‘The Equalizer’ Reveals If Robyn’s Team Survived — What About Dante’s Feelings? (RECAP)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Equalizer Season 4 premiere “Truth for a Truth.”]

The Equalizer left off at the end of last season with Robyn (Queen Latifah) stuck watching as her team—Mel (Liza Lapira), Harry (Adam Goldberg), and Dante (Tory Kittles)—were tied up and trapped in a room engulfed in flames. Fortunately, the Season 4 premiere doesn’t waste time revealing who survives.

Robyn had been shocked to discover that Michelle (Ilfenesh Hadera), someone from her past she thought was dead, was alive and out for revenge. But as soon as Robyn was left alone with one of Michelle’s men, she easily knocked him out, found the room where her friends were kept, used a grenade to blow open the door, and got all of them out safely. We may not be able to say the same for Fisk (Donal Logue) and the others from the CIA transporting Michelle at the end of the episode after she was taken into custody.

The premiere also had Dante’s confession about Robyn from last spring’s finale to address. While drugged, upon Harry answering a call from Mel and Robyn, Dante remarked, “Robyn, she showed me things about myself I didn’t even know were there, showed me that justice wasn’t so black and white. I love her for that.” Everyone reacted, including Robyn, who asked, “Did he just say—?”

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And now, in the premiere, Mel tries to bring up what he said while on truth serum, but he’s distracted, and she doesn’t push. That’s not too surprising; the slow burn has to continue, after all. “I think in the traditional sort of television romance — and we talk about this all the time in the room, may it be Moonlighting, may it be Cheers, may it be everything like that — it’s that pull-tug and it’s like two ships passing in the night,” co-showrunner Adam Glass told TV Insider during Season 3. “Timing might never be right for these two. We hope it will be. We hope they could find a place, but [they’re] caught up in their personal lives and their professional lives and everything like that. There’s definitely something there. There’s a spark. And just the question is can they ever come together and find the right time to make it work?”

That echoed comments from co-showrunner Joseph C. Wilson after the Season 3 premiere. “I think the attraction is clear. Both of these actors are fantastic in the way they play it. The flirtation is just off the charts. We can’t wait until they get together. But we’re gonna play the flirtation, the romance,” he said. “We’re gonna play the push-pull of it all. We might separate them, bring them close, and who knows where it’s gonna land. We don’t want to take it too fast, but we understand the shippers and how they feel. We hear that and we want to see it, too.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Dante finds out the team’s headquarters is beneath the bar—”So this is how you get it all done? Who paid for all this?” he asks—and gets his badge back, thanks to Harry finding a camera on a nearby weather station that shows he didn’t throw a suspect off a roof.

 The Equalizer, Sundays, 8/7c, CBS