Warning: spoilers ahead for the Season 3 finale of The Equalizer, called "Eye for an Eye."
The third season of The Equalizer has come to an end on CBS with a finale that put the whole cast of characters in varying degrees of danger from almost the very beginning. While some of them were safe by the end of the hour, "Eye for an Eye" wrapped with no fewer than three regulars in immediate danger of burning to death, with McCall seemingly helpless to save them. While fans will have to wait through summer hiatus to find out what happens next for all the characters, two stars spoke with CinemaBlend about what went down... and dropped some clues about how Season 4 will pick up.
Read on for how Laya DeLeon Hayes and Tory Kittles broke down the "Eye for an Eye" finale of The Equalizer after they'd hyped the high stakes and "imminent jeopardy" of the episode!
Delilah Dealt With A Hostage Situation
Delilah and Aunt Vi seemed like the safest characters of the episode with their plans to go out to a movie, but their plan to load up with snacks at a bodega instead of paying movie theater prices for candy backfired. They ended up in a hostage situation with the armed and desperate Drake waving a gun around. Fortunately, Aunt Vi was able to get through to him with her particular kind of wisdom with some help from Delilah, and Dee managed to save the man's life with a well-timed dropkick. She used what she learned from both Vi and her mom in this situation, and Laya DeLeon Hayes weighed in on what her character went through:
She's been through so much in these past three seasons, and it's been a lot of learning for her, a lot of experiences that she's been able to grow from. Even at the end of Season 2, she didn't fully understand why her mom does what she does and what she actually did, and still me and Aunt Vi kind of lean on each other for support in that way throughout the show. It's all kind of leading up to this point. Everything she's learned and everything that's been taught to her ultimately leads to her having this beautiful hero moment, which is so lovely.
Delilah put her own life at risk at the end of the hostage situation when the police stormed the bodega. After noticing an instant before that Drake's revolver wasn't actually loaded, she dropkicked him so that that cops wouldn't have a clean shot, then shouted that his gun was empty while she more or less served as his human shield. It was a brave moment that could have gone sideways if somebody had shot anyway, and all came down to Dee noticing that the gun wasn't loaded in a very Robyn McCall-type move. Laya DeLeon Hayes elaborated on the situation:
Throughout the episode, I was constantly thinking about the episode we shot a few weeks before, which was with McCall and Delilah in the cafe and just them being observant of different people walking in because that really sets off the inspiration for her going to Aunt Vi and saying 'Hey, I think we need to leave. Something dangerous is about to occur.'
Interestingly, the episode with McCall and Delilah in the cafe (available streaming via Paramount+ subscription) was the same one that showcased Lorraine Toussaint as Aunt Vi did everything she could to help a friend stuck in a cycle of domestic abuse. Dee obviously absorbed a lot of what her mom tried to teach her about situational awareness, and was proved right (albeit too late to escape) in her deduction that Drake was about to rob the store. The actress went on to share what it means to Delilah to be taken seriously, with Hayes saying:
Oh my goodness, I think it means everything for her. One, because obviously training has been something that she really is passionate about and she fully believes in herself, as you can see with her dropkick in the season finale! So I think because she's so passionate and she's so fueled by it, knowing that that's completely validated from both her mom and Aunt Vi is only going to help her gain more confidence and gain more clarity on what she wants to do in the future.
Luckily, Delilah is one of a couple important characters actually guaranteed to have a future after the events of "Eye for an Eye," since neither she nor Vi was captured by Michelle Chambers in her revenge plot against McCall. Hayes continued:
Then on top of that, she's been fighting for the past two seasons just to be taken seriously. She wants to be mature, all of that. But now that she's actually shown maturity, and she's been through so much and grown a lot, Aunt Vi and McCall being able to recognize that they should take her seriously and listen to her is a really beautiful thing and kind of a little full circle moment, I would say.
The little family unit of McCall, Delilah, and Aunt Vi (which Lorraine Toussaint has said she's very "proud" of) is at the heart of The Equalizer, and according to Hayes, the two older women acknowledging Dee's maturity and growth has been a special part of Season 3. A lot has changed since just earlier this year, when McCall didn't want her daughter trained at all!
Dante Has A Fiery Cliffhanger (And Accidental Confession)
Unfortunately for Dante, his dangerous situation was not neatly wrapped up by the end of the hour like Delilah's was. Not only was his life in danger in the final minutes of the finale, but he was injected with a deadly truth serum earlier in the hour and actually had his heart stopped before Harry's Hail Mary move with a defibrillator. Oddly enough, though, Dante being stabbed in the neck with the syringe of serum led to some comedy with Harry... and Dante confessing his feelings for McCall. Actor Tory Kittles weighed in on whether his character would have ever said any of what he said without the effects of truth serum, saying:
I think he might have sung it in the shower to himself. I don't think he would have confessed it to Harry and I definitely don't think he would have confessed it to McCall, knowing that she was on the other end of that line along with Mel listening in. But the truth has a way of coming out at the most inopportune times, but nevertheless doesn't make it not the truth. I think he would have handled that situation a little bit differently, but it's a lot of fun to see him squirm.
