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'Flashpoint' Co-Creators Discuss 'The Human Cost Of Heroism' And Ed Lane's Season 5 Trajectory

by: Lindsay Zier-Vogel Date: 9/21/2012

In the very first episode of “Flashpoint,” Ed Lane (Hugh Dillon) had to make the toughest call any member of Team One ever had to make…and in the first episode of the final season, he finds himself doing it all over again.

 “The shot that Ed Lane has to take is probably the worst one a police officer ever has to take. You’re doing your job, you’re doing everything by the book, and a guilty person goes free and unharmed and an innocent is harmed,” says co-creator and writer, Mark Ellis.

And, he reveals in a recent set visit, that this opening shot will set the tone for Ed’s journey throughout the final season.

“Ed having to take a person’s life ends up being more trouble and traumatic for him that he would’ve anticipated,” says fellow co-creator and writer Stephanie Morgenstern.

“He comes home at the end of the pilot episode (in Season 1) shaken by nearly killing a young boy,” she says, recounting the concluding emotional scene from that first episode where Ed’s son Clark comes down the stairs and he holds him tight as tears rise to his eyes.

“We track that relationship between him and his son and the shifting dynamic between them as the son grows more cynical about his father’s profession,” Morgenstern says. “Clark is going to learn a very different portrait of his father over the course of the season.”

“Ultimately (Sgt. Greg) Parker will have to help him through,” adds Ellis.

Going into the fifth season knowing it would be the last was liberating for the writing team. “In a way that made it easier in some ways because we knew the scope of the story could be as big as we wanted it to be. If there were places we wanted to take the characters that we hadn’t taken them yet, now was the time,” says Morgenstern. “Basically, it was go big or go home.”

“To be able to think about the last season as a whole was extraordinary,” adds Ellis.

The pair continued to develop the theme of the series – the human cost of heroism – and for this final season also added the theme of legacy.

“It’s about what we leave behind and how we move forwards and bury old ghosts,” says Ellis.

In previous seasons, they have explored themes of sacrifice and family and the nature of team work, and they say that with each season, they dug deeper and deeper into the longer narratives of the show, and the emotional lives of the character.  “As we became closer and closer and more intimate with the actors and (learned) what they were capable of, we were able to challenge them and write them into new areas.

“There are some things we set up in the pilot episode that pay off 75 episodes later,” she says.

And it looks like Ed Lane’s struggle with grief and PTSD might be one of those returning ghosts.

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