What To Know
The RJ Decker Season 1 finale ends with a shocking death and on a promising note for RJ and Emi.
Showrunner Rob Doherty explains why that character had to die and what could be next there and for more characters in a Season 2.
ABC drama has yet to be renewed.
It’s RJ (Scott Speedman) and his inner circle versus Victor Ochoa (David Zayas), and the corrupt businessman probably didn’t realize just who he was going up against. But by the end of the RJ Decker Season 1 finale, he’s no longer a concern … just not in the way that the others had thought. TV Insider spoke with showrunner Rob Doherty about that shocking end and what could come next, should the series be renewed. Warning: Spoilers for the RJ Decker Season 1 finale ahead!
To take down Emi’s (Jaina Lee Ortiz) corrupt father, Victor, RJ brought in his ex-wife Catherine (Adelaide Clemens), her wife Mel (Bevin Bru), and his former cellmate Wish (Kevin Rankin) to help. And working together, they did get to the bottom of why Victor had his son Lucas (Maximo Salas) try to steal the camera out of the former photographer’s car: There was a photo on it that proved that Victor’s man helped cover up a murder across the street from a scene RJ had worked for the newspaper. With the man responsible for that murder, Bruce (Stephen Bishop), willing to flip on Victor, Emi’s father does end up in a holding cell alongside RJ, whose new parole officer was assigned by Victor to claim there was a violation that should send him back to prison.
But, as RJ reveals to Victor, that’s straightened out and he’s free to go. He’s just there to make sure that Victor knows he’s won — at least for now. However, in the final moments of the episode, as RJ and his friends celebrate and he dances with Emi, someone kills Victor! But who?!
We spoke with Rob Doherty about that, the finale, and more, plus he shared early details about a Season 2.
Was the plan always to end the season with Victor’s death and why kill him off at this point?
Rob Doherty: Yes. Yeah. Victor was constructed to go away in a ninth and final episode, just as we kind of looked — I don’t know when we settled on it. It was probably sort of the midpoint of our season that it felt appropriate. It felt like a good punctuation mark at the end of our various first-season arcs. And it felt like it would open us up to some bigger things if and when we rolled into a second season. I will cop to having second thoughts after we cast David Zayas, who is just a remarkable person and actor. He was just so much fun to watch and interact with. In my book, he’s TV royalty. Ultimately, though, we had to say goodbye to Victor, but we’ll miss David.
Disney/John Merrick
So a man like Victor has a lot of enemies, including his family, who have to be on the suspect list. What can you say about who killed him and what that investigation would look like in a Season 2?
You’re absolutely right. I think the people closest to him will have to find themselves under a magnifying glass. I think Emi in our finale was part of a cabal to bring him down. If you look at that from another angle, it could look like she was acting against him, and maybe this was something —Certain parties may come to believe that Emi had a hand in what happened. Beyond that, as we mentioned in the finale, Victor copped to being a shady politician, which I hear is a very rare thing. But he confessed to Emi that he maintains relationships with a lot of people that on paper he should not, but he has decided that it’s for the greater good. It makes Fort Lauderdale a safer city and Florida a safer state. So we’ll have to pick our way through some of those people, too. That’ll take some digging for sure. Who was Victor in bed with, and could they have done him in?
RJ and Emi leave things in an unresolved place, but there is that dance. There seems to be hope for them after what we saw in Episode 8 as well. What can you say about where you wanted to leave them, and could we see Victor’s death changes things for them? Or could that just bring them closer together, that they’re both working towards something?
I think Victor’s murder has to change things. I think dramatically that’s a good thing for us as writers. It’s good to have to sort of wend your way through that sort of surprise and that sort of tragedy. It will disrupt the Emi and RJ relationship, not just because each can, will, and should be looked at as suspects, but Emi’s going to carry some guilt. She didn’t see any of this coming, but the truth is she teed him up for an arrest, and the arrest made him a vulnerability to someone else, someone to be identified. And so, as brilliant as Emi is, it’s the one thing she couldn’t have seen coming, and she’ll have to sort of pick her way through that. And I think that will make it harder to be around RJ, at least in the short term. Not because she blames him, but because it’s hard to look at RJ and not sort of be reminded of the path that ultimately led to her dad getting gunned down in his home.
RJ is left in a pretty good place, especially since he just dealt with the threat of being sent back to prison. He doesn’t know about Victor yet. Why was it important for you to do that with him ending this season?
What I liked was the appearance of everything being put away in its respective box and simultaneously showing something terrible and bloody and messy only to the audience. I like seeing these two things at the same time. The night of, RJ and Emi and Catherine and Mel and Wish, they’re right to celebrate and feel good and gather as a family, so to speak. But I liked that simultaneously the audience has this sort of God’s eye view that lets them know there’s a much bigger mess coming. Enjoy the party while you can. It’s going to be trickier in Season 2.
You bookended the first season with two cases from RJ’s past, getting some resolution. What can you say about a Season 2, especially in terms of who RJ is?
I feel like as a series, our standalone cases are our bread and butter. I look forward to swiveling back to Carl Hiaasen-esque Floridian weirdness. That can be a little harder to pull off when things are more personal, and the stakes feel higher. So I think as we come into a second season, the goal is to start with something fun and strange and distinctly Floridian, while also tending to and picking through all of the fallout of what happened for RJ, Emi, and Victor at the end of the first season. So I think for all intents and purposes, RJ, the man and the investigator, is the same, but he has sort of a brand new mess laid out in front of him. He’ll continue to attack these cases that I hope are unique to our show, but he’ll also have to kind of tend to some cleanup in his personal life.
Knowing that you were killing off Victor, what did you want to do with RJ and Victor’s scene together in the cell? Because Scott and David were so good in that scene.
They were really, really good. I’d say a fair amount of our episodes are resolved in interrogation rooms or conference rooms, and that’s totally appropriate to what we do. I like that brand of take-down. But I fell in love with the idea of putting both our guys behind bars. Let’s give this final little triumph to RJ in a setting that’s darker and stranger, and let the fun of it be that he’s leaving in a minute. He’s really only here because he’s a gracious host. And so our amazing production team was kind enough to build us a holding cell. It was not a set that we had previously, but maybe we’ll circle back, but really, it was just to ultimately put these guys on opposing benches and let them just say what they needed to say to each other before RJ is able to excuse himself.
At the end of the scene, Victor said that it wasn’t over, but the thing is, now he’s dead. But could he have said anything in motion prior to his death, or his death set anything else in motion, or his killer be involved in anything related to that warning?
Wow. What could I say? Victor was a brilliant and devious guy, and yes, absolutely, it is conceivable that wheels were already in motion to make things difficult for RJ following Victor’s release. Only time will tell. To what degree those things were short-circuited or made even more complicated by Victor’s passing, we’ll have to see.
What I liked is that you brought everyone together in the finale after having RJ’s worlds kind of separate throughout. So does that mean that going forward, you’re going to be able to mix and match people together more?
For sure. And I appreciate you noticing that. It became one of the things I looked forward to the most as we approached the final episode was this opportunity to take all the toys out of the box and put them in any arrangement we wanted, to put them on sets they hadn’t shared together previously. That was great. To put Catherine in the police station, to put Emi in the conference room, to really get the band together. I loved that, and I looked forward to it.
It was great. It was great, mostly because we have such an amazing cast. You start to want to put everybody together or you start to want to team them up in different configurations. So, yeah, having done it once, having had them all on the same playground, so to speak, I for sure want to take advantage of that again as we move forward.
RJ Decker, Streaming Now, Hulu