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‘SEAL Team’ Season 4 Episode 1 ‘God Of War’: What happens at Spin Ghar Mountain and will Mandy step down?

Bravo team heads off to the Afghan mountains hunting the son of a terrorist that Jason Hayes took out 13 years ago

High on danger and drama, ‘SEAL Team’ is back with a brand new season and the first episode ‘God Of War’ will pick up right where the show ended. The military drama that follows the professional and personal lives of the most elite unit of Navy SEALs as they train, plan, and execute high-stakes missions is back — with a bang!

The show has always focused a little more on David Boreanaz's character Jason Hayes — the respected, intense leader of the Tier One team whose home life has suffered as a result of his extensive warrior's existence — and the new season might take a good look at his past and what made him who he is now. His team includes his trusted confidant, Ray Perry (Neil Brown Jr), the longest-tenured operator with whom Jason shares an ingrained shorthand, Sonny Quinn (AJ Buckley), an exceptional, loyal soldier with a checkered past who still combats self-destructive tendencies; and Clay Spenser (Max Thieriot), a young, multilingual, second-generation SEAL with insatiable drive and dedication.

Apart from the Bravo boys, troop commander Lieutenant Commander Eric Blackburn (Judd Lormand), CIA analyst and Jason's love interest Mandy Ellis (Jessica Paré), who has sacrificed everything in her drive to root out evil and take down terrorists; and of course Ensign Lisa Davis (Toni Trucks), a no-nonsense, take-charge officer are among the core team responsible for the team's success. 

‘SEAL Team’ Season 3 Episode 20 — titled ‘No Choice in Duty’ — ended on a complicated note. Instead of Jason, Ray was told to lead the team on an urgent mission when they got a time-sensitive lead on HVT Asim Al-Hazred’s (Sameer Ali Khan) location. Episodes 21 and 22 could not be shot as the coronavirus crisis led to a stall. Will the show depict the same story that was planned for those two episodes? 

“We were cut short finishing two episodes — everybody’s had that issue, on other shows — so our season finale was not the way it was supposed to be ended. But [this episode] definitely has an unexpected plot twist for a character, for Jason at least. I will say that. But we do come to resolve some characters, which also opens up more doors,” David Boreanaz told TVLine. Disclosing how there were just “four more days of shoot left,” he said, “I was shooting up in Big Bear — and I will say, there’s a lot of snow involved in that episode — and Chris [Chulack] was shooting 22, so we were kind of shooting two days here, two days there… I had two days left on my episode, and Chris had four days when all this went down.”

Titled ‘God Of War’, the summary of the first episode reads: “Bravo Team enters the Spin Ghar Mountain Range to capture Al-Hazred, the leader of a terrorist group and son of the terrorist leader that Jason took down early in his career and made him Bravo One; Jason and Cerberus are separated from the team.” The teaser shows Bravo Team in the backdrop of snow so it means the makers have depicted the same story that was spun for the last two episodes.

Spilling the beans on how they waited for that episode to be telecasted, Matt Weiss said, “It was tough, we were shooting this episode back in March then we got shut down. To be able to sit with this episode for six months during this kind of craziness was tough because we hadn’t completed it. As a director, you go in an episode like this and it was so big. The conditions were harsh that we shot four days in the snow. The last day we had a snowstorm that kicked in and the wind was whipping.”

Revealing what goes on over there, David Boreanaz continued, “We’re going to find that Bravo team is heading off to the Afghan mountains hunting the son of a terrorist that Jason Hayes took out 13 years prior. It has a little bit of an emotional feel for Jason Hayes. On the top of the mountain there Jason gets separated from Cerberus and it almost becomes like a sense of survival and it has a ‘Revenant’ feel to it for both of these characters." On a heartbreaking note, he added, “I will say someone doesn’t make it and we take that into episode two which we find out in the beginning that Jason’s pinned against the mountain with Cerberus and all hell ensues. There’s a rescue mission that goes astray. At the end of that episode, we find out that somebody steps down and we lose some members.”

Who could it be? Is Jason stepping down or is it Ray? Many fans feel it could be Mandy. As one said, “It's Mandy, I can feel it. I'm not ready. I don't think I can keep watching without her.” Will Cerberus survive? Well, only time will tell but it seems like there's a tough ordeal for all the characters. In a new 20-second teaser posted on the official account, all the actors expressed their excitement to portray their characters back on screen!

‘SEAL Team’ premieres Season 4 with two new back-to-back episodes — titled ‘God of War’ and ‘Forever War’ — on December 2, 2020, from 9 pm ET to 10 pm ET and then from 10 pm ET to 11 pm ET. More episodes in the series will air every Wednesday in the 9 pm slot on CBS.