Walker’s Season 3 Finale – And A Cliffhanger Ending!

It’s been a tumultuous week in the Walker fandom (and especially in the Supernatural fandom at large), with Walker renewed but Walker Independence and The Winchesters not renewed and Gotham Knights still up in the air. So I think we all needed some feel good TV, and the season finale of Walker didn’t disappoint – although, of course, that wasn’t ALL the episode gave us!

“It’s A Nice Day For A Ranger Wedding” set up the story for next season while also giving us some truly happy making moments, which felt much needed.

The episode starts at the end, a discarded bouquet of flowers, a bloody body on the floor, still alive and breathing heavy.  The room is ransacked, broken glass strewn all over.

And then it’s 36 hours before…

Well damn, Walker, that’s a beginning!

Cordell is back to running with Liam and Trey, which means he’s starting to make some progress with his PTSD perhaps, and also means we get to see the boys all run in single layers. Cordell has a brief flashback of the time he went running and got kidnapped by Grey Flag, but then Cassie runs right into him and they’re off again. Cassie wins and triumphantly puts on the hat and everyone is a good sport. (Also, we find out she was a Mathlete, which is a shoutout I’m sure to Padalecki – who really was a Mathlete!) There are a lot of shout outs in this finale, and I am here for it.

Most of the episode is devoted to planning the wedding of Captain James and Kelly, with a lot of healing going on in the process for lots of the main characters.

Abeline tells Trey she’s seen how far he’s come, highlighting that he’s in a better place and feeling less responsible for the Grey Flag mess.

Cassie gets a call from the FBI – Tessa Graves – who wants her and Walker to come join an FBI task force for the summer in Florida. They’re flattered and Cassie is tempted, though also conflicted because Austin has come to feel like home. She’s clearly in a better place too.

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Walker ‘False Flag Part 2’ Brings the Big Reveal

Part 2 of the dramatic two part ‘False Flag’ resolved a lot of the mysteries we’ve been pondering all season on ‘Walker’ and left Cordell absolutely reeling – and many of us too! (Suspecting that a character you kinda sorta liked is about to turn bad guy with a tragic backstory isn’t the same as watching it happen onscreen!)

In the aftermath of the explosion (and Julia’s death, which I am NOT over even if others are), Cordell is the prime suspect thanks to Kevin’s careful set up.

The not-very-empathic Agent Tessa Graves is determined to prove Cordell is guilty, with a single-minded focus on him that doesn’t allow her to see the holes in that narrative. She shows up at the Walker ranch to search everything, much to the family’s understandable protest. Kevin, it turns out, even (very obviously) planted some C4 in the room where Walker already had those photos of the men he served with, all with the X’s through them – which, if you recall, I always thought was a totally weird thing for him and Julia to do.

But made for a great set up!

Cordell, much the worse for wear both physically and psychologically, flees from the scene of the explosion and siphons some gas from a (very nice) woman’s trunk. I can’t imagine that was a fun scene to do, even if that, of course, wasn’t really gasoline that Padalecki had to suck up and spit out.

Ewww.

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(Disheveled Cordell somehow manages to look kinda hot even doing this though…)

At that moment, Cassie pulls up to the gas station with a deadpan ‘I need a coffee’ and seriously, she is an awesome partner and always has Walker’s back.

Trey is back in Ranger uniform (and looking amazing in that hat, truly) but just as angry as Captain James and the Walker family are that Cordell is being blamed. Graves insists innocent people don’t run, but James points out that if they’re being framed, they would. And he’s right! I’m not sure Tessa is the best at her job thinking that the way Grey Flag tortured Cordell “turned” him, because that makes no sense to me, but she’s sticking to that.

Walker realizes he asked Julia to meet him at the safe house, so of course it looks like he set her up to be murdered – Kevin did a brilliantly (evil) job with the set up. I would imagine that also adds to Cordell’s guilt that he accidentally got Julia killed, even if he was totally being manipulated and so was she. (Julia….sob….)

He also has a concussion, staggering around and bumping into walls in the little gas station where he and Cassie go to buy some burner phones. Nobody does hurt better than Jared Padalecki, so you feel every bit of that pain and disorientation.

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Walker’s False Flag Delivers an Explosive Twist

Yes, I do mean that literally.

Last week’s episode of Walker picks up right where the previous one left off, and doesn’t let up on the tension for pretty much the entire episode, thanks to writer David James and director Richard Speight, Jr.

Cordell wakes up to Emily’s voice, telling him to wake up and not stay cuffed to a sink.

Cordell: Honestly, cuffed to an old sink in the middle of nowhere is about how I’m feeling right now, emotionally.

So many of us can relate, Cordi.

Also, oddly, it’s a familiar situation for Jared Padalecki’s characters.

