CAUTION – the below includes spoilers for Wednesday’s season finale of Major Crimes. Do not read if you have not yet seen the episode and don’t want to be spoiled!

In Part Two of our exclusive interview with James Duff, we discussed some of the most shocking (blowing up the squad room!) and long-awaited (Commander Raydor has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?) moments of the season finale, and what’s ahead for the team when it returns next fall for Season 6.

MajorCrimesTV: So, first of all, wow! That was a very nerve-wracking finale, and then right at the end, it packed a big emotional punch!

James Duff: I agree. And also, I want to point out how well-directed it was all the way through. Patrick Duffy did a great job of last week’s episode and Michael Robin did a fantastic job of the finale, and it all worked very well. Very happy about it.

MCTV: You mentioned earlier that there two drafts of this finale – one if it was the season finale, one if it was the series finale. Certainly I didn’t want it to be a series finale, but had it been, I feel like this was satisfying and beautiful, and would have been one we could have lived with as the end.  But had this been the series finale, what can you tell us about what might have been different?

JD: There would have been many changes. There was an important reprise, a very important reprise, and there was a heightening of what could happen in the future. Also, the explosion (at the LAPD) happened much later in the story than it would have, had it been a series finale.

MCTV: I saw that explosion and thought, wow, I don’t know if they would have blown it up if they knew they were going to have to put it all back together again for the next season!  

JD: Well, actually, blowing it up gave us a chance to refresh the room a little bit. That set has been there for seven years, we’ve been using it exactly the way it is. And police work has evolved. The white boards are still important, but police work is evolving and we need to evolve with it. Also, when you live on a set for seven years, you get to know not only strengths but also its weaknesses. It gives us an opportunity to fix the weaknesses of the set while holding on to its strengths. It’ll look very familiar and it will look a little different, too. But not very different.

MCTV: We had one moment in here that was years in the making, and that was Raydor’s promotion. It was a long time coming, and a beautiful moment to watch. Why now, and when Asst. Chief Mason says there are changes coming, what kind of changes are we talking about?

JD: I think you can expect two things. One is that the promotion freeze is over at LAPD and Major Crimes used to be led by a Deputy Chief and Raydor certainly deserves to be a Commander, and I think everybody would agree that that promotion was well-earned. And also, gosh, just to see Mary play it!

It was wonderful, because Mary had asked, will she ever get to be a commander, and she lives inside this character so much that Sharon’s promotion–felt real in a way that really came across on-screen. And also because the emotion of having a woman struggle for that job and get it, it was very important to see, I think. And then as a reward for the long game that Sharon usually plays. And then I would say the way Major Crimes is going to change is that Major Crimes is going to be deployed as Mason sees fit. And the cases are going to get bigger. We’re going to be in more of the multi-part universe from now on. Our first five-parter next season is called: Major Crimes: Sanctuary City and it’s not at all what you think. I will say it involves a legal immigration, it involves the Catholic church, illegal drug use, and a trio of missing fifteen-year-old boys.

MCTV: Winnie Davis certainly made no friends this season. Is this the last we’ve seen of her? Is she out now or is she going to be a thorn in everyone’s side in whatever capacity she can manage. 

JD: It’s the last time we will have seen her as an enemy. If you see Winnie Davis again, she will not be an enemy.

MCTV: Flynn he had a great moment at the end of this episode. But earlier on, Provenza says “for you to go back out in the field, the right person has to be become assistant chief.” Has the right person become the Assistant Chief to get Flynn back out there?

JD: Not yet.  He’s going to have to struggle for that. But, also, there are going to be some big emotional problems next year, and that may be not something he’s as concerned about. Everybody is going to be facing some adversity. Not to mention the spectral presence of Stroh sort of glowering over the whole thirteen episodes.

But overall, I just want to say that we are very excited about this episode and the way our season ended and we’re incredibly excited that we get to do it again for another thirteen episodes. And hopefully we can spend a little more time together.

In part one of our interview with series creator and writer of tonight’s episode, James Duff, he discusses in what ways the late renewal affected tonight’s season finale, and how it feels to be celebrating a combined 200 episodes in the world and characters of The Closer and Major Crimes. Stay turned for part two of our interview tonight, after the episode airs.

