Part 1

CHAPTER 1: THE WEIGHT OF THE FINAL SCRIPT

You have to understand, when you play a character for seven years, they stop being just words on a page or lines you memorize in a trailer. They become a part of your DNA. Lisa Davis wasn’t just a role I clocked into at 5:00 AM; she was a woman I grew up with, a shadow that walked beside me through my thirties.

Back in 2017, when I first got the call from my agent, I had no idea what this beast of a show would become. I remember walking onto the set that first season in Los Angeles, which was doing its absolute best to pretend it was Virginia Beach. The air smelled like fake smoke and craft service coffee.

Davis was… well, “pedestrian,” as I like to say now with a bit of a laugh. I was packing parachutes. That was the gig. My biggest responsibility in the script was making sure the guys—the big, tough Tier 1 operators—had their favorite candy bars packed before a mission. I was essentially a glorified logistics manager. I was Blackburn’s sidekick, standing in the background, nodding at orders, holding a clipboard.

If you had told me then—while I was standing there in that humid warehouse set—that seven years later, I’d be a Lieutenant, an Admiral’s Aide, navigating the shark-infested waters of high command in Washington D.C., I would have laughed in your face. But that’s the beauty of this journey. We grew together. I grew as an actress, finding my voice, and Davis grew as a leader, finding her power.

So, fast forward to last Sunday. The end of the road. The final script for the series finale lands in my inbox.

The atmosphere on set that week was heavy. Not a bad heavy, but electric, thick with nostalgia. Every hug lasted a little longer. Every “cut” from the director felt a little sharper, like a knife severing a cord. We were a family facing eviction from the home we built together, brick by brick, scene by scene.

I retreated to my trailer and locked the door. I turned off the lights, leaving only the glow of my iPad. I needed silence.

The fear was real. It sat in my chest like a cold stone. “How am I going to be satisfied?” I kept asking myself. After 114 episodes, how do you wrap up a life? How do you do justice to the women in the military who have stopped me on the street, tears in their eyes, thanking me for showing them a version of themselves that was strong, capable, and cunning?

I remembered a Halloween a few years back. A fan tagged me in a photo on Instagram. She had dressed her little daughter up as Lisa Davis. Camo, stern look, clipboard. I remember thinking, That’s it. I’m out. I can die now. I’m a Halloween costume. That responsibility weighed on me. I couldn’t let them down.

I didn’t want a fairy tale. Davis isn’t a princess. She’s a warrior in a different kind of uniform. But I didn’t want tragedy either. I wanted… truth.

I scrolled to the first page. SEAL Team. Episode 710. The End.

My heart was hammering against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat. I started reading, analyzing every line of dialogue, every look, every stage direction. And then I got to the middle of the episode, and my heart sank.

CHAPTER 2: THE MISDIRECT AND THE SACRIFICE

The script was playing games with me.

Our showrunner, Spencer Hudnut, is a genius storyteller, but in that moment, alone in my trailer, I wanted to strangle him. The story was setting up a massive misdirect. It looked like Sonny and Davis were done.

The text described Sonny Quinn—my on-screen “sorta-love” interest, the chaos to my order—making plans to leave Virginia Beach. He was talking about moving closer to his daughter in Texas. He was packing up. It felt like a breakup. It felt like the reality of the military life was finally winning—that you can’t have the career and the love. You have to choose. And he was choosing to leave.

I remember sitting there, the screen blurring slightly, thinking, “No. After all the stolen glances, the secrets, the near-death experiences… we just drift apart? Is this how it ends? With a whimper?”

I was sad. Genuinely mourning a fictional relationship. I actually put the iPad down for a minute and stared at the acoustic foam on the ceiling of the trailer. It felt too real. Too cold.

But I picked it up again. I had to finish it. I had to know the damage.

And that’s when the bombshell hit.

The rumor mill on set had been buzzing for weeks. People were whispering that Sonny gave his revolutionary med kit idea to the Navy for free because he was a nice guy, or maybe to avoid the bureaucracy of patents. That was the “clean” version.

