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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Fire Country Season 2 Episode 6 “Alert the Sheriff.”]
Fire Country could be expanding with a new spinoff, centered on the sheriff’s office, and the latest episode introduces Morena Baccarin as Mickey, who also happens to be Sharon’s (Diane Farr) estranged sister. It’s not a backdoor pilot—this is very much an episode of Fire Country, though one that does introduce us to a different part of Edgewater—but it does give us an idea of what we could see, in part, if a new series does happen.
We meet Mickey in a helicopter, chasing down a suspect for money laundering; when he dumps the cash out, the Three Rock inmates immediately grab it, then Sharon’s the one to bring it to the sheriff’s office. It’s through the scenes with Sharon and Bode (Max Thieriot, who directed the episode) that we get to know more about Mickey. (They’re not sisters by blood; their parents married.) Yes, her father was a drug dealer. It ended badly (with an FBI raid). The sisters haven’t talked because Mickey thinks Sharon blames her for how Bode’s life turned out after she arrested him as a teen for stealing baseball cleats from a store. Sharon says she doesn’t and even apologizes, admitting she knows she was nuts when it came to Bode after losing Riley. But Mickey turns down her offer to be a better sister.
As Mickey later points out, sure, Sharon had feelings about her arresting her son, but the sheriff had arrested her nephew. In fact, Mickey called her sister a month ago, and Sharon at first claims she didn’t see the call then admits that she did. Mickey reveals that she reached out because her daughter Skye is in rehab. She thought she raised Skye not to be like Bode, that she was going to be the perfect kid because she was the perfect mom, and it turns out, she was out buying drugs from a guy she met on social media. It’s also through Sharon that—at least according to her—we find out that Mickey, when scared, gets mean.
The episode also offers a chance to see Mickey in action multiple times. She and Sharon find the sheriff, dead, and Lieutenant Andy Kubiak (Alberto Frezza) injured. Andy says the escaped inmate shot them, but as Mickey eventually realizes, including by running the distance he would have had to cover from where he was last seen, it couldn’t have been Rudy. Rather, Andy’s corrupt, but once Mickey realizes that (wondering why she didn’t see that or the problems with Skye sooner), Bode shows him where the escaped inmate is likely hiding. Though Andy has a plan to kill both Bode and Rudy, Bode can outsmart him. By the time Mickey and Sharon arrive on the scene, they’re out of a burning cabin, and both Andy and Rudy take off in opposite directions; Mickey uncuffs Bode and sends him after his fellow Three Rock-er. Both are taken into custody, and Mickey’s going to give Bode credit in her report.
And so with that, we’ve met Mickey and gotten a sense of the sheriff’s office, though if this does end up becoming a series, there would need to be an entirely new group of characters around her, since Sheriff Watkins (Michael St. John Smith) was killed and Andy arrested. And it’s possible that anything we’ve seen from Mickey could change, given that she and Sharon are in a much better place by the end of the episode.
“Our biggest goal on this episode was to introduce a character who felt like she was very much a part of this world already and that she lived in and felt authentic to Edgewater and this community and all these other characters, like she’s just one other piece of the bigger puzzle,” Thieriot tells us. “But I think the big thing as well was because we were showing as a pretty large focus of the episode the sheriff’s office for the first time—we had seen different jobs in the show, usually branches of Cal Fire, maybe neighboring fire stations or volunteer fire departments—and we were really going to spend more time with Mickey in this episode and see this sheriff’s office, we felt like it was important to give that a little bit of a different feel while also keeping it in the same world.”
He continued, “It’s a weird balance where you want it to be distinct and unique and stand out and have a little bit of a different look, but at the same time, you don’t want it to be such a contrast that it doesn’t feel like Fire Country. So that’s sort of the juggle and why we played around with coloring the episode a little differently, using some longer lenses in some of these scenes and compressing things a little bit, making them soft, but also still maintaining the general Fire Country feel.”
But what did you think of the introduction of Mickey? And would you watch a sheriff-centric spinoff? Let us know in the poll and comments section, below.
Fire Country, Fridays, 9/8c, CBS