Fire Country Season 1 Episode 1: Pilot

Bode Donovan asks a California parole board to release him in the second year of a three-to-five-year sentence for armed robbery; the board refuses. Outside, his attorney Ana Koh hands him an application for the Cal Fire inmate firefighter programme, which offers a shorter sentence in exchange for fighting fires.

In Edgewater, Station 42 answers a vegetation fire on the Bodega Highway. Vince Leone runs Battalion 1508, and Jake Crawford and Eve Edwards are on the crews. A helicopter water drop finishes the job. A Department of Corrections bus then rolls into town carrying Bode and his cellmate Freddy; officer Cory Walters tells Bode he cannot use the telephone for seven days. Bode admits to Freddy that Edgewater is his hometown.

The town is celebrating Gabriela Perez, who placed fourteenth in Olympic diving. Her father Manny is the captain who trains the inmate crews. At Smokey's Tavern, Gabriela tells Jake she wants to stay in Edgewater rather than train in Florida, and leaves when he does not answer the way she wants. The fire board turns down Vince's request for a bulldozer - Sharon Leone, his wife, sits on the board - and Vince tells Sharon he visited Riley's grave and overheard Jake and Eve talking about moving on.

That night Freddy takes Bode to a roadside spot to get a telephone. A car breaks down in front of them. Bode approaches to help and the lone woman driver draws a gun on him; he repairs the car anyway. She drops a photograph of herself with Jake Crawford - she is Gabriela - and Bode hands it back.

The next day Station 42 responds to a collision on Buckeye Road and pulls a woman and her baby clear before the car explodes. The fire runs toward Miller Canyon, and Harrison Ridge is the only thing between the flames and Edgewater. Vince sends Jake and Eve to scout the ridge and asks Sharon to start evacuating the threatened side of town. Manny's inmates begin cutting a firebreak, and Gabriela joins local residents digging a line on Old Creek Road.

On Harrison Ridge the fire has already crossed the canyon. A tree falls on Jake's leg and Eve cannot move it. Manny radios for help and Bode, repeating the rulebook instruction to act decisively, takes a saw and goes to them without permission. He cuts Jake free and the three of them take cover in fire shelters; Jake's shelter has burned, so Bode holds on to him. When the burn passes and they stand up, Bode punches Jake and tells Eve that Jake had been involved with Riley.

He describes finding Riley crying outside Jake's house the night she died and losing control of the car while reaching for her.

The next morning the inmates walk back into Edgewater to applause. At the hospital Eve tells Sharon that Bode is back, and Sharon finds her son. Bode greets her as "Mom."

The pilot resolves its central fire: the burn passes, Jake and Eve survive, and the inmates walk back into Edgewater to applause. It also resolves the identity question the episode has been withholding - Bode is Sharon and Vince's son and Riley's brother, and he had legally changed his surname (F31, F32).

What the episode leaves open is the reckoning. Bode has publicly accused Jake of his part in Riley's death, but Vince is not in that scene and the episode does not show whether he is ever told (F26, F27). Whether Bode will be allowed to stay at Three Rock rather than be transferred back to prison is not established within the episode, and the conditions attached to his place in the inmate programme are not spelled out. Riley's death itself is described only through Bode's account, and the episode does not show the crash, so the exact sequence remains unconfirmed within the episode.