But the script revealed the darker, grittier truth. The closing montage peeled back the layers.

It flashed back to the parking lot. The confrontation with Colonel Decker after the disastrous Mali mission. The mission that haunted us.

Sonny didn’t just argue with him. He decked him. He punched a superior officer in the face. In the real world, that’s not just a slap on the wrist. That’s a career-ender. That’s a court-martial. That’s jail time.

But Sonny… he made a deal. He confessed. He traded his Trident—the symbol of everything he is, everything he fought to be, his identity as a SEAL—to save the team. To save me.

By taking the fall for the punch, he cleared the path for my promotion. He removed the stain of the investigation that would have dragged me down with him if I had tried to protect him. If I had lied for him, I would have been finished too.

He gave up being a SEAL so I could be an Admiral’s Aide.

I read the scene where he confesses. The realization washed over me like a tidal wave. He wasn’t leaving because he didn’t love me. He was leaving the Navy because he loved me enough to destroy his own career to save mine. He sacrificed his ego, his pride, and his dream job.

And then, the final scene.

We aren’t saying goodbye in a hallway. We are in a car. My belongings are packed in the back. We are driving to Washington D.C.

Together.

Hand in hand.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. The relief was physical. It wasn’t just a happy ending; it was an earned ending. It was messy and complicated, just like us. It wasn’t a ride into the sunset; it was a ride into the unknown, but we were doing it together.

I wiped a tear from my cheek and smiled. “Okay, Spencer,” I whispered to the empty room. “You got me.”

But as I prepared to film these final moments, I couldn’t help but think about the road that got us here. It wasn’t just the drama on the page. It was the crazy, unscripted moments behind the scenes. Specifically, the dancing. Oh god, the dancing.

If you think military combat is hard, try getting a stubborn actor to learn choreography in Colombia…

Part 2

CHAPTER 3: THE TRAP OF THE “WILDCARD”

People ask me all the time, usually in the hushed corners of a convention center or in the comments section of my Instagram: “Why didn’t you just lie? Why couldn’t Davis just look those brass-heavy officers in the eye and say, ‘I don’t know who hit Colonel Decker’?”

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? The “Blue Wall of Silence.” The Brotherhood. You protect the team at all costs. And believe me, looking at that script, looking at the situation Davis was in, part of me—the part that loves Sonny Quinn—wanted her to bury the truth six feet deep in the Virginia mud.

But here is the thing about playing Lisa Davis for seven years: you learn that the higher you climb, the thinner the air gets. And the harder it is to hide the bodies.

I couldn’t just tell the higher-ups, “Hey, I really, really looked into the Decker thing, and… I simply don’t know who did it, so let’s move on.”

It wasn’t that simple. It was a trap.

Remember Season 6? If you were paying attention, you remember the “wildcard.” I had a friend, a contact deep inside the machine, who slipped me the file. The file that proved Colonel Decker was to blame for the Mali mission disaster. That file was radioactive. It was the smoking gun.

If I had walked into that inquiry and perpetuated a lie—if I had said, “I saw nothing, I know nothing”—I wasn’t just risking my own stars. I was risking him.

That’s the part of the story you don’t see on the surface. If I lie, I pull on a thread that could unravel everything. I could potentially take him down with me. I have to be relying on the absolute fact that he’s not going to ever tell. And in Washington? In the military industrial complex? Betting your life on someone else’s silence is a suicide mission.

I spent hours thinking about this headspace. I needed the audience to feel the pressure cooking inside Davis’s skull.

If it was just me lying, knowing Davis, I can definitely see a scenario in which her loyalty would test the scales of her responsibility. She loves Bravo Team. She loves Sonny. She might lie to save them from a bureaucratic lynching.

But with other people involved? With a source who trusted her? She had to find a way to keep her integrity about her.

This is what made the role so juicy, and so exhausting, in the final stretch. Spencer Hudnut, our showrunner, didn’t want it to be easy. He didn’t want Davis to just be the “cool chick” who covers for the boys. He wanted to show the cunning that is required to survive as a woman in that space.

