The SEAL Team star opens up about [Spoiler]’s fate after that harrowing season 6 premiere

The following contains major spoilers from the Season 6 premiere of SEAL Team, now streaming on Paramount+.

Those who thought the SEAL Team Season 6 premiere would simply be about the aftermath of the season-ending Mali ambush soon realized that there was much more to do before that literal smoke cleared Go.

The dizzying first 15 minutes of the season opener continued the ruthless assault on Team Bravo, which was taken down a man by Clay, who – to put it mildly – was taken by an opponent’s RPG Phuong completely blew off his right foot.

I mean, yes, that foot was dangling by a thread, and Clay, God bless him, tried his best to reset his badly broken leg with a makeshift splint. Heck, he then even jumps back into the firefight, launches a grenade or two, and uses his secondary weapon to take down a monster!
Jason temporarily sneaked around the side of the canyon and came up behind some warriors, taking them down and then using one’s RPG to further thin their ranks. Bravo 1 then used a laser pen to mark the incoming enemy convoy for HAVOC to destroy with their only available missile attack.

Bravo was transferred to the same hospital in Germany that transferred them after Jason made a life-saving call in Season 5. In fact, Jay had a run-in/shrug with the same doctor back then who had urged him to see a doctor. TBI looked, damn Trident.

Meanwhile, for Clay, things were going very rough for the rest of the hour, as he had suffered internal injuries/bleeding including the possibility of losing his spleen, plus a wound to his leg said, there was a risk of infection (in part because while at the scene he was off antibiotics).
Besides, Lisa informed Stella about Clay’s initial condition/injury. But at the end of the episode, Jason arrives with Mandy to relay the latest information from Sonny, who has stayed by Christie Brink-clay’s side: Clay’s right leg was infected and had to be amputated below the knee.

Series vet Max Thieriot told TVLine that a “tremendous mental and physical struggle” awaits Clay, “a journey with incredible highs and incredible lows.” amazing”.

Because even though Clay has decided to leave Bravo for a while and focus on Stella and their newborn son Brian, “We’re going to see the struggle of someone who’s dealing with the loss of a job and the best life they ever wanted, when they were young,” and who can now only “look back and watch his teammates move on without him.
It’s a lot…. He has been through a lot this season,” Thieriot emphasized. “I think he’s been through more this season than any character has been through on that show.”

Given that Thieriot is now the lead of one of CBS’s new fall dramas, Fire Country (airing Fridays at 8 p.m. starting October 7), he doesn’t consider fate Clay’s was perhaps even more dire. “I think Clay’s death, for everyone, was always on the table,” he ventured. “Probably almost every character on the show could say the same thing.”

Clay, however, lived to see another day—albeit the first of many arduous days—while Thieriot himself took on a series regular role on both dramas with the high octane number. (Oh, he’s also an executive producer on Fire Country, which is based on where he grew up in Northern California, and he co-wrote the premiere.)

It was an ambitious body of work, to say the least, but “I’m an ambitious guy!” Thieriot said with a smile.