Fire Country Season 1 Episode 16: My Kinda Leader

Rebecca's death hits everyone hard. Bode becomes angry after she dies; he wants someone to blame, and the best person to blame is the captain, who was not there that day — Manny was out working a second job, and Eve was injured by another firefighting crew's mistake. Rebecca was both heroic and a victim, and Bode believes she would not have had to die at all if Manny had been there, since without him the others in the fire camp refused to do their jobs and it often fell on Bode to step up. But he lost a friend by stepping up: he was in charge and he could not keep Rebecca safe.

He no longer wants to write her eulogy because he does not think he is worthy of the honor, and he thinks Manny should write it instead. Bode has now lost two people on the job and is not sure he can keep doing the work.

Then he is called to the scene of a huge fire in another county. The fire camp is only supposed to assist with putting the fire out before it spreads to the town, and it is there that Bode meets a man who tests his patience: a fire superintendent for that county. The superintendent tells Bode he does not want to work with another Leone, because the last one cut and ran when the going got tough — that other Leone being Vince, Bode's father. Bode is fourth-generation California fire, and he does not want this superintendent to see him retreat.

Bode wants to stay on the scene, even as it risks firefighters. One firefighter is swept away by the wind because he is harnessed to the tent they put up, and the crews have to run after him and free him from being strangled to death by the harness.

At that point the superintendent in charge demands that the crews move closer to the fire. Manny, as a fire captain, speaks against it, saying the order is unnecessarily dangerous and that the superintendent has something to prove; he is not going to jeopardize the fire camp. Manny takes his team and leaves rather than run into the fire to divert it away from the town — but he allows Bode to stay, because Bode needs to work through something. Bode stays with the superintendent.

He wants to save the prison in the fire's direction, knowing his father and friends are there trying to evacuate the building, and that a prison riot has broken out and strapped everybody inside.

Vince, Eve and Jake are all trapped inside the prison. The fire outside is getting closer, the prisoners inside are getting antsy, and they start stabbing people while the firefighters run short on supplies. Vince needs to calm the prisoners, so he goes to talk to the shot callers; he goes to the secure wing, has security open their cells, and asks whether they can talk leader to leader. His sole objective is to save lives — he does not want anyone dying in the fire.

Bode wants the same, but he also wants to stay with the reckless crew to prove that Leones do not run, and he wants to save the town before the fire reaches it. Bode already struggles with a hero complex, and it has worsened since Rebecca's death; now he risks dying if it means saving someone.

It is only later that Bode goes too far in his bid to save lives: he remembers that he does not want to die, and he sees that his father chose retreat in order to save lives. Bode walks away from the situation when it becomes too much, following his dad's lead. His father, meanwhile, gets the shot callers to suspend their gang war, and they all go peaceably to the vans as the prison is evacuated. But the fire itself appears to be part of a string of fires set by a serial arsonist.

The arson investigator believes it was started by someone under Vince's command, and Sharon tries to hide this information when they later attend Rebecca's wake, where Bode chooses to give the eulogy. Sharon puts two and two together and comes to believe that Jake is the serial arsonist — recalling that Jake once sent fire to his own room as a kid because he wanted to be the one to save the house — and she tells Manny, but she mostly wants to bury the evidence, because she loves Jake like another son.

The Drake Country fire and the prison emergency are resolved: the prison is evacuated after Vince persuades the shot callers to suspend their gang war, and Bode walks away from the fire when it becomes too much, following his father's lead.

The episode leaves its central mystery open. The arson investigator believes the string of fires was started by someone under Vince's command, and Sharon has concluded that Jake is the serial arsonist — a suspicion she shares with Manny while trying to bury the evidence. Whether Jake is responsible, and what Sharon does with what she suspects, is not resolved within this episode. Bode's decision about whether he can keep doing the job is also left open, as is the rift between Bode and Manny over Rebecca's death.