MajorCrimesTV: Last week’s episode was a real nail biter, and going into tonight, I have a lot of questions about what’s going to happen. And in terms of bad guys, it seems like Christian Ortiz rates right up there with some of the biggest foes the team has ever faced, right up there with Phillip Stroh and the Chris Wood character from the Poster Boy arc a few years ago. Was that an intentional choice to just put everything into this character and story?

James Duff: Most of our finales on Major Crimes center around a really bad guy you get to know. And Chris Wood is a fantastic example of someone we employed in that capacity. And by the way, look what happened to his career afterwards! He exploded. He’s such a fantastic actor. And the same thing is going to happen with this guy. He’s in “The Fate of the Furious”, coming out this weekend. So, we just got him at the right time. He was awesome and fantastic in this role.

But what’s really good for Major Crimes is when they face a foe who is formidable. Nothing is better than a formidable foe. And what we’ll find out tonight is that this guy is both deeper and more destructive than you thought possible. It’s the bomb at the graveyard that’s telling you he was willing to do anything. What he does tonight will convince you for sure. Those pictures that he took will come back to haunt him. We see those pictures and they have a role to play in how he’s apprehended.

MCTV: Rusty also faces a foe of his own tonight, when he meets Gus’s boss.

JD: Yes. We meet Aiden, played by Keegan Allen, who is formidable foe for Rusty, in that his interaction with Rusty is something we’ve never seen before.  Someone really putting the kid over a barrel and forcing him into doing something extremely adult and extremely loving, which turns out to be an amazing response for Rusty.

MCTV: One of the few lighter moments in last week’s episode was courtesy of Nolan, who called out Davis on her aspirations for the chief job. Are we going to see Nolan, now that he’s settled in more with the team, flying off the cuff a bit more and calling things the way they are?

JD: Nolan has been holding back and he’s been trying to find his way. But he’s also been in really desperate situations before and he doesn’t like the way Winnie Davis is treating people, and he’s like, “to hell with it,  I’m gonna say what I’m thinking here.” And I thought Daniel (di Tomasso) did a great job with that. He was so excited when he got that little exchange. None of our regular crew could have done it, because we don’t have a character like that in our regular crew. Provenza will sometimes get in people’s faces and even Sharon will sometimes say to a commanding officer “Do you want to cover this case, or would you like me to step aside?”, and diplomatically find a way to address it, but she would never do anything like Nolan did. Which was actually attack the character of a commanding officer. I loved it, personally.

MCTV: It was great, and you could tell the others loved it, and were also terrified for his future at that point forward. It also brought about a great moment for Sharon, too, where she says very clearly, “this is where I want to be, this is what I want to do, and quit screwing it up for me!”

JD: Yes! Exactly! I thought that was one of Mary’s best performances in the entire series. Her reaction to that was great, because we’re reminded that she believes in the rules, and she believes in the chain of command, and she believes in leveraging that knowledge into power. And I thought Mary played that scene beautifully. She did it several different ways, and we went with the one that we felt she was really behind in her heart.

MCTV: Between last week and tonight’s finale, these are two very big episodes in scale, especially with all the explosions, the locations, etc. What goes into getting these huge episodes, with all the effects, together?

JD: What we do is just hours and hours of preparation, so that we have everything we need in place, and we’ve tried to consider every stupid thing we might do wrong, and really work very hard to get it right the first or second time. The way you get to have really big episodes like this is by being extremely careful with your budget as you go along. So that you’re building a pool of cash that you can employ at the right moment to deliver an optimal experience at the end of the season.

MCTV: When you were writing it, you’ve said you thought it could potentially be the end of the series. Did that figure in?

JD: Exactly. You know, we also had every reason to believe that this was the end of the series. And I think if you watch it with the idea that we almost ended the series here, then you can see how we opted to put everything we had into it.

MCTV: Along with being the season finale, tonight’s episode marks two hundred episodes for some of these characters. What has the experience been to inhabit this world and these characters for this long, when these days so many shows never get past twelve episodes a show, if they even get past the pilot. You’ve had two hundred. What has that been like?

