‘SIX’ Season 2: History’s Navy SEAL Drama Is Back With a Vengeance

History/Leo Williams

Don’t expect a sophomore slump for History’s SIX when it returns on Memorial Day. The action drama following an elite team of Navy SEALs is back with a vengeance for Season 2.

The first eight episodes followed the SEALs on a mission to rescue their friend and former team leader Rip Taggart (Walton Goggins) and a group of schoolgirls taken hostage by a terrorist cell in West Africa. While the mission was a success, the homecoming was bittersweet for SEAL Team leader Joe “Bear” Graves (Barry Sloane), who returned to an empty house. It was much worse for Rip, who had a shocking seaside encounter with a terrorist recruit in the season’s closing scene.

“The story picks up right where it left off,” Sloane assures us. “There’s no time gap. There’s no shift. We pick it up right from the pier.”

While Rip’s fate hangs in the balance, the SEALs have to face the frightening reality that the war has come home with them. They’re left to wonder how many homegrown terrorists are operating in this sleeper cell, who’s coordinating them and which of the SEALs — or their family members — will be targeted next. “[SEALs] do work very hard to keep their family away from the battlefield,” Sloane says. “When it’s on your own doorstep, it’s hard to dissociate that part of your life.”

The mission to counter this new threat sends the SEALs to Eastern Europe and hostile areas like Chechnya to strike at the heart of the terrorist network. This brings them dangerously close to Russian territory, where their actions could have serious geopolitical consequences and spark a much bigger conflict.

Enter CIA officer Gina Cline, played by series newcomer Olivia Munn (The Newsroom). Cline is calling the SEALs’ shots for this new mission, and some operators are better at taking orders than others. “You get to see during this season the SEALs’ position in the pecking order of the United States, and it’s not as high as you would initially think,” Sloane says. “These guys don’t get the ultimate say in pretty much anything.”

Sloane likens Munn’s role to Jessica Chastain’s character in the film Zero Dark Thirty. “They are incredibly smart, incredibly driven professionals, who in order to achieve what they would like to achieve, they’re not shy about reaching out to people with a different skill set from their own to get the job done,” he says.

For Sloane and his castmates, getting this job done required skills beyond the brutal but basic SEAL training they received for Season 1. “This season we were treated more like operators, which was great,” Sloane says. “We were given a huge rucksack to fill with various torture implements, and taken off into the mountains of British Columbia with two Navy SEALs. We arrived and started walking, and didn’t stop walking for four days. We learned how to survive in subzero conditions in the snow, how to plot our course without conventional GPS location.”

It’s all worth it to give the 10-episode second season a bigger scale, heightened emotion, greater danger and more intense action.

“The season premiere, if you thought the firefight in Episode 8 was ambitious, this blows it out of the water,” Sloane says. “I think we have five Black Hawk helicopters, three Little Bird helicopters, about five or six cars. It’s incredible.”

Season 2 of SIX premieres Monday, May 28, at 10pm ET/PT on History, then an all-new episode premieres in the show’s regular time slot beginning Wednesday, May 30, at 10pm ET/PT.

About Ryan Berenz 2166 Articles
Member of the Television Critics Association. Charter member of the Ancient and Mystic Society of No Homers. Squire of the Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Lynx, Lodge 49, Long Beach, Calif. Costco Wholesale Gold Star Member since 2011.