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Lethal Weapon Season 2: Riggs' Trip to Mexico Won't Go as Planned

The show's boss tells us if Riggs will find justice

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Lindsay MacDonald

Lethal Weapon ended its first season on a pretty major cliffhanger, sending Murtaugh (Damon Wayans) chasing after Riggs (Clayne Crawford) to Mexico, where he plans to hunt down and take revenge on Tito Flores (Danny Mora) for the murder of his wife.

The bromance of that decision was sweet enough to give anyone cavities, but according to executive producer Matt Miller, things in Mexico haven't quite gone as planned. In fact, there may be far-reaching repercussions (personal and professional) to this little trip south of the border in Season 2.

A few weeks will have passed since the finale when the show returns, so what's gone on during that time?

Matt Miller: Riggs has been following Tito Flores down there and basically harassing him, leaving him voicemails, text messages. He's been like a complete lunatic. He's been sort of biding his time and waiting for the right moment, where he wanted to enact his revenge. So Murtaugh's been down in Mexico this whole time trying to find him, but instead has just been following Tito Flores places, hoping he finds Riggs. That has led to a very expensive Mexican trip that he's been on that his wife is not thrilled about.

Can we expect some resolution on the Tito Flores issue?

Miller: Yes, it's not the resolution that [Riggs] wanted, but it's the resolution that he gets, and he's going to have to learn to live with it... It all somehow feels like some degree of justice.

The through line of Season 1 was Riggs solving his wife's murder. Now that he's done that, what's going to be the overarching story of Season 2?

Miller: He kind of has some degree of resolution by the end of our first episode, but he's still not completely healthy. He spends a couple of episodes trying to be normal, but what does that look like for Riggs? He's like too normal. He's afraid he's become too normal. Of course, he's still quite a bit off, and ultimately what starts to happen is he doesn't understand why if he's trying to move past Miranda, what's wrong with him? Why can't he fix these things that are broken? It starts to sort of chip away at some stuff that he's never wanted to deal with and has long since buried, and we start to get into his childhood. His dad is in the show in flashbacks. We get a young Riggs in rural Texas, and that shows us that he's never ever going to be fixed.

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What else can you tell us about Murtaugh's marital issues this season?

Miller: What happens is at the end of season 1, Trish (Keesha Sharp) got this job offer. It was a very exciting job for her, and it sounded great on paper. Trish has given Murtaugh a tremendous amount of rope to go and deal with Riggs and in his job and in everything else. Really, it's "no questions asked" as long as he comes home at the end of any night. What happens is that she starts working later and she starts traveling, and maybe he doesn't quite reciprocate that as much. He becomes a little bit more insecure and possessive and that starts to cause friction in their marriage.

You get fun later on in the season with Murtaugh having marital trouble and going to Riggs, and Riggs being like, "Yeah, I'm not interested in talking about that." Whereas Riggs, anything he wanted to talk about, [Murtaugh] was always there for him, so we realize Riggs isn't quite that same friend in the same way.

Clayne Crawford and Damon Wayans Jr., Lethal Weapon

Clayne Crawford and Damon Wayans Jr., Lethal Weapon


Lethal Weapon has always had a comedic element, but now that you've been paired with two comedies on Tuesday, will we see more of that comedy?

Miller: We've gotten no pressure from Fox. Like they didn't call us and say, "Hey, you're on Tuesday with these other comedies, so you should lean into the comedy." They never said that, but naturally, the way our story was unfolding, we wanted to kind of start our season with a little bit lighter episodes. You can't have a guy that's gazing into the abyss and wants to kill himself every week. You've got to have him go through peaks and valleys. We start the season with him maybe at a little bit of a low point, and then we watch him kind of build himself up a little bit only to kind of bring him back down. But that does allow us to be a little bit more comedic with the first bunch of episodes.

Can you tease how Karen Palmer's character will be brought back into the narrative?

Miller: What happens is when Riggs starts to feel like he's putting Miranda behind him and he's healthy and normal, he does all the things that a healthy person would do. He gets up and he tries to exercise and clean his trailer... but he doesn't understand how to be normal. Part of his idea of what it means to be normal is to start dating again, so he takes a case that has a very thin connection to drugs and starts to think that there may be a DEA component in this. So he brings [Karen] (Hilarie Burton) into a case when there's really no reason for her to be in the case.

When he goes to her, he realizes she's been sort of relegated to the basement of the DEA because of her having assisted him at the end of Season 1. So he wants to win her back romantically, but then he also wants to help her career also, which he was kind of responsible for messing up.

The boys are also getting a new, female boss this year, so what's that dynamic going to be like?

Miller: Avery (Kevin Rahm), who's been the boss, has kind of been one of the guys, but these guys are wreaking all kinds of havoc down in Mexico, causing international incidents. So we need to bring in somebody who represents "the buck stops here" from the LAPD, so she comes in in that capacity.

Murtaugh has this shared romantic history with her, where he believes something happened that maybe didn't happen. It was the two of them in a squad car like 20 years ago. They were on a stakeout, "Dancing in September" came on the radio. Both their hands went for the dial, and there was a finger-linger. So he really believes this is the source of tension between the two of them all these years, but she has no memory of the incident.

Lethal Weapon returns Sept. 26 at 8/7c on Fox.