,” executive producer Spencer Hudnut told us back when the show was making the switch to streaming. “It’s not just the war on terror anymore. We have our finger on what’s going on in the real world.”
Things had gotten heartbreakingly real in the fourth-season finale, when Bravo learned their buddy Scott Carter (Scott Foxx), aka Full Metal, had died from injuries he sustained protecting his brothers from a rocket-propelled grenade. There was also cause for celebration: Clay (Max Thieriot, now starring on Fire Country) married longtime girlfriend Stella (Alona Tal).
Meanwhile, Jason left the wedding reception with a debilitating headache, which— along with his increasing forgetfulness — casts a shadow going forward. “[This season] we examine what years of combat in the war on terror has done to [soldiers],” Hudnut revealed to us in 2021. “Jason keeps an eye on [his health] situation to make sure he’s able to operate.”
The risks that Jason’s war injuries are creating for the team become undeniable in the eighth episode, when all of Bravo is hospitalized at the same time with little memory of how they got there. The answer brings a formal diagnosis for Jason — and a major change to the unit before an adrenaline-pumping deployment to Venezuela. A bright spot for the battered soldier: the return of former colleague Mandy Ellis (Jessica Paré), with whom he’s always had chemistry. Can love heal all?
SEAL Team, Season 5, Thursday, November 2, 10/9c, CBS