He’s traumatized by learning that Coop was actually a deserter and a coward instead of someone he admired and thus modeled his whole life after, questioning what would have been different if he’d seen through him. Would Liam not have been tortured? Would Hoyt still be alive? Would he even be a Ranger at all?

Emily reminds him he’s not a deserter or a coward, even if his self doubt is winning out right now. She’s the voice of reason in his head when he considers just trying to shoot his way out of the cuffs, and finds a smarter – dare I say a totally McGyver way – to do it instead.  We get to see a very badass and resourceful Cordell indeed, chewing his way through a bullet to accomplish that.

Meanwhile, Trey thinks he’s fooled Kevin into believing he’s a loyal Grey Flag operative now. We learn that Kevin actually poisoned himself, which is…. Disturbing…

Or….amusing? No, I’m going with disturbing.

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Walker Confronts The Man Who Was His Brother in “The Deserters”

Many of the separate threads that have been woven this season came together in this pivotal episode – some in the way I feared, and some with a twist that I didn’t see coming. In the feel good portion of this episode, the Walker family works on building new stables for the horse rescue, taking time out for Augie to try some comedy and everyone to find out that Mawline used to be in a comedy troupe!

Is there nothing Abeline cannot do?

Bonham grouses that Cordell is too busy to come help with the stable building, but Kevin shows up to pitch in. Abeline sees through his earnest just wanna help speech to being all about retaining the mayor’s biggest donor, but Kevin is nothing if not a complex character. He really does seem to want to help, at least part of him does.

Kevin thanks Liam for saving his life when he was hit with the nerve agent, calling him a real hero – which is nice to hear because Liam doesn’t hear that often enough. Of course Kevin wants to use that in his speech because Kevin always has an angle. We find out he’s an amateur pilot when he hammers his hand by accident, which maybe will be important at some point.

Kevin runs into Cassie at Cordell’s house, and they’re sort of adorably awkward together. I can’t help but kinda like the two of them, though I’m guessing when he says that he can promise that next time he sees her, it will be different, that means something much more ominous than mere awkwardness. (Spoiler alert now that I’ve seen the whole episode: It does.)

August sees Kevin as a mentor, and asks Mawline to be nice to him. I hope Augie isn’t gonna get hurt in all this… (More spoiler alert: uh oh…)

That’s the feel good portion, such as it is. The rest of the episode is emotional, taut with suspense, and not exactly the feel good part.

Most of the episode is devoted to the mystery of Cordell’s old mentor, Coop, and where the hell he’s been for two decades. Cassie and Captain James speculate – has he been hiding all these years? Was he captured and turned? Cordell and Julia have been busy too, using Walker’s knowledge of Coop’s use of aliases in the past to track his movements and money.

(We’re treated to some flashbacks with Colin Ford as young Cordell – I love that he’s become a recurring part of the show).

Neither James nor Cassie are sure that Cordell is actually going to be able to take Coop down if it comes to that.

James: Cordi, this guy was your mentor. If you do find him, are you sure you’re gonna be able to slap the cuffs on him, or worse?

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Walker: Best Laid Plans

I just typed out that episode title and thought, “laid”? Is that a naughty dad joke? In any case, it has a lot of different meanings, as the episode titles in this show often do. There are multiple story lines in this episode, which all intersect for a dramatic reveal at the end.

Trey Undercover

Cassie and Walker find out that Trey is in fact still a Ranger – and currently making inroads undercover trying to figure out what Grey Flag is up to (and why that’s all about Walker). The dead guy in the van, in fact, was Trey’s in. Not anymore! The Feds are now involved, providing a secret house for the team’s HQ and also ordering James not to let Cordell and Cassie in on what’s happening.

The foursome is a team again!

Though I like that Cassie is pissed that they were kept in the dark and also protective of Trey, and it takes her a while to come around. That was realistic – too often in TV people come around way too quickly and easily without struggling like most humans would.

They all realize by now that it’s a personal vendetta against Walker.

Cordell (waves adorably): Yeah me, I’m the last one on their hit list!

They intercept the text with the instructions for Trey’s first mission and figure out the cryptic message. Walker gives Trey the advice of not getting attached to anyone, and a warning about how a sad story can pull you in when you’re undercover – which clearly comes from experience. I kinda love that Cordell is an emotional man, that he struggles with that sometimes, but it’s part of who he is.

Trey stands watch as lookout for his Grey Flag ‘initiation’ of sorts, while James and Cassie keep watch on him. Things go south when the woman he’s standing guard for staggers out badly wounded.  Grey Flag wants the briefcase she’s retrieved and orders him not to waste time on poor Lana, but of course Trey can’t do that. Cassie pretends to be a bystander and covertly slips Trey some gauze to save her life (waiting for the okay from James on her out-of-the-box impulse though). Another guy shows up and grazes Cassie with a bullet, but Lana survives thanks to Trey’s combat medic skills – and he passes the test.

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