‘Sheriff Country’ Boss Explains Shocking Cliffhanger, Mickey & Travis’ Feelings, and More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Sheriff Country Season 1 Episode 9 “Crucible, Part 1.”]

Man down! Sheriff Country leaves fans with quite the cliffhanger at the end of the Friday, December 19, fall finale, ahead of its hiatus until February 2026.

A custody issue involving one of Edgewater’s most powerful families, who run a secluded ranch where no one recognizes law enforcement’s authority, comes to the sheriff’s stations front doors — and inside it. Just as it seems like Mickey’s (Morena Baccarin) de-escalating the situation, and the head of the Barlows, Enoch (Michael Gaston), will see the process through, the FBI arrests him for tax evasion since they can’t yet get him for the weapons they know he has stockpiled. His family then attacks the station … and Mickey’s ex-husband Travis (Christopher Gorham), who’s there hoping that they can rekindle their relationship after sleeping together, is shot!

Below, showrunner Matt Lopez breaks down that cliffhanger and other key fall finale moments, teases what’s to come when the show returns on February 27 as well as with the upcoming Fire Country two-part crossover, and reacts to the early Season 2 renewal.

Congratulations on the Season 2 renewal.

Matt Lopez: Thank you. It was very exciting. I kind of had a feeling just because the show had been performing, but we had sort of been told, “Oh, you probably won’t hear until January.” So it was a nice little year-end surprise.

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What can you say about Travis’ fate?

[Laughs] Well, it hangs in the balance and at an extremely emotional time where he is just on the heels of confessing to Mickey how he’s still in love with her and wants them to have another go at it. And Mickey is, I think, thinking about it and it’s obviously very, very dramatic. It’s a big, important — it’s essentially a two-part episode, so folks will have to tune in to our Episode 10.

But look, I think you have to expose characters to jeopardy, right? I think it keeps the stakes alive, it grounds the show. It’s real life when you have characters dealing in law enforcement, and even though Travis isn’t, poor Travis is really in the wrong place at the wrong time when that goes down. But I think the B side, the way the story will unravel in the back half of the season will have really emotional ramifications for not just Mickey, but for Skye [Amanda Arcuri], for Boone [Matt Lauria]. This siege episode and what’s happening will really bind our characters together in, I think, a way that they’ve never been before. The first half of the season, we started off, as you well recall, with Boone investigating Skye for Brandon’s murder. And if they can survive long enough, I think our heroes will emerge stronger for it.

Did you have Travis be the one who was shot because of what’s happening with Mickey, or did what happened with Mickey and Travis happen because you knew you were going to leave his life hanging in the balance? Which came first?

We had a sense that we wanted to obviously create a really juicy cliffhanger, but it wasn’t like we picked — we weren’t intentionally picking on Travis. There were versions where, early days in the writers’ room, other characters’ lives were put in jeopardy. We’re just really fascinated by the Mickey and Travis relationship and the idea that sometimes people who you spend a lifetime with and years with, we just love the idea that they got together when they were 17 and 18 years old, they had a kid very, very young and they never got to experience kind of a romance like most normal people do. They were sort of thrust into this situation. And the idea that, gosh, at the end of the day, who’s the most surprising person to fall in love with, aside from your ex-husband, your ex-spouse? We just think that that’s really interesting terrain to play, and we think the jeopardy to Travis’s life is really well earned. When audiences see where we take the story on the B side, I think they will find it very rewarding. It’s not one of these, oh, we need a cliffhanger, let’s pick a name out of a hat and get him shot. It is really kind of interesting where it goes.

Which are the characters you were considering having in danger? Was it the same cliffhanger, someone being shot and we just hear it, or was it a different cliffhanger depending on the character?

Yes, we talked about Cassidy [Michele Weaver], we talked about — The Barlows who start to lay siege at the end of the episode you watched, they intentionally created a situation where it’s a skeleton crew. It’s not only end of watch, so there’s very few people in a small-town police station at end of watch, but most of the people who were there have been called on this red herring call. So it’s a crucible. The episode’s literally titled, “Crucible.” We love this idea of taking our heroes and who have had these divisions all season long — Travis was sleeping with Mickey’s deputy and a woman who she’s really close to in Cassidy, Mickey and Boone have had their issues. So putting them all through this cauldron and seeing if we can’t have them emerge stronger on the other side.

So, how is Mickey going to be dealing with everything in the next episode? Because there are her feelings for Travis to take into account, but she’s also the sheriff. She has to manage the entire situation.

It puts all of her skills to this ultimate test, and I can’t wait for audiences to see it. It might be Morena’s finest hour on the show, and she’s already had, through halfway of a season of television, so many because you’re absolutely right, she’s dealing with 10 different balls in the air. A person has been shot. That would be stressful enough, but it’s her ex-husband and the father of her child who she still harbors some feelings for. At the same time, she has this incredibly fraught and dangerous situation to manage in her role as the sheriff, and that’s very much the waters we play in all season long. I think one of the reasons audiences have responded to Mickey is this dichotomy between a woman who, on the one hand is a mom and a daughter and a mentor, and on the other hand is the sheriff of a small town. And in many ways, all the episodes we’ve been telling in some way play off of that theme. But in this two-part mid-season finale, that is put to the most extreme test it’s had yet.

Christos Kalohoridis/CBS

I have to say how much I enjoy where you’ve taken Mickey and Boone and we’re seeing what they were like as partners before because there was all the tension at the beginning of the season. But now they’re back to teasing each other and things like that. The car scene in this episode? Fantastic. Are we going to continue to see that now going forward? Are they really past that earlier tension?

