The Brave star, creator on that explosive ending

WARNING: This post contains spoilers from the series premiere of NBC’s The Brave. Read at your own risk!

Well, that’s one way to end a pilot!

The series premiere of The Brave ended with a bang. After eliminating a wanted terrorist and saving a kidnapped American doctor, Capt. Adam Dalton’s (Mike Vogel) team — Preach (Demetrius Grosse), Jaz (Natacha Karam), McG (Noah Mills), and Amir (Hadi Tabbal) — decompresses from their most recent mission by playing soccer on the beach with some kids. Unfortunately, a suicide bomber drives a car bomb right into the middle of the game and explodes, leaving the team’s lives in the balance.

The biggest question going into next week’s episode: Who survived? Luckily, series creator Dean Georgaris was more than willing to answer that question.

“It’s fair to say the team makes it out alive, some more injured than other,” Georgaris tells EW. “They were able to rescue a lot of people, but they weren’t able to rescue everyone and they carry the psychological and the physical injuries with them throughout the season.” For example, McG, the team’s medic, injures his wrist, which compromises his ability to do his job in the following episodes.

Originally, the pilot was going to have a happy ending, but Georgaris did away with that because he wanted to emphasize an important point about the show’s world.

“This is a dangerous world they live in. The enemy can be anywhere and attacks can come any time,” Georgaris says. “When I was writing the pilot, I kept looking for a place. “Okay, maybe I’ll injure one of my characters. Maybe I’ll kill one of my characters.” Invariably, I felt like you wouldn’t care enough about them and it wouldn’t get the point across. You’d feel bad for the team, but it would feel like a plot move.”

He liked this idea because it then opened up the door for the show to also explore the psychological effects of not being able to go after the bad guys. In order to maintain the show’s verisimilitude, we won’t see Dalton and the team go out for revenge in the next episode. In fact, we won’t see them return to the Middle East until what Georgaris hopes will be the show’s midseason finale.

“It doesn’t become an obsessive search for the bomber,” Georgaris explains. “These units don’t get to do that. They have to dust off, move on to the next mission and trust that the people in Washington will eventually find the bad guy. They don’t get to sit around and sulk. They don’t get to go on vigilante missions. Why not? Because if they did, they’d lose their jobs. They follow orders. They’re honorable people.”

“It’s not the wild west,” says Vogel. “As much as we want to go and get retribution, until we’re assigned a mission, we can’t act independently and we can’t go out with zero intelligence because that’s how people end up killed.”

The Brave airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on NBC.