I love seeing Davis in tough spaces. I really, really do. It pays homage to the real women in the military who are navigating these male-dominated spaces every single day. They don’t get to just punch their way out. They have to outthink, outmaneuver, and outlast the men around them.

They have to have “cred.”

I didn’t want her arc to always be easy and fun and have her have back-up. I needed them to show that sharp edge. That moment where you realize she isn’t just following orders anymore; she’s analyzing the board, moving pieces, and realizing that sometimes, the only winning move is to let the truth come out, no matter how much it hurts.

So, the “misdirect” in the script wasn’t just a plot twist. It was a character test. Davis was backed into a corner. She was holding a grenade—the truth about Decker—and she had to decide whether to throw it or swallow it.

And Sonny? He saw that. He saw the corner I was in. He knew that if the investigation continued, if they kept digging into me to get to him, I would be forced to choose between my integrity and my heart.

He didn’t let me choose. He fell on the sword so I wouldn’t have to.

That’s the tragedy and the beauty of it. The “Wildcard” file was the leverage, but Sonny was the one who broke the stalemate.

CHAPTER 4: THE PARKING LOT AND THE “TRUMP ERA” OF PRIDE

Let’s talk about Colonel Decker.

Every good story needs a villain, but Decker wasn’t a villain with a mustache and a cat. He was worse. He was an incompetent man with power. He was the guy who makes a mistake that gets people killed, and then hides behind his rank to avoid the consequences.

We all know a Decker. You’ve probably worked for one.

The central conflict that led to the end of SEAL Team—the incident that cost Sonny his Trident—happened in a parking lot. A 7-Eleven parking lot, practically. It’s gritty. It’s unglamorous. It’s real.

People asked me, “Why couldn’t Decker just let it go? Why did he have to press charges? Why couldn’t he stop being so… precious?”

And my answer is: Have you looked outside lately?

We’re living in—God forbid I say it—the Trump era. I don’t mean that politically in a red-vs-blue way, I mean it culturally. We are living in a time where it’s all pride and pomp. Where people have got to pay.

Nobody lets anything slide anymore.

Decker represented that fragile ego. The kind of man who cares more about the shiny brass on his collar than the blood on his hands. He couldn’t just take the punch. He couldn’t say, “Yeah, I screwed up in Mali, I deserved that right hook.”

No. People really get all in a twist about name-calling on the playground now. It’s wild, right?

So, when I read the script, and I saw that Decker was coming for blood, it tracked. It made sense. It felt honest to the world we live in. It tracks to have somebody be like, “You’re not going to punch me and get away with it. Not on my watch.”

That parking lot punch wasn’t just violence; it was a collision of two worlds. Sonny represents the old school. Tier 1. You handle your business. You settle it man-to-man. If you mess up, you take your licks.

Decker represents the system. The bureaucracy. The world where appearance matters more than reality.

Sonny decking him was the most satisfying moment of the season, but it was also the nail in the coffin. You can’t fight the system with your fists. Not forever.

Filming the aftermath of that was intense. We had to carry the weight of that violence in every scene. Davis had to walk into rooms with men who outranked her, men who were friends with Decker, and hold her head high, knowing exactly what happened in that parking lot but unable to say it.

It was a masterclass in acting with your eyes.

I remember standing in the hallway set, waiting for the cameras to roll, thinking about the “upward mobility” of my character. From Petty Officer to Lieutenant. Every promotion felt like an achievement, but it also felt like a target on my back.

We kept kind of slipping in promotions over the years, to the point where we had to kind of make reference to them and move on. “Hey, congratulations! By the way, we have a mission.” We didn’t have time to keep up with them.

But this final promotion? The Admiral’s Aide? This was the big one. This was the “Game of Thrones” move. And Decker stood right in the middle of the road.

If Sonny hadn’t cleared the way, if he hadn’t confessed to the punch, Decker would have used that investigation to burn us both to the ground. He was petty enough to do it. He was “precious” enough to destroy a Tier 1 asset and a rising female officer just to soothe his bruised jaw.