JD: If you put it in perspective, I’ve spent all of elementary school, middle school, high school and my first year of college in this world. (laughs) It is been like living inside a learning experience. And if you want to live inside a learning experience then this is the way to do it. I never could have imagined two hundred episodes. It just boggles the mind, especially going from the end of The Closer, to already be looking ahead to the hundredth episode of Major Crimes next year.  I mean, I thought it was possible, but not likely. But three people absolutely believed it would happen. And they were Tony Denison, Phillip Keene, and Raymond Cruz. The rest of us, and even at the network, there was curiosity and good intentions, but doubt.

And so I credit the audience, honestly, with getting us through that transition and sticking with us, and holding onto our characters. I guess, in addition to being a learning environment, the two hundred episodes that we’ve done, they’ve allowed me to grow close to the audience in a way I don’t think you get an opportunity to do very often. The social platforms that are available now have enhanced that opportunity. I feel incredibly close to the viewers and am incredibly grateful and thankful to them for electing to be a part of this community.

MCTV: Anything else you want to tease about tonight’s episode?

JD: Provenza’s bobble-head has never faced a bigger crisis (laughs).

The Major Crimes season finale airs tonight at 9pm/8c on TNT. Read part two of our interview with James Duff tonight, as he discusses what might have been different if the episode had been a series finale, and what we can expect when Major Crimes returns next fall.

CAUTION – the below includes spoilers for Wednesday’s all-new episode of Major Crimes. Do not read if you have not yet seen the episode and don’t want to be spoiled!

Major Crimes is always full of twists and turns, and tonight’s winter premiere is no exception, with two particularly shocking moments towards the end of the episode. We wanted to find out just how those moments came to pass, so we checked in with creator James Duff for the scoop.

MajorCrimesTV: So, this episode was full of shocking moments, but first, let’s talk about Sharon getting punched, because I was NOT ready for that!

James Duff: Sharon was just trying to find a reason to hold her suspect and she put her face in the line of fire. You see our characters running towards the danger at the top of the episode, and then you see Sharon walking in and putting herself in the line of danger in the interview room. It’s actually a parallel to that moment in the beginning. It’s a dramatization of her putting herself first – she is trying to find a way to stop this guy. And the way to stop him is to get him to assault her. And she succeeds. That was her strategy to resolve this case.

MCTV: Well, it sure got me – I wasn’t expecting it at all, and it looked very real.

JD: It got me, too, even though we wrote it and knew it was happening, when I saw them on screen I gasped. And Mary was fantastic in that scene. It’s very unnerving.

MCTV: The other big bombshell at the end of this episode is that Stroh may be back. How is that going to play into the rest of this season?

JD: Well, we’re going to get more information as we go along about Stroh, but I’m not going to be able to tell that story–remember when I was doing these last eight episodes, I didn’t know whether or not we would have a season six, and so I put all the Stroh information where I could excise it if I needed to. And I made it small, so I could track his potential return without promising to actually show anything.

Indeed, if he has come back, he would be very careful. I mean, he’s on the ten most wanted list, he is a serious, serious criminal, people seriously want to catch him. He’s the subject of a world-wide manhunt. So how he may be accomplishing these things is questionable. He may not be here in person. We know he has a history of manipulating people into helping him. I’m not really going to pay off the story in the back eight, but I’m going to continue setting it up, because I am going to go there next year.

Major Crimes returns with an all-new episode next Wednesday at 9pm/8c on TNT. Don’t forget to check out the “What Would Sharon Raydor Do?” podcast tomorrow, where we talk about this episode (and that scene!) in depth with Captain Raydor herself, Mary McDonnell.

After a five-month hiatus, Major Crimes returns tonight with the first of eight all-new episodes of its winter season. MajorCrimesTV.net spoke to series creator and executive producer James Duff to find out just what fans can expect from these upcoming episodes, including how Chief Taylor’s death continues to impact the team and the LAPD at large, what we can expect from two major new additions to the cast, and how the long wait for a season six renewal affected how the writers approached the season finale. And stay tuned for after the episode for our special postmortem with Duff on a few of the jaw-dropping turns tonight’s episode delivers.

MajorCrimesTV: It’s great to have you and the team back. It’s been far too long, and with everything that has been going on in the world, it feels very comforting to have Major Crimes, and these familiar characters back in our lives.

