If there’s one thing that “Fire Country” knows how to do well,

it’s writing off fan-favorite characters. The firefighting drama

got rid of Fiona Rene’s Rebecca Lee pretty early on, but another

who got the axe heading into the show’s sophomore season was W. Tré Davis’s Freddy Mills. A recurring cast member in Season 1, Freddy is Bode’s (Max Thieriot) best friend and confidant at the Three Rock Conservation Camp, and he quickly became everyone’s go-to hero. Nicknamed “Goat,” Freddy helps save plenty of lives as a convict firefighter, but unlike Bode, he was incarcerated under false pretenses. It’s not until the end of the first season that Freddy is exonerated, and he wastes no time leaving Edgewater behind him.

“Fire Country” was never quite fair to Freddy. The character was more than just Bode’s best friend at Three Rock, he was also the heart of the show. While every other character has massive amounts of soapy drama keeping their lives in a constant state of unbalance, Freddy is the consistent companion who always has the right thing to say. He’s the type of friend that everyone needs and proves himself loyal to the end. Even when we thought that he and Bode were on the outs for a while, it all turned out to be a ploy meant to uncover a secret drug ring at Three Rock.

But with the show’s second season, “Fire Country” wrote Freddy off, sending him to SoCal while his best friend was rotting away in a cell up north. Sure, Season 2 brought Freddy back for the finale, “I Do,” but not before making him seem like a fair-weather friend who left town the moment things got hard. It just didn’t seem in character.