So, yes, the punch cost Sonny his career. But in a way, it was the only way to beat a man like Decker. You can’t out-argue him. You can’t out-rank him.

You have to out-sacrifice him.

Sonny realized that the only thing Decker couldn’t take from him was his willingness to lose everything for the woman he loved. Decker would never understand that. A man like that doesn’t understand sacrifice; he only understands leverage.

And that, my friends, is why the ending hits so hard. It wasn’t just a love story. It was a war story. And we won.

But before we could drive off into the sunset, we had one last hurdle. A hurdle that terrified me more than any parking lot brawl or military tribunal.

We had to dance.

And let me tell you… AJ Buckley (Sonny) had other plans.

Part 3

CHAPTER 5: THE SECRET REHEARSAL AND THE “SAVIS” PRESSURE

You might think the hardest part of filming a show like SEAL Team is the pyrotechnics. You’d think it’s the 100-degree heat in the Santa Clarita hills, wearing forty pounds of tactical gear while pretending you aren’t about to pass out from heat stroke. Or maybe memorizing the complex military jargon that sounds like a different language to civilians.

But for me? The most terrifying moment of Season 7 wasn’t a firefight. It was a dance floor.

We need to talk about the “Savis” undercover dancing scene.

If you are a fan of the show, you know that the relationship between Davis and Sonny has been a slow burn. A painfully slow burn. It’s the “will-they-won’t-they” that kept Twitter up at night. We knew that before the end, we had to give the fans something visceral. Not just a look across a briefing room, but body contact. Kinetic energy.

The script called for Davis and Sonny to go undercover in Colombia. The setting: a vibrant, sweaty, high-energy club. The objective: blend in. The method: dance.

Now, here is a little secret about me, Toni Trucks, that plays a huge role in this disaster. Before I was Lieutenant Davis, barking orders and analyzing intel, I had a whole life in musical theater. I trained for this. I know my way around a stage. If you tell me to hit a mark and do a pirouette, I’m there. I thrive on choreography. I love the structure of it. One, two, three, step.

So, when I saw “Sonny and Davis dance salsa” in the script, my inner theater kid did a backflip. I thought, “Finally! My time to shine! I can show off a little!”

I was ready to turn SEAL Team into Dancing with the Stars.

But then there was the variable I couldn’t control: AJ Buckley.

AJ plays Sonny Quinn to perfection because, in many ways, he embodies that chaotic, lovable, rough-around-the-edges energy. Sonny is a brawler. He’s a door-kicker. He is not, historically, a salsa dancer.

But we were professionals. We were committed.

We actually scheduled dance lessons. This is something you rarely get in TV production. Usually, they throw you on set and say, “Figure it out.” But for this? We had three scheduled sessions with a professional choreographer.

I was taking it so seriously. I showed up in my workout gear, hair tied back, ready to sweat. I wanted us to look like we belonged in that Colombian club. I wanted the chemistry to be electric.

And AJ… well, AJ showed up.

I have footage on my phone—footage that I threatened AJ I would release if he ever crossed me—of these rehearsals. Picture this: Me, trying to count out the beats, trying to get the hip action right, looking at the mirror with intense focus. And then there’s AJ, looking at his feet like they are foreign objects that have been attached to his legs by mistake.

He was trying. I’ll give him that. In the rehearsal studio, he was sweating, furrowing his brow, trying to memorize the steps. “Left foot here, spin her there.” We went over it again and again.

By the end of the third lesson, we had a routine. It wasn’t professional ballroom level, but it was passable. It was cute. It had a dip. It had a spin. I felt confident. I thought, “Okay, we are going to nail this. The fans are going to lose their minds.”

I went home that night practicing the moves in my kitchen. I was visualizing the camera angles. I was ready to bring the romance. I was ready to sell the “Savis” magic.

I didn’t know that AJ was plotting a mutiny.

CHAPTER 6: THE COLOMBIA INCIDENT AND UNSCRIPTED CHAOS

We flew to Colombia to film the final episodes.

The location was stunning. The air was thick and humid, the kind of weather that makes everything feel a little more dangerous and a little more alive. The set for the club scene was incredible—lights pulsing, music thumping, extras packed in tight to create that claustrophobic, high-stakes atmosphere.

