‘Duster’ Finale: LaToya Morgan on Those Bombshells & Season 2 Hopes

[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for the Duster Season 1 finale.]

The first season of Duster has come to a bittersweet end. The finale sees the culmination of this season’s events (and leaves a few dangling threads for a potential Season 2 to pull from).

The episode begins with young Nina back in Philadelphia in 1954 at the moment when she first lays eyes on Ezra Saxton (Keith David) as he gives her father a tongue-lashing at his convenience store, and she accidentally alerts them to her presence. In the present day, Nina (Rachel Hilson) awakes in custody, with Billy (Evan Jones) torturing her for information about who else she’s been working with besides Jim Ellis (Josh Holloway).

It doesn’t take long for Jim to realize what has happened to her. After returning his daughter Luna to Izzy’s (Camille Guaty) house, her doctor boyfriend mentions meeting Billy at the hospital and the fact that he spoke to Sheriff Groomes (Donal Logue), who woke up from the coma. Jim, knowing Saxton has eyes in the bureau, then alerts Nina’s partner, Awan Bitsui (Asivak Koostachin), not to go after her or else Saxton will hear about it and kill her on the spot. He and Jessica (Sofia Vassilieva) reluctantly oblige.

When confronted by Saxton himself, Nina doesn’t flinch, instead offering up her reasons — including showing him the content of her locket, a photo of her fallen father, whose death she blames him for. Saxton reveals, though, that her father was an informant. Jim then arrives and informs Saxton that his father, Wade (Corbin Bernsen), is with Saxton’s daughter Genesis (Sydney Elisabeth). Though it’s a friendly visit to her bar for now, as insurance for Jim’s safety, Wade is willing to do what it takes if things go wrong. Then, Jim willfully submits to imprisonment alongside Nina.

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Undeterred by this threat, Saxton still calls up a fixer to take out Nina, and that duty then falls to the duplicitous Agent Grant (Dan Tracy), whose movement alerts Bitsui to his true intentions. Billy and Saxton then leave Nina in the desert and take Jim to meet the Greek, Sal, to exchange Jim for the mysterious tape that’s been at the center of all of the backdoor dealings all season long.

Nina manages to narrowly avoid being shot by Grant in the desert, but when all hope seems lost, Awan arrives to save her. Then, just after handing over Jim and taking the tape, Saxton has a change of heart — apparently, it isn’t worth the risk to Genesis’ life after all — and he guns down Sal. Now freed, Jim pledges to go back for Nina if he survives the shootout, but lo, she arrives all her own, saving Saxton from a gunman just behind him. However, Saxton still ends up taking a shot to the chest to protect Royce (Benjamin Charles Watson) from another gunman. We don’t yet know if Saxton is dead from his wounds, as Jim merely tells Genesis that her brother is in the hospital with her father. (Lost in the melee are Billy, who likely won’t survive being shot through the eye, and several other minions from either side.)

Elsewhere in the episode, Izzy is successful in convincing Bob Temple (Kevin Chamberlain) to institute some union changes to benefit women drivers and end the strike, which is great news. However, she has some potentially terrible news, too; her boyfriend is also her oncologist, and she will need Jim to stick around for Luna’s sake in case treatment doesn’t go well.

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With Saxton in the hospital and her mission to implicate Saxton in a crime complete, Nina attempts to resign from the FBI, but Abbott (Greg Grunberg) won’t accept it. He informs her that she has been right all along about a bureau conspiracy and that it extends further than anyone could’ve imagined — all the way back to D.C. This is, of course, a reference to the mysterious figure we haven’t met yet, Xavier, whom the late Breen left a tape about before he lost his mind. Abbott will need Nina to help connect the dots.

As Jim sits on the side of the road with his title car, Nina arrives to tell him she’s staying for the top-secret investigation, and her one condition for doing so was learning about Xavier. Turns out, Xavier is a code name for a national security threat whose real identity is Joey, the brother Jim thought was dead. And Saxton was the one to help Joey disappear.

The season ends with Raoul’s guys opening the tape and realizing it’s the Richard Nixon Oval Office tapes that would become an infamous article of American history. So what could come next after all of these bombshell developments?

“I’m really curious to meet Xavier,” Rachel Hilson told TV Insider of a potential follow-up to the finale’s events. “And I’m interested to see how Nina’s role in the bureau evolves and … how she’s treated and how she feels now that she’s not attached to this mission.”

“Joey just better not be handsome and younger and a bigger star or I’m gone,” Josh Holloway also joked.

As for who might potentially star in a Season 2 of Duster as Joey a.k.a. Xavier, series cocreator LaToya Morgan teased, “Yes, we have a bunch of great names that we’ve been thinking about… We’re so excited about where that’s gonna take us, and hopefully, if we get a Season 2, so many fun escapades to get into — all very exciting, I think.”

Morgan also teased that when it comes to the future relationship between Nina and Jim after that almost-kiss, the possibilities are endless. “Listen, all options are on the table. I’ll leave it at that. We’ve had many, many discussions about it, because, of course, there’s the age difference… but I mean, they just have such undeniable chemistry. Who knows what can happen between them?” she said. “So there’s the fun of that and then, of course, there is Izzy and Jim, they have this great on-again, off-again relationship, and there’s Luna, who’s also a factor, and so his heart is also always kind of there. So it’s just fun to just play with those emotions and sort of see where they lead us. I won’t spoil anything, but I’m just saying there could be things that happen in Season 2.”

As for Saxton’s fate after the shooting left him hospitalized, Morgan teased that the issue is “not fully in the past,” and there’ll be “loose ends” from that case. But the biggest story going forward will be Joey. “Who is Joey now? And what has he been getting into and who has he been getting into it with?” Morgan pondered. “There are a lot more murky areas that we want to peel back the layers of to really deepen the story and really challenge Jim and Nina’s relationship. They’ve just sort of kind of come to a place where they have a little bit of trust and now, what happens when this other X factor is thrown into the mix, so there’s lots of good stuff to play with.”

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