James Duff: Thank you, it’s good to be back. I will say, in our present day lives, the world suddenly seems less stable than it used to. I do think having these familiar characters come back for eight episodes right now is something that offers people a little happy familiarity. And people who like the show, I think they’ll like it even more than usual, because they want a little stability somewhere, and the show does, in its own way, foster that stability in the world. It’s a continuance, and no matter what changes in the world, or how it changes, MC is still here, doing its thing. And we’re very glad to be back for that.

MCTV: You’ve mentioned before going into this season that the team was in for a big shakeup, but what struck me even more than that watching the winter premiere was the feeling that this was a bit of a rebirth for the show, and that things are headed somewhere different. Camryn Manheim as Winnie Davis comes onto the scene like a bull in a china shop, butting up against Raydor. It’s very reminiscent of how Sharon really came onto the scene in The Closer and butted up against Brenda. Are we going to see that parallel continue?

JD: Yes. That is a parallel, but there is a difference, in that Brenda handled Sharon’s presence much differently than Sharon is going to end up handling Winnie’s presence. You’re going to see in this episode, Sharon’s first reaction is, ‘may I please go back to work’. But later the later reactions are going to be much different. Sharon is struggling to find a way to deal with Winnie that’s professional, and Winnie knows that, so she goes for the personal. She tries to get some personal antagonism going between her and Sharon, and Sharon does not take the bait. She keeps everything as cool and professional as she can, although she does eventually lose her patience.

MCTV: We see in tonight’s episode that Wes Nolan, who was the undercover cop from the three part finale from summer, is now working with the team. Has he become a permanent addition?

JD: You know, that’s still a question. He’s going to be testifying for years against the white power organization in which he was an undercover agent for five years.  And while he’s testifying against Zyklon B he’s going to be attached to Major Crimes. And he may ultimately end up somewhere else, but he does seem to fit in, and I will tell you that the cast loved Daniel. They adore him and I think he’s a great addition to what we have. But a lot of it depends on our story-telling needs next season and how his career path goes.

MCTV:  Part of this episode focuses the team going through training exercises, and all that’s involved in that. How did that come about being part of this, as we’ve really not seen that before on the show?

JD: No we haven’t, and active shooter training is a big thing that started with the actual LAPD. There wasn’t any active shooter training like this for a very long time, and also the training has now changed. In the past, the police were told to wait for SWAT. But now, you can’t wait for SWAT, and you have to go right in. Your job as a first responder now is to get in there and try to stop it any way you can.

I felt like I didn’t want to do an actual active shooter story, because we did one already last season, but I did want to show how these episodes are disrupting our society, and I also wanted to show how we are training to deal with it. Additionally, it takes a lot of resources to continue this sort of training. A lot of time, a lot of effort and everybody must go through it. Since our show is largely about the lives of police officers, I felt like it was a great way to start our season, by showing them still training. Even the most successful of them still are training to do better.

MCTV: One thing that really hit me in this episode was that, as we’ve seen for the life of the show, the Major Crimes division has always been the darling of the LAPD. It’s the elite division, they’ve been supported by the brass, etc. But it seems that perhaps in this episode, and moving forward, I’m feeling like we might have just seen the first crack in that armor?

JD: Yes, and that is it exactly. Every time new management comes in, there are changes. They look to see where changes can be made, on all sides. It may surprise you to hear that detectives are not the most popular people inside the LAPD, or inside any police department, usually. Everybody feels they get special treatment, especially homicide detectives. The resources that are detailed to Homicide are always envied by other divisions. It’s natural, of course, because you want your money to go in support of people tracking the most violent offenders. But everybody considers their job important, too. And there’s always a question of balance. How much does any one division get, as opposed to another division, and could some of the crimes that are ultimately solved by our detectives have been prevented by resourcing some of these other departments? Those are legitimate questions. Allocation of resources, that’s always a big deal inside bureaucracies. And the LAPD is no different.

MCTV: We don’t see him until next week, but what can you tell us about the other person who’s going to be in the running for the Chief position?

JD: Commander Davis is also in charge of a division that the LAPD supports and that causes a lot of anxiety among other divisions, which is Criminal Intelligence Division, the LAPD’s own CIA. People’s big complaint about Criminal Intelligence is that they swoop in, they get information, and it goes away and it never comes back. And they never share anything they’ve learned with the rest of the department. I mean, these are the rumors and the complaints that you hear from other LAPD officers, that CI is the sinkhole of all relevant information. And that they would rather hold on to their sources and methods than assist in solving crimes. So Commander Davis will have his own issues in terms of the Chief position, and Winnie Davis is going to have issues with him as well.

