National Post

Taking One Last Shot : Flashpoint Prepares For Its Final Season

Jesse Kinos-Goodin Sep 19, 2012

CTV The cast of Flashpoint will say farewell to the series after this season.

Enrico Colantoni is “tired of saying goodbye, tired of dealing with death.”

As the negotiator Gregory Parker on the hit series Flashpoint, which begins its fifth and final season Sept. 20, Colantoni says he’s now “ready to do a comedy.” Sitting on set in the Team One locker room in front of a wall of grappling hooks, Tasers, shotguns and assault rifles earlier this summer, a clearly choked-up Colantoni describes Parker as “the greatest character I‘ve ever gotten to play,” but it’s also the one that’s taken the biggest toll on him.

“I can’t not bring this stuff home,” he says of his role as the voice of reason on the fictional strategic response unit, which also includes Hugh Dillon as team leader Ed Lane, Amy Jo Johnson and David Paetkau as snipers Jules Callaghan and Sam Braddock, and Sergio Di Zio as tactical technician Mike Scarlatti.

Colantoni says he started feeling the effects as early as Season 2, and even went so far as to ask the writers to “just please have Parker save somebody, because after a year and a half, I was already at a point where I needed to feel what it was like to save somebody.”

The toll the role took on actor’s emotional state speaks to the power of the story behind the police drama, a ratings juggernaut for CTV in Canada that also airs on ION in the United States and various networks worldwide.

When it premiered in 2008, the Toronto-shot series was built around the idea of examining “what happens to the officer that takes a life,” says Stephanie Morgenstern, who co-created the series with Mark Ellis. “[It’s] what really drew us to thinking about the subject seven years ago — the human cost of heroism, [and] the complicated human situation that it is to be responsible for keeping the peace and for someone’s life or death.”

That feeling of life and death is palpable while visiting the drama’s set during the final days of shooting. With its various set pieces dissembled and boxed up, others wrapped in plastic, it feels like a last walk through a recently sold home right before the movers come to clear everything out.

While it has a somber effect on the cast and crew, the decision to wrap things up this year was made by the show’s creators voluntary, before Flashpoint ran out of things to say. When executive producers Anne Marie La Traverse and Bill Mustos announced earlier this year that Season 5 would be Flashpoint’s last, it was almost a blessing for the creators, who were given the chance to write the ending they felt the show deserved.

“We headed into Season 5 knowing that this was going to be the wrap up,” Morgenstern says. “In a way we knew it would make things easier because the scope of the story could be as big as we wanted. If there are places we wanted to take the characters that we hadn’t taken them yet, this was the time.”

One of those places concerns Dillon’s character Lane, who in the pilot was forced to “take a shot,” as Ellis puts it. “We really wanted to push the envelope of what these characters go through and we felt the shot that Ed Lane has to take in the first episode is probably the worst one that a police officer has to take.”

Season 5 will open with Lane facing a similar situation, which was a way for the creators to “go full circle to a lot of the themes that started the series,” Morgenstern says.

For Dillon, he says reading the first script of Season 5 was both “challenging” and “exceptional. “The arc of the Ed Lane character was phenomenal this season. Just to have such closure. You couldn’t ask for more in terms of storytelling,” the Headstones frontman says. “Just to be at the finish line and have succeeded so brilliantly in every regard, it is satisfaction.”

And while everybody involved is quiet on details for the two-hour finale — executive producer Mustos says they “pushed budgets to the max, spending more than we have,” to make it — Colantoni admits to having his own ideas on how to end everything.

“I can easily tell you that I lobbied for the whole team to get killed,” he says. “That would be wonderful for me, you know what I mean? If we just all went out like Butch Cassidy and Sundance. … Then it’s a definitive ending. Apparently nobody really wants to end a show like that. Everybody we asked was sort of like, ‘It would kind of be like a big punch in the stomach.’ ”

Season 5 of Flashpoint premieres Sept. 20 at 10 p.m. on CTV.

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