It was time.

I walked onto the dance floor in my dress, feeling the nerves kick in. This was it. The culmination of three dance lessons. The moment we show the world that Sonny and Davis can move as one.

The director called for quiet. The playback music started.

I turned to AJ, eyes bright, ready to lock into our practiced frame. I put my hand on his shoulder, expecting him to slide his hand onto my waist and begin the “one-two-step” we had drilled into our brains.

Instead, he just stood there.

He looked at me, then looked at the camera, then looked back at me with that classic Sonny Quinn stubbornness.

“Yeah… I’m not doing that,” he said.

My jaw practically hit the floor. The music was playing. The cameras were rolling. The extras were dancing around us.

“What?” I hissed, trying to keep a smile on my face so we wouldn’t ruin the take. “AJ, we practiced! We have choreography! Do the dip!”

He shook his head, barely moving his feet. “I’m just going to do what I’m going to do,” he mumbled. “Sonny doesn’t dance.”

I could feel my musical theater training screaming in agony. My internal metronome was ticking, waiting for the beat that he was completely ignoring. “But—but the lessons!” I whispered frantically. “The spin! The steps!”

“Nah,” he said, grinning that lopsided grin. “Sonny wouldn’t know how to salsa. He’d just… sway.”

And that’s exactly what he did. He grabbed me, not with the finesse of a dancer, but with the possessive, protective grip of a Tier 1 operator holding onto the only thing in the world that matters to him. He didn’t lead me; he just held me.

All my preparation went out the window. I had to abandon the steps. I had to abandon the technique. I had to just… be there. With him.

And in that moment of panic, something magical happened.

I stopped acting like a dancer and started reacting like Davis. Because AJ was right. Sonny Quinn wouldn’t have taken salsa lessons. Sonny Quinn wouldn’t know how to do a perfect cross-body lead. He would be uncomfortable, he would be stiff, and he would only care about being close to Davis.

The awkwardness you see on screen? That wasn’t acting. That was me, Toni, trying to figure out what the hell AJ was doing, and AJ just living in the moment.

He pulled me in close, shuffling his feet in a way that was entirely un-rhythmic but entirely honest. It wasn’t a performance for the people in the club; it was a private moment in a public space.

I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. The frustration melted into genuine affection. That’s us. That’s the dynamic. Davis makes the plan, Davis studies the map, Davis packs the parachutes perfectly—and Sonny jumps out of the plane without checking the altimeter.

The scene that made it into the final cut wasn’t the polished routine we rehearsed. It was messy. It was raw. It was two people clinging to each other in a chaotic world.

When the director yelled “Cut!”, I slapped his arm. “I cannot believe you made me do those lessons for nothing!” I laughed.

“It wasn’t for nothing,” he said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “It was so I knew exactly what I wasn’t going to do.”

That moment, right there, encapsulates everything I’m going to miss about this show. The trust. The ability to look at your scene partner, see them go completely off-script, and know that they are doing it because they know the character better than anyone else.

We didn’t get the perfect dance. We got something better. We got the truth.

But as the high of that scene wore off, the reality of the end started to settle in again. The fun was over. The dancing was done. We were heading back to the States to film the final goodbyes. And I had to prepare myself for the question that haunts every actor when a long-running show ends:

What happens when the uniform comes off for the last time?

And more importantly… what really happens to Davis now? The script says one thing, but my heart says another.

Part 4

CHAPTER 7: THE GHOST IN THE MIRROR AND THE REAL HEROES

The cameras stopped rolling. The lights dimmed. But the hardest part wasn’t walking off the set; it was walking out of the character.

There is a specific kind of silence that falls over a soundstage when a series wraps. It’s not peaceful. It’s heavy. It’s the sound of a machine powering down after running at maximum capacity for seven years.

I went back to my trailer to change out of my uniform for the last time.

As I unbuttoned the jacket, I looked at the rank insignia. Lieutenant. It was just a piece of metal, a prop, but it felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.

