‘Countdown’: Jensen Ackles & Derek Haas on Meachum’s Mortality & Blythe’s Fate

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Countdown Season 1 Episode 9 “10-33.”]

The Countdown task force may be about to lose one of its own — and no, not the agent who was stabbed at the end of the previous episode.

Episode 8 left off with task force leader Blythe (Eric Dane) being stabbed by Volchek (Bogdan Yasinski), and it certainly doesn’t look good considering all the blood he loses dragging himself to his car to turn on his sirens to alert someone to his location. The team rushes to the hospital, concerned, before heading to the crime scene to see what they can find once they get a status update — thanks to an old friend of Oliveras’ (Jessica Camacho), Julio (Eddie Aguirre), being a doctor there — and know he’ll be in surgery for an hour.

Blythe is going to be just fine and even argues against staying at the hospital for observation for long. But did creator Derek Haas ever consider killing him off? He tells TV Insider he didn’t.

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“I had this all mapped out from when we first started, so the scripts were already written before we ever began. So I mean, of course, when you’re writing something, a lot of times in your brain you’ll just be like, ‘Oh, what if I did that?’ Sometimes that wins where you’re like, ‘Oh, they won’t expect this because I didn’t even expect it when I was writing it,'” he says. “And then sometimes you just stick to what your plan was, so there wasn’t a real plan to kill him off. I wanted to see what resolve he had under that very polished exterior.”

But we are concerned about Meachum (Jensen Ackles), who’s getting worse because of his brain tumor that only Oliveras knows about. In this episode, he nearly falls off a roof chasing a suspect because of his headaches and vertigo. But was that yet the wake-up call he needs?

“I think each one of these episodes that he has is a wake-up call. I think he’s starting to really wrestle with his mortality, and as much as he can shove it away and shove it down, which is probably what he’s lived his life doing with any kind of feelings that aren’t comfortable, he’s becoming less and less able to hide it and to keep making up excuses for it because now it’s happening in front of others,” admits Ackles. “So yeah, I think the veil is getting thinner and thinner.”

The task force does discover Volchek’s plan: set off bombs at the Vine. But what’s worse is Finau’s (Uli Latukefu) family is there. This is again where having the season mapped out came into play for Haas.

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“I really like what we call long throws. You don’t always have the chance to do that on these kind of shows. We did it on Chicago Fire a few times where you would just lightly show something, and you’d think that’s all that story was about, but then much later, you bring it back into play. And so I really wanted to meet his family early. He’s kind of the little John to Meachum’s Robin Hood, and I like the idea that he’s got this loving family, not a jerk family who doesn’t respect him. They genuinely care for him and believe in him,” the creator explains.

“And so what better danger than to put that family into the thick of Volchek’s plan? Happenstance, but plan. I thought it would bring personal stakes to a potential terrorist attack because I just think about in these attacks that happen in real life, that these victims have families,” he adds. “We just see them as names a lot of times in newspaper articles, but they have lives and families and all those things. So the fact that we’ve met this family before makes it bigger than just he’s trying to blow up a big commercial shopping area.”

Oh, and if you think that Julio might be a complication in Meachum and Oliveras’ slow burn, well, you’d be right.

“I think as anyone would be who met Oliveras and re-met her after being childhood friends, he’s probably like, ‘I remember that girl. She was amazing back then. She seems still amazing.’ Why wouldn’t you want to bump into her again? I think that he kind of speaks for any audience member watching this show. So yeah, it is a complication because he is not a bad dude. He seems like a great guy,” says Haas.

Countdown, Wednesdays, Prime Video