MCTV: We were all thrilled and relieved by the recent renewal announcement for season 6, but it came pretty late in the game in terms of where you were in the production schedule of these episodes. Did the delay in renewal affect the storytelling and how you wrote this winter arc, not knowing if there would be another season after this?

JD: I was preparing to do the last eight episodes as if we were going to do no more, but we also planned it so the last episode could go a multitude of ways depending on what happened. The word came down [that the show was renewed] before we started shooting the last two episodes. So as things turned out, we were prepared for the renewal with an alternate script, and the renewal came, and so we had that script ready to shoot.

The winter premiere of Major Crimes airs tonight at 9PM/8C on TNT, and don’t forget to come back to MajorCrimesTV.net after the episode as James Duff breaks down two of the most shocking moments of the night.

Thursday morning, delve even deeper into the new episode with a brand new edition of Mary McDonnell’s “What Would Sharon Raydor Do?” Podcast, guest hosted by the editor of MajorCrimesTV.net. Find out just what Sharon Raydor was thinking during tonight’s episode, from the woman who knows her best, actress Mary McDonnell.

MCTV: I would be remiss to start this off without asking about Taylor, and the shocking decision to kill him off in part one of this three-part summer finale. What lead you to making the decision to have Taylor’s death be such a catalyst in this arc, and as part of the season as a whole?

James Duff: There’s two things to discuss with this. Part one of that is, opening Taylor’s office was always my plan, so that was always going to happen at some point. Part two is that balance is the theme of all thirteen summer episodes – it links them all together. I couldn’t do a study on balance without including the balance of power, and without completely removing the balance of power and forcing a new center of gravity into the circumstances around which Major Crimes revolves. And this new center of gravity that the team is now looking to find is going to be the subject of the next eight episodes–how we adjust to changes, who becomes the center, and how everyone must adjust to accommodate that new center.

History itself is the story of a succession of one center of gravity replacing another, and how people must adapt constantly to that sort of change. People either adjust, or they crash and burn. That’s just how it works. And so, Major Crimes is adjusting. And that will be the back eight episodes we’ll see this winter. That’s always what I meant to happen. And beyond that, there is a world beyond the adjustment of gravity, and so that would be our next season, if we end up getting one.

It’s also important to remember that the LAPD is a dangerous place to work, and police officers have an extremely dangerous job in this day and age. The Los Angeles Police Department trains hard to do the right thing, and to bring policing into the twenty-first century, but it’s still every bit as vulnerable as the bad police departments are. There’s no discrimination, apparently, between good police officers and bad police officers. Taylor also encompassed the essence of the blue/black divide, because he’s both. And both sides are damaged by this divide. And I’m not taking sides, I’m just dramatizing the divide that exists, and he was a very good way to dramatize that nobody wins when violence is the answer.

So Taylor’s death accommodated the two things I needed. One was to explore the balance of power and how it affects our daily lives, which is what part two of the finale was about. But, any meditation on the balance of power in our human life would require us to take into account religion, and its force in the world and on our leading characters. So both of these major events, Taylor’s death, the shooting of Dwight Darnell, the balancing of what we owe to our spiritual selves and what we owe to our professional selves, all of that was meant to create special circumstances for Sharon Raydor. And I think we did that.

MCTV: Speaking to that examination of religion, last week was a departure for the show, in that it both took on a different structure in how it was framed from Sharon’s confession, but also gave us a much closer look at Sharon than we’ve seen for a while. There has been hints that Sharon has this strong religious part to her, but this was the most overtly we’ve seen it, and also gave a bit more insight into the state of her relationship with Andy, and what she feels like she can and can’t talk to him about.

JD: To be clear, it’s not that she can’t rely on Andy to talk to, it’s just as she says, she can’t rely on Andy to talk to about the death of Dwight Darnell. And truly, she couldn’t rely on a lot of the audience, either. A lot of the audience would tell her, ‘Look, you did the right thing. Get over it.” I heard that from people after the episode aired.