When I started this journey, I was terrified of the military community. I’m an actor. I pretend for a living. These people? They bleed for a living. They sacrifice for a living. I was petrified that they would look at me—this girl from the theater world—and see a fraud. I was scared they would see someone playing dress-up.

But over the years, that fear turned into my fuel.

The interaction with the military community has been the single biggest gift of my life. It enriched our performances, sure, but it did something more. It tethered us to reality. It made the stakes so much higher.

We weren’t just trying to get good ratings; we were trying to make them proud. We knew they were watching. We knew they were checking our work every week.

I remember a woman coming up to me at an event. She was rigid, posture perfect, wearing her dress blues. She looked me dead in the eye, and for a second, I thought I was in trouble. I thought I had messed up a salute on camera or worn my cover wrong.

Instead, she softened. Her eyes welled up.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice cracking just a little. “Thank you for showing the cunning. Thank you for showing that we don’t just sit behind desks. We fight different battles.”

That moment stayed with me in the trailer as I packed up my things.

Davis wasn’t just a character anymore. She was a vessel for all those stories. She was the “Halloween costume” that little girls wanted to wear because she was a badass, not because she was a princess.

I looked at myself in the mirror one last time. I wasn’t just saying goodbye to a job. I was saying goodbye to a version of myself that was braver, sharper, and tougher than I ever thought I could be.

I realized then that I would miss her. It sounds silly to say you miss a fictional person, but I knew I would wonder about her.

I’d be at home, making coffee, and a thought would pop into my head: What’s Davis up to right now?

Is she winning the battle in Washington? Is she outmaneuvering the brass? Is she finally safe?

The script gives us an ending, but the character lives on in the imagination. And leaving her to that unknown future felt like sending a child off to college. You hope you taught them enough to survive, but you can’t protect them anymore.

CHAPTER 8: THE DRIVE TO D.C. AND THE LAST HANDSHAKE

The final scene. The very last image of the show.

We are in the car. Me and Sonny.

It wasn’t an explosion. It wasn’t a gunfight. It was quiet. Just the hum of the engine and the open road.

The misdirects of the script had cleared. Jason stayed with Bravo. Ray took the warrant officer path. And Sonny… Sonny didn’t sell out. He didn’t take the easy money from the med kit. He took the hard road. He turned himself in for the Decker punch to save me.

That knowledge changed the energy in the car.

We weren’t driving away from failure. We were driving toward a second chance.

When we filmed that scene, driving with all our belongings in tow, it felt incredibly intimate. There was no dialogue in that final shot, just the visual of us.

We reached across the center console. Our hands locked.

It wasn’t a tentative touch. It was a grip. It was an anchor.

In that moment, I felt a wave of relief wash over me. I didn’t think I was going to feel that way. When I first read the script, I was worried about the ambiguity. I wanted a guarantee. I wanted a “Happily Ever After” stamped in bold letters.

But life—and especially military life—doesn’t give you guarantees.

Seeing them attempt to actually give it an honest go, heading to D.C. together, truly hand in hand… it was perfect. It was better than a fairy tale because it was earned.

They are leaving the safety of the team. They are leaving the brotherhood. They are going into the lion’s den of Washington politics, where the knives are sharp and the enemies don’t wear uniforms.

But they are doing it together.

As the director called “Cut!” for the final time, I squeezed AJ’s hand. We didn’t let go immediately. We sat there for a moment in the silence of the car, two actors who had spent seven years driving each other crazy, dancing off-beat, and fighting for this fictional love.

“We did it,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” I whispered. “We did.”

Now, it’s up to your imaginations. Does it last? Do they get married? Does Davis become an Admiral? Does Sonny open a bar in D.C. and charm the politicians?

I like to think they make it. I think they deserve to give it a real go.

Because in a world full of Deckers—in a world full of ego, pride, and people trying to tear you down—you need someone who is willing to throw a punch for you in a parking lot. And you need someone who is willing to drive into the unknown with you, hand in hand.

Lisa Davis is out there somewhere, fighting the good fight. And I have a feeling she’s going to be just fine.