Sharon has been through a lot. She accepted her death in season 1,

and then season 2 is when she really had to bounce back from that.

What would you say her overall outlook is after having been through something that traumatic?

Diane Farr: I think, because the theme has been legacy, Sharon’s question is, “Who am I now?” which stems from, “Who am I now if I’m not saving my child?” She lost one child, and then she lost the other one. As we saw, the firefighting job was a means to an end to save her kid. She was willing to burn the job or do things wrong in the job. She’s trying to figure out who she is now if her job isn’t to save her kid. She’s not good at it right away. It’s a process.

Sharon has a slightly different issue this season, which is an issue I had in my own real life. I went to the writers and said, “Can we show this?” For six episodes, she has to figure out a health thing that isn’t related to her kidney that sort of consumes her. It takes her a while to figure it out. That’s also feeding into, “Who do I want to be if I’m not just here to rescue my kid? If my own health is going to go down the drain trying to do it, why don’t I just save Sharon? Because that might hurt him more.”

Vince went through some health issues in season 2, and as you said, this is new territory with Bode being free. How do you feel about the trajectory of Vince’s storyline?

Billy Burke: I think he’s done pretty well coming off of whatever that heart condition was. Whether or not any of that’s going to resurface, I don’t know. It hasn’t yet in this season, but he’s plugging along pretty well. There is some setup right now that we’ve been doing in the first half of the season. I talked to the writers this summer about some ideas.

I don’t particularly know where it’s going, but I know that they have implemented some of the stuff that were just little brainchilds that I had. I’m very excited to see where any of that goes. It’s never going to be specifically what I was thinking, but that combination of, “Oh, here’s an idea. Where are we going to run with that?”