The truth may have been bound to come out at some point or other, but spilling the truth to Harry with McCall and Mel on speakerphone was not the way that Dante would have gone if given the choice! He's certainly one of the more serious characters on the show, which made this a fun episode for Tory Kittles, as he explained:
It's just one of those moments where you get to see a character an entirely different light. For me to play that was a lot of fun, because we hadn't touched on any comedic sides of Dante, so it was good to see that and great to be able to do that. The writers do such a great job of just sort of throwing us curveballs and turning the story in a different direction when you're thinking it's going one way. They keep us on our toes, and they keep the audience on our toes and it's one of the things that I love about the show.
As much as the episode was fun for Tory Kittles to play, the same cannot be said for his character! As if Dante wasn't already having a bad day when he went from trying to drink his suspension woes away to getting in a brawl with a bad guy to stabbed with a truth serum to his heart literally stopping, he was revived just in time to be captured, tied to a chair in a room full of accelerant, and unable to fight back when the room was set on fire... and the credits rolled without a resolution. The actor shared his thoughts on the cliffhanger:
Literally, we have a fiery cliffhanger where everyone is in risk of being burned alive, and we're in need of The Equalizer, but the problem is The Equalizer has her hands full with a bunch of bad guys and a very bad woman. So how we're going to make it out of this, only time will tell. Or if we're going to make it out of this, only time will tell.
How much time it will take for The Equalizer to tell remains to be seen, particularly in light of the WGA writers strike, but Dante, Mel, and Harry are going to need some help ASAP, which McCall seemingly can't provide unless something big changes. "Eye for an Eye" ended with McCall's three allies tied to chairs and on the verge of burning alive, and Tory Kittles opened up about filming that climactic moment:
We were tied to chairs, and the thing about it is, getting out of a chair is not as easy as you think when you're tied to it. We always say, 'Well, if I was in this situation, how would I get out of it?' As an actor, the questions you ask yourself are, 'Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going and how am I gonna get there?' The objective in this particular scene was to get out of this room, but when you're tied up, how can you do that? And when the people who are around you, Harry and Mel, are tied up as well, how can you do that especially with the fire bearing down on you? And so their lives are at the mercy of the bad guys and at the mercy of whoever will come and help them, and we're left with this cliffhanger.
Hopefully most people will never been in the same circumstances as Dante when it comes to being tied to chairs with what appears to be the seemingly impossible objective of escaping! According to Kittles, the fire wasn't all a result of special effects, either. The actor shared:
Not all of the fire was added in post. [When] we shot that scene, we did it very safely, but the room was warm, and there were some places around the room where there was real fire, and so that helped. But also, the stakes were on the page... Our writers do such a great job with the voices of our characters. Joe Wilson has been my character advocate since Episode 1, Season 1, and he's now showrunner with Adam Glass. They do a very good job of when they place us in these situations, we're very well aware of how the character is going to act.
The writers ended Season 3 with a big and complicated cliffhanger to resolve, and fans can only speculate about the payoff for the time being. As to whether or not everybody will survive... well, we can always cross our fingers until The Equalizer is back!
Season 4 Started Filming Early
While CBS has not yet announced precisely when The Equalizer is expected to return to primetime for Season 4, the show did take the extra step of making sure to film the resolution sooner rather than later. The actors confirmed that the fourth season premiere has already been filmed. When asked if she gets any clues about what comes next or is kept in the dark as much as fans, Laya DeLeon Hayes shared:
I'm partially in the dark. We filmed already the first episode of Season 4, so I fully know what goes on in that episode, which I'm keeping under wraps. As opposed to everything else that happens in the season, a lot of it is kept in the dark, and we don't really know, and sometimes if you ask they will tell you, but things change so often and on the fly, so you never fully know how it's gonna play out. It's always a nice surprise when I get the scripts in my email and I get to read them every week and just constantly be surprised by what's happening. The fans aren't the only ones kept in the dark! We're all wondering, like, 'Oh my goodness, what's this character going to do next?' It keeps us excited as actors.
This certainly isn't the first time that The Equalizer wasted no time in filming the payoff of a cliffhanger, as the show did something similar with Mel's story at the end of the fall finale and beginning of the winter premiere, according to Liza Lapira. Of course, the stakes are considerably higher following this season finale than it was back with the fall finale. For Tory Kittles, getting right into the premiere was "great," as he explained:
It was a real-time continuation of the last episode, so there's a ticking clock element on the finale of, if this doesn't happen before that fire catches up with them, everyone's gonna die. So we pick up the first episode of next season exactly at the moment we left off. It's a continuation, and to be able to shoot it concurrently, actually, I think helped everyone's performance and kept us in line, so we didn't have to break for two months or three months and then come back and go, 'Okay, alright, let's remind ourselves where we were when we shot that last episode three months ago.' We were able to stay in it, which lends itself to the authenticity of the performances, the stakes, [and] where we were as characters, and so it just kept everything congruent in a way that I think lends itself to some consistency in the episode.
Fans will have to wait to see the continuation of this Season 3 finale, but it's a good sign when actors are already speaking highly of an episode that is still months away from airing. For summer hiatus, viewers can always revisit past episodes of The Equalizer streaming on Paramount+, which has all three seasons so far available. For some new viewing options to pass the warmer months, check out our 2023 TV premiere schedule.
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