[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Rookie Season 7 Episode 16 “The Return.”]
Apparently, all it took for Seth (Patrick Keleher) to be honest with his coworkers was getting fired, returning to find everyone shunning him, trying to prove himself, and getting seriously injured and losing his leg as a result on the job.
“He was so blatantly honest,” Keleher tells TV Insider as part of our Booked: The Rookie Aftershow for the Tuesday, April 29, episode. “This is the only time, I think, pretty much the entire season where he has to leave it all out on the table, and he finally tells the truth.”
Seth returns to work, and no one’s happy about it, to the point that everyone turns their backs on him when he walks into the station. “I had to leave to go to New York because I was doing a play called Fatherland, and we did an off-Broadway run, and that was my conflict,” explains Keleher. “When I was done, I came back and shot Episode 16. So coming back and then filming that scene where everybody stands up and turns their back, it felt too real. I remember telling everybody, ‘This doesn’t feel right. It feels like I really am being shunned.’ And yeah, it was a little too real.”
There was originally a scene before that: Tamara (Dylan Conrique) dropping him off. “It’s how the episode was supposed to open. And in that scene, they just had this conversation. She says, ‘You can do it,’ and we get to see a little bit more inside their relationship,” Keleher reveals.
Seth’s first time around, he had Lucy (Melissa O’Neil) as his training officer. This time, it’s Nolan (Nathan Fillion), and he saves his life during a shootout (which results in the injury that leads to his leg being amputated). How much was that him trying to prove himself, and how much might it have been a glimpse into who Seth really is and can be if he stops doing, as he says, what he always does, making himself a victim?
“I think he wasn’t trying to prove himself. I think that was a very natural instinct, he just saw and he acted the way that he naturally did,” says Keleher. “He’s a good kid at heart, just a little mixed up in the head.”
But his character has been changed now, he continues, with losing his leg “the biggest thing” to do so. As for who he is now, Keleher doesn’t know. “I would say pretty damaged. I don’t know where he is at. In that last monologue, he talks about, ‘Nobody at the station wants me anymore. This is it. I’m done. I’m done.’ And no one tries to cheer him up and says, ‘No, dude, you have a second chance. You can come back in and if you really try, you can be a good cop.’ So I don’t know where he is.”
Watch the full Booked: The Rookie Aftershow above with Patrick Keleher about Seth’s return, filming key scenes from Season 7 Episode 16, and much more.
The Rookie, Tuesdays, 9/8c, ABC
