Spoilers for Fire Country Season 3, Episode 13 – “My Team” – are ahead! If you want to stream the episode, you can do so with a Paramount+ subscription.
Another week, another traumatic episode of Fire Country on the 2025 TV schedule. While the episode, on the whole, wasn’t terribly disastrous, it did end on a tragic note, as Birch, one of the Three Rock inmates, died in the final moments. After watching it, the short scene really left an impact on me, and it has me incredibly worried about three characters as they cope with this loss.
So, here’s what happened: Birch was sick at the start of the episode, and when Manny asked if he needed to go to the prison infirmary, he said no. Then Kevin Alejandro’s character said he’d help his fellow inmate.
Eve and Manny then went back and forth about the best ways to support the Three Rock inmate in a way that didn’t make him feel like a criminal. In the end, they had Birch stay in his bed, and when his symptoms got worse, they decided to send him to the infirmary in the morning, which he was upset about. However, when they went to wake him up, he didn’t, and when Bode and Station 42 arrived, they couldn’t save him.
Now, I think this could have a serious and troubling impact on Manny, Eve and Bode specifically.
Manny
Arbuably, the person this death will impact most is Manny.
This loss has to be a big blow to Manny’s philosophy about the best way to help those in the camp, and he also simply lost a friend. He was already teetering this season with his rocky relationship with Gabriela, so this kind of loss concerns me.
Thankfully, he and his daughter are back on good terms, so hopefully, she can help him through this.
Eve
Eve has gone through a lot this season. She was at odds with her dad a few episodes ago, and there’s been an underlying struggle for her when it comes to embracing and feeling confident in her leadership role at Three Rock.
With this episode, she made a choice that proved to have intense consequences – even though it was all well-intentioned. So, I’m worried that what happened could impact her job.
While I’m anxious about her and her position, I’m more nervous about how this might affect her emotionally. I don’t want her confidence to be shaken, and I want Eve to feel like she’s fit for this job, because she is. However, there’s no denying that this loss could cause her to take a few steps back, literally and figuratively.
Bode
Finally, and possibly surprisingly, I think this death could impact Bode in a bad way, too. In this episode specifically, we saw Max Thieriot's character struggling with losing a patient in the last installment. He was sleeping at the firehouse, and there were even hints back to the struggles he had with drugs before he went to Three Rock.
While he loves firefighting – almost to a fault – Bode is now facing the harder parts of the job, and he’s struggling to handle it all. Could witnessing this death negatively impact his progression? It certainly seems possible…
Overall, I think the ending of Episode 13 left us with many reasons to be worried, especially when it comes to Manny, Eve and Bode’s stories. Thankfully, we don’t have to wait long to see how they’re impacted because Fire Country returns to CBS next Friday at 9 p.m. ET.
