Warning: This post contains spoilers for the season finale of Boots.
After an arduous 13 weeks at Marine Corps boot camp, Cameron Cope (Miles Heizer) and his platoon almost all make it through the Crucible to become full-fledged Marines by the end of Netflix’s boot camp series, Boots. Because the show takes place in 1990, though, their celebration is cut short by a news bulletin: Iraq is invading Kuwait and U.S. President George H.W. Bush is send the country’s young men and women to war.
“[The season has been] this beautiful story of self-discovery and growth and bonding and brotherhood,” Heizer tells Gold Derby. “All of a sudden this harsh reality hits. If there were a Season 2, that would for sure be a focus: everyone’s reaction to the reality of this decision that they’ve made.”
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Cameron initially entered boot camp unsure of whether he’d be able to cut it, as well as uncomfortable about hiding his sexuality in the pre-“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era. But over the course of the eight-episode season, he finds success and community — so much so that when his mother Barbara (Vera Farmiga) turns up at his graduation providing him with a reason to exit the Marines, he convinces her to sign papers permitting him to stay.
“She thinks she’s helping Cameron, but that’s not the help that he needs anymore,” series creator Andy Parker explains. “He’s a different person than the kid that went off to boot camp.”
For that matter, all of the characters are changed by their experience in boot camp — some in surprising ways. For example, sibling recruits Cody (Brandon Tyler Moore) and John (Blake Burt) get news that their father died while they are in the middle of the Crucible, and it causes Cody to emotionally spiral and he ultimately washes out. John, meanwhile, has the opposite reaction and truly gets into fighting shape.
Elsewhere, Slovacek (Kieron Moore) decides to become a Marine for what the uniform means… and not just as a way to stay out of prison; Ochoa (Johnathan Nieves) finds a talent as a sniper, but a hidden health condition rears its head and he dies during training; perfectionist Ray (Liam Oh) doesn’t get the title of Honor Man and is comfortable with that. And Cameron openly defies the orders of continuing with his platoon through the rest of the Crucible — the final test before becoming a Marine — to join Sergeant Sullivan (Max Parker) in a search for his bunkmate Jones (Jack Cameron Kay) who wanders off in the middle of the night due to a sleep disorder.
“We wanted to make sure that the stakes were real, and in boot camp, not everybody makes it through,” Parker says of the varied fates of the show’s characters.
Showrunner Jennifer Cecil echoes those sentiments, adding that Cameron’s defiant act in the finale also matches what the Marines want from their cadets. “The Marines being incredibly disciplined is matched by this, ‘I will do anything for my brother. I will lie down for my brother,'” she notes. “Cameron disobeys an order because he cannot leave this recruit behind. I find that actually quite beautiful and moving and a more humanistic element of the Marine Corps that this would be accepted, that he would not be punished for that.”
Max Parker as Sgt. Sullivan in ‘Boots’Netflix
Meanwhile, Sullivan’s secret is also revealed as Cameron works his way through boot camp. He, too, is a closeted gay man and had a relationship with a superior in Guam. After that superior got caught, Sullivan denied he was gay in order to save his own career.
“For Cameron, Sullivan sort of represents what he could be if he chooses to hide this part of himself,” Heizer notes. “As things start to spiral for Sullivan, Cameron is witness to that and sees the actual cost of what hiding means. And Sullivan ends up becoming this example of everything that could go wrong.”
For his part, Parker says that Sullivan is finally ready to confront his past thanks to Cameron. “He finally wants to face what he’s been running away from, and the only person that could have made him come to that is Cameron.”
Parker had a resource on set in the form military technical advisor, Leon Ingleright, who was discharged from the Marine Corps in 2002 under the military’s ban on having openly gay service members in its ranks. “It was very important to me that at the exact moment that Cameron joins the Marines there would be another gay person — an actual decorated, valorous Marine, who was undergoing his own journey at exactly the same time,” Parker shares.
“What I hope is that we’re left with a sort of ambiguous feeling about whether or not the change that’s happening with Cameron is actually ultimately for the best,” he continues. “There are so many beautiful things he’s taking from the Marines, and yet it comes at this cost. I want us to feel a question at the end of the season: What’s going to become of Cameron?”
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