‘SEAL Team’ Recap: How’s Clay’s Recovery Going?

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for SEAL Team Season 6 Episode 2 “Crawl, Walk, Run.”]

“It’s how we deal with our s**t after we’re knocked down that makes us Bravo,” Jason Hayes (David Boreanaz) says at one point in the latest SEAL Team episode, which proves just how right he is about that — for those still with the team and Clay (Max Thieriot) back home, recovering after his leg was amputated to save his life.

Three months after the ambush, Clay has a prosthetic, he’s in physical therapy, and mirror therapy is helping the phantom limb pain. Sonny (AJ Buckley) has really stepped up to help his “battle-boo.” (“He’s my brother, got no other choice,” he says.) Clay refuses to be treated with kid gloves and is eager to move forward in his recovery. So when his therapist says he wants him to be able to stand for five minutes next week, Clay insists on trying for a minute then. He falls, and his therapist tells him, “crawl, walk, run. You just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Stella (Alona Tal) calls him out pushing himself too hard after Sonny sends her a video from PT, but Clay insists he’s good. He also refuses to let her help him when he pushes himself to stand without using the walker (“This is who I am”), and though at first he keeps falling, by the end of the episode, he’s standing for two minutes.

Monty Brinton/Paramount+

While he’s seen his team since he’s been back, he sees all of them — including Trent (Tyler Grey), back from his own injury — together for the first time at the bar after those three months. There is some awkwardness as Clay joins everyone in a wheelchair and they talk about his future with Green Team, but soon they’re back to joking around like usual.

Though Jason was giving Clay space because he feels he’s a reminder of what he lost, blaming himself for not reporting his TBI and getting Bravo taken out of rotation, Clay refuses to let him think that way. “You want to think of yourself as the master of everyone’s universe,” he tells Jason, pointing to the wall of the bar. “If not for you, my picture would be up there. Stella would be a widow, and Brian would never know his father. You ended that fight and you got me out of there alive. There’s more to life than operating.” And Clay’s not giving up on operating again, pointing out he wouldn’t be the first guy to do so after losing a limb.

The team may be a man down (for now), and if you ask Sonny, “without Clay, Bravo isn’t Bravo anymore,” but they are successful in completing their mission. Still, they need to worry because at least one team is going to be decommissioned — and as Ray (Neil Brown Jr.) points out, they’d be naïve to think it’s not them. They have, after all, been blown up twice on their last handful of ops.

And as Davis (Toni Trucks) admits to Jason when he ends up at the base unable to sleep one night, Bravo is “part of the conversation.” When she has to get back to work, he tells her, “see you around … hopefully.” Uh-oh?

SEAL Team, Sundays, Paramount+