But taking a human life is complicated, no matter the circumstances. For example, with the military, we have 20 veterans a day committing suicide, and a lot of it has to do with loss of life they are involved in. We train people to believe that murder is wrong, and then we send them out to kill people, and don’t understand why they’re confused afterwards. And so I thought it would be important to show Sharon in a moral quandary – wanting to feel grief for having stopped Dwight Darnell from killing anybody else through violence, which she’s always been hesitant to use, unless absolutely necessary. And she’s never killed anyone, and I wanted to explore that aspect of her personality.

Also, she’s very Catholic. That has been mentioned throughout the series. She was so Catholic she didn’t divorce her husband for over thirty years. She loves angels, that’s an established fact, and she sent Rusty to a Catholic school. She’s been very serious about her religion, although, this is a murder show, not “True Confessions” or anything like that, so we just haven’t seen it more than that. But if she and Andy were to perhaps want to do something more than just live together, that would create conflict for her. And so maybe there’s a reminder there, maybe I’m setting something up for the future, by reminding everybody about how Catholic she is.

MCTV: Going back to Taylor for a moment, we’re heard through some casting announcements that we’re going to see the power shift, and we’re going to see some new people come in to be in the running for his job. Are we going to get closure on the loss of Taylor at all, and the impact that death itself has on the team?

JD: Well, we will be talking about Taylor for ages to come. And there is an attempt to honor him in the summer finale in the first act. Not at a funeral, because we’ve already done that, when we went to the funeral of the Chief of Police. I don’t want to give away too much, but he will not be gone completely. He’s a member of the Major Crimes family and he’ll be treated that way throughout.

MCTV: In terms of the power vacuum, the Sharon of a few years ago had a lot of desire to move up the ranks. But now that we’re seeing this job having opened up, it’s hard to envision Sharon wanting to leave Major Crimes now that she’s established this great team, and everyone works together so well. How is this power vacuum going to affect her, in a desire to move up the ranks, or lack thereof?

JD: It’s a delicate dance inside the LAPD when one of these positions opens up. If you get considered for a promotion, you have to try to get it because if you fail, you’ll lose what you have. And that happens all the time. It’s an unfortunate circumstance, but when new people move in to positions of power, then the people underneath them, who were also trying to get that position of power, end up with a lot of ‘freeway therapy’. They get transferred to Harbor Division or they end up at SOB (Special Operations Bureau) or teaching at the Police Academy. So in terms of a career path, it’s dangerous.

On the other hand, you don’t get to decide this. The Police Chief job is decided by the Mayor in concert with the city council and the police commission. The job of Assistant Chief is decided entirely by the Chief. There’s no one else to ask. So if he interviews you, and everybody knows you’re up for the job, then you’re exposed. That’s why we’re bringing on Camryn Manheim, and another actor I can’t announce yet, to all be in play for the job. But the struggle to replace Taylor, will also be a struggle to protect Major Crimes. Because a new Assistant Chief comes in, and the division changes. So Sharon is given a lot to think about in these back eight episodes this winter, and that influences how she has to react to being considered for the position.

MCTV: Switching just quickly over to Buzz, and his journey this season. We saw last episode that he’s really stepped up in this investigation and come into his own. Are we going to see more of that now that he has had a taste of being part of this side of the police work?

JD: Well, you’re going to see his realization that things are not over. That’s going to come back. So the conclusion of Buzz’s story is both final, and ambiguous. And Phillip has done an amazing job this season, and in the last scene of the case, he does an amazing job, and in the scene after the case, he does an amazing job. And also stepping up and showing he’s capable has been Julio Sanchez, as a foster parent. And we’re going to see just how much this new experience has meant to him in the finale.

MCTV: Finally, you mentioned that a potential season 6 would have a focus around the adjustment to whoever becomes the new chief, and how that appointment could change Major Crimes. There hasn’t been an announcement yet for season 6 from TNT. Any updates there?

JD: It’s impossible to know what the network consider their needs to be right now, and I can’t say for sure anything. They have not indicated a pickup for next season to me yet, so I really don’t know. I’m very happy overall with how we’ve managed our numbers this season, especially given the switch to 10pm. We did much better than we thought we would do and I think better than TNT thought we would do. It’s a bit of a win-win for us and hopefully the network will want to solidify their gains here and do it again.

The summer finale of Major Crimes airs tonight at 10pm/9c on TNT.