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In a new interview with TVGuide.com Major Crimes creator James Duff teases a little of what we can expect in Major Crime season 3, including a difficult reunion for Rusty, a secret that may come back to bite Flynn and a possible romance for one of the team members.
“The theme of our first 10 episodes this season is expectations,” creator James Duff tells TVGuide.com. “We have an expectation of a lot of things in our lives that it turns out that we have no right to expect. Family is not a given. Family is something you are sometimes obligated to create for yourself and that you embark upon with other people.”
Indeed, over the first two seasons, Capt. Sharon Raydor (Mary McDonnell) has built a new family dynamic with Rusty (Graham Patrick Martin), an orphan whom she originally took into her home while he prepared to testify as a witness in a murder case. But just when it seems like Sharon might be ready to make their arrangement more permanent, Rusty gets a surprise: His mother (Ever Carradine) returns to his life.
“We begin our first episode with a different Rusty,” Duff says. “He has changed quite a bit. The experience of testifying on his own and having his say in the courtroom, reduced the whining, reduced the teenage angst. He’s sort of moving beyond and looking into his own heart and how he can make things better. Then, out of the blue, he’s knocked off stride by the reappearance of [his mother] who he had thought he was separated from for good.”
And Rusty has no plans of sharing the surprise with Sharon — at least not right away. “You get close to someone, but that doesn’t mean that on certain intimate issues you are inflexibly honest,” Duff says. “Sometimes we like to sort out our own feelings about circumstances before we involve the people who are closest to us, and that doesn’t mean there’s a loss of love or a loss of respect. It means there’s fear and anxiety. The anxiety he has about his mother will reveal itself, and he [does] introduce his mother to Sharon,” Duff says. “His mother has a very different take on where he is in life than Sharon does.”
But Rusty’s dilemma is only half of the story. His mother’s return comes just as Sharon begins to consider making her arrangement more permanent by legally adopting him. That will raise the eyebrows of Sharon’s “real” family, including her husband Jack (Tom Berenger) and her yet-to-be-cast son Ricky. “As she moves forward to adopt Rusty — or as the questions appear: ‘Should I? Do I want to be [his mother]?’ — her already established family weighs in in different ways,” Duff says. “How do you include other people? What does the word family mean? Do you have any right to expect that your family will always be exactly what it is?”
Of course, the Major Crimes work family dynamic will also be explored. “There will be more personal life stuff,” Duff says. “Sykes [Kearran Giovanni ] gets flowers [in the premiere]. Who did they come from? Is she dating somebody? Flynn [Tony Denison] keeps talking about his daughter. His daughter is going to show up, and he keeps pretending to his family that he and Sharon are closer than they are. How long is he going to get away with that?”
Read the entire interview here