Fire Country Season 3, Episode 18, “Eyes and Ears Everywhere,” is a big one for Gabriela Perez, played by Stephanie Arcila. Gabriela finds out that ever since she broke things off with Finn (Blake Lee), he’s been stalking her. He set a fire in his own house in order to create a situation where Gabriela had to talk to him, and while she rides to the hospital with him, his behavior escalates from creepy to outright threatening. When the ambulance they're in pulls over, he escapes and runs off into the night, leaving Gabs to worry about what will happen if he comes back. Her father, Manny (Kevin Alejandro), advises her to go find her gun to protect herself.
“I did not see that coming at all,” Arcila exclusively tells Parade of her stalker storyline. “At the same time, I was excited to be able to bring awareness to something like that.” She hopes that it encourages people to watch out for red flags like love-bombing, which Finn does to Gabriela, before it escalates to something more dangerous. “People need to trust their guts, because we have good guts, and they're connected to our brain, so we need to listen,” she says.
Gabriela’s new love interest goes bad
Gabriela met Finn during a call earlier in the season, and they immediately took a liking to each other. He was cute and seemed nice. He was the first guy she was into since Bode (Max Thieriot). There was some weird stuff like buying her a new cell phone before they even went on a date, but she was willing to overlook that. However, when he asked, “So should we just skip straight to the wedding?” immediately after their first kiss in Episode 17, she got the ick. He was moving too fast, and she wasn’t interested. She broke things off, and he immediately started bombarding her with increasingly hostile and deranged text messages.
By the start of Episode 18, the texts have stopped, and Gabs thinks it’s over. She notices someone watching her, but she assumes it’s a spy from Oxalta, the chemical company, keeping an eye on Bode and Manny as they work to help organize a class-action suit. And when Station 42 responds to a fire call at what turns out to be Finn’s house, they don’t suspect anything is amiss. It’s a small town, so you’re bound to get calls from people you know.
Finn seemed to have hurt his back when he had a pot on the stove, which led to the fire. Not too weird. But what is weird is the darkroom full of sneaky photos he took of Gabriela that Jake (Jordan Calloway) and Eve (Jules Latimer) find when the fire spreads to his basement.
Stephanie Arcila as Gabriela Perez and Blake Lee as Finn in 'Fire Country' Season 3Sergei Bachlakov/CBS
Finn is a stalker
Meanwhile, Gabriela is riding with Finn alone in the back of an ambulance, and he takes the opportunity to apologize to her for coming on too strong. She explains that she just isn’t looking for anything serious right now, and he says that he can go slow. He’s trying to get her to give him another shot. Just then, Vince (Billy Burke) radios that the ambulance needs to pull over, and Gabriela needs to get out because Finn is a stalker. He grabs a scalpel and says they need to go, now. She realizes that he set the fire so he could see her again. “Isn’t that romantic?” he says, as a crazy smile spreads across his face. As Vince approaches the ambulance, Finn opens the door into him and escapes. Finn knows where she lives, knows where she works and is out there. It’s very scary.
Arcila says that Lee, who plays Finn, is not scary at all in real life. “I got to know Blake through this show, and he's such an incredible artist and completely, like, completely opposite to Finn,” she says with a laugh. “He’s one of those people that anybody talks to him about anything because he just makes people feel safe. The duality of seeing that and seeing him shift into his character was really beautiful to watch.”
She can’t say much about what’s coming up with Finn in next week’s two-part Fire Country finale, but would like to remind viewers that Gabs got her gun back in Season 1 when she first met Bode. “It’s coming full circle and now continues to be used as some form of protection that her dad taught her and brought her up on, even if she doesn't fully believe in using these things.”
Max Thieriot as Bode Leone in 'Fire Country' Season 3Sergei Bachlakov/CBS
When will Bode and Gabriela get back together?
Looking past Season 3 toward Season 4, Arcila doesn’t know what’s going to happen — “I've learned that they always surprise me,” she says of the show’s writers, “so I've learned to release any expectations” — but she hopes all the work that Gabriela has put into herself this season continues to pay off. “One of the things I would be excited for is for Gabriela to finally save herself,” she says. “For her to rise up to everything she's worked so hard for and just show up for herself.”
Aside from a brief romantic reunion early in the season that Gabriela quickly put a stop to, Gabriela and Bode have not been together all season — and for once they’re not even trying to be. Bode is with Audrey (Leven Rambin), and Gabriela is working on herself. She’s actually become good friends with both of them. Arcila thinks Gabriela and Bode’s friendship is a healthy place for them to be right now because if they ever do get back together, they’ll be on firmer ground. She says that Bode and Gabs rushed into it before, and so finding a way to “backtrack” and build a friendship will be good for them if they ever do date again, “because isn't that the basis of every good relationship?”
“Because all of the fun and then exciting stuff fades eventually, and then what do you have left if you haven't created a good, firm foundation for it?” she continues. “So what the future holds for them, I don't know. I think that it is very healthy, though, for them to be seeing other people, especially if they haven't dated much in life. They get to know themselves through that, grow, mature, feel and then see where they're at in the future.”
Leven Rambin as Audrey James in 'Fire Country' Season 3Sergei Bachlakov/CBS
Gabriela’s new best friend
Gabriela’s friendship with Audrey is good for her, too. Gabriela has always been so focused on work, whether it’s training for the Olympics as a solo diver or becoming a first responder, that she doesn’t have much of a social life, and she’s awkward and uncomfortable around people. “I think to watch the way that Audrey moves has probably helped and inspired her to just free herself up a little more,” Arcila says.
Conversely, seeing Gabriela’s intense discipline has been good for Audrey. Gabriela and Audrey both had difficult childhoods, but took very different paths to get where they are now. Audrey did things to survive that Gabriela did not. But her friendship with Gabriela can help show her a different way to be that may serve her better in her post-prison life. “She doesn't have to lean into that toughness anymore. She can just breathe a little and soften up a little,” Arcila says. “Not everybody is out to get her, you know?”
Production on Fire Country Season 3 wrapped last month, and Arcila has been enjoying some downtime during the break between seasons. She went to visit her family in Colombia, and she’s hanging out with her friends in Los Angeles, including Alejandro and Burke. She’s learning how to play bass and taking acting and neuroscience classes. Learning about neuroscience helps with her acting because it gives her a deeper understanding of emotions — what they are, chemically. “I know how we work, how we function,” she says.
The two-part Fire Country Season 3 finale airs Friday, April 25, at 9/8c on CBS and streams the next day on Paramount+.
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