They are. That’s not to say there won’t occasionally be flareups, but we sort of love the rhythm that they’re finding and the closeness. And from our research, having talked to our tech advisors who are retired sheriffs, retired law enforcement, there’s an intimacy. You ride around in these cars for years, going in and out of sometimes very dangerous and precarious situations. There’s this bonding that happens that’s unlike any other thing even with your spouse. And so we love this idea that they can tease each other, they can laugh with each other. Yeah, I love that car ride, too. And there’s plenty more of those car rides coming. We like the gear that Mickey and Boone are finding with each other.

Speaking of spouses, Boone’s surprise wife Nora (Susan Misner). Their conversation was interrupted by the siege and they’re still having communication problems as we can see; they need to work things out. What can you say about how this siege is going to be affecting their relationship?

Well, it’ll really play out through the back half of the season. When we ultimately unpack the reasons why Boone and Nora got married, what we realize is it comes from this very noble place on the part of Boone that her partner and the father of her child, who was Boone’s partner as a deputy, died, and to get her benefits, to get her a pension and all that stuff, he married her, but there are long lingering feelings there. They both had a front row seat to the self-destruction of a person who they both loved and that brought them together, and now how do they move forward? But Boone loves being a cop, and the question becomes, does Nora want to go back to that again? Is this a relationship that can survive? And we’ll see that play out in the second part of the season as well.

I’ve been loving the small crossovers that you’ve been doing with Fire Country. The Mickey and Sharon (Diane Farr) scenes in last week’s episode were so good, and that’s something that you can only do with the sisters. How much more are we going to be getting of that coming up and what can you say about this two-part crossover that we know is coming?

The two-part crossover takes it to another level. So, I’d say we’ve sort of had in my mind three different buckets of crossover. We’ve had ones like the one in Sheriff Country Episode 2 or Fire Country Episode 316, where Mickey goes to Fire Country or say Sharon or Bode [Max Thieriot] comes to Sheriff Country and they have an interesting story that they’re woven into. We’ve also done one and we’re going to do more that are really quick hits, which are fun in their own way. Like in Episode 5, a lot of people — I know the internet was just so giddy when Manny just shows up because you’re not expecting it and he’s in one scene and it’s Kevin [Alejandro], he’s like the most charming guy in the world. He just makes the most of it. So those are two different types.

The crossover event that’s upcoming is on another order of magnitude where we’re really telling one continuous story across two hours of television, and many, many more characters are crossing and with some really fun and unexpected pairings. We expect Mickey and Sharon, they’re stepsisters. But there are others coming up that I think audiences will love the weird chemistry of seeing some of these characters come together. And it’s a really, really great case. I think it’s cool. It taps into the strengths of Fire Country in the best possible way, but also Sheriff Country.

Are we going to see Dawson (Wes Chatham) again?

Ooh, that’s a great question. It sounds like a cop out to say stay tuned. I will say this: Audiences who really responded to that character, which seems to be just about everyone, will not be disappointed.

I liked what we got with Cassidy this episode. If Hank (Ian Quinlan) hadn’t brought up getting closure for her mom, would Cassidy still have started digging into her sister’s disappearance with the resources she now has at some point?

That is a fantastic question. I like to think that the answer is no. Hank is a really great character and he and Michele Weaver, who plays Cassidy, play off each other so well, and they’re rivals and they’re frenemies and he drives her insane. But it’s that kind of relationship where sometimes the people you love and are closest to can tell you something until they’re blue in the face and you won’t listen. And then someone who you don’t know as well and may not even like all that much says the same thing to you, and for some reason, it gets your attention in a unique way. And that’s what’s so great about the tough love that Hank is going to continue to give Cassidy, like, “You owe it to yourself, you owe it to your mom to find out what happened.” And that becomes a really, really exciting story and takes the character of Cassidy to some places that I think are really, really exciting and different for her.

Christos Kalohoridis/CBS

Wes (W. Earl Brown) is setting himself up to take a major step back in the progress he and Mickey have made with that decision he makes at the end of the previous episode. How are we going to see that affecting their relationship? Because they were finally getting into a good place.

They were finally getting to a good place, and Mickey has put a lot of faith in her father, and he, I think, genuinely believes two things. I think he genuinely believes, and he’s probably correct, that in many ways he’s doing the right thing. He’s standing by his community in a way that I think Mickey would actually appreciate. The second thing is I think he thinks he can get away with it without Mickey either finding out about it or holding him to account. And that one, I think, he’s on much shakier footing and he knows he has betrayed her trust before and he has to tread very carefully. But once again, it’s like a theme we always play with. It’s like the pull of your personal relationships versus your community. And Wes is such a fixture of the cannabis-growing community in Edgewater, he thinks he’s doing right by his people.

What else can you tease about what’s coming up when Sheriff Country returns?

We’re going to play a fantastic multi-part crime story that takes our characters to some extremes, to some places where we’ll never have seen them before, where, for example, and not to be too coy about it, we’ll see Boone, as we’ve established, is from big city Oakland, and that comes with a much more muscular style of policing. We saw that in Episode 3. We’ve seen that in previous episodes where Mickey, she knows everyone in Edgewater. Her first instinct is to deescalate, and there will be a case, and I can tease that it is the case that involves Cassidy’s sister, that will see that dynamic between Mickey and Boone turned on its head, where it’s Mickey who might be testing some boundaries and become a little uncentered from who she might be. And it becomes a question of, can Boone actually bring her back to her best, truest self?

Sheriff Country, Midseason Return, Friday, February 27, 2026, 8/7c, CBS