[Spoiler] Had to Die ‘Because I Was Playing the Character’

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for La Brea Season 3 Episode 5, “The Road Home Part 1.”]

The major death in the penultimate episode of La Brea was inevitable if you ask the actor playing the character. Furthermore, it was supposed to come sooner.

Levi (Nicholas Gonzalez) reappears, seemingly working for Maya (Claudia Ware), only to explain to Scott (Rohan Mirchandaney) that he infiltrated the military base to try to find Eve (Natalie Zea) and make it up to Gavin (Eoin Macken) and the others for everything he’s done, namely taking away their chance at leaving 10,000 BC by blowing up the tower. But when Levi hears that the soldiers are targeting Gavin to take him out—and sees Izzy (Zyra Gorecki)—he immediately breaks cover and runs to save his friend. He succeeds in doing that—and lets Gavin know where he can find Eve (the detention center, through another aurora, to 1965)—but at the cost of his own life.

But that wasn’t necessarily how Levi’s death was originally going to happen, Gonzalez tells TV Insider. “A lot changed a few times,” he shares. Initially, once everyone was brought back for a shortened third season (in anticipation of the strikes, which did happen), he was told he was probably only going to be in one episode. “I guess it had always been the plan for Levi to die, probably because I was playing the character because all my characters die for some reason,” he says.

And so he thought he’d be killed off in the first episode after a conversation with creator David Appelbaum and another producer. Gonzalez understood since it had reached “a certain point where other than the mea culpas and Levi saying it’s my fault and what can I do and I want to get this family back together—he’s betrayed so much in trying to keep things to himself, going for revenge last season—what’s next?” He also knew that fans either wanted to see the Harris family back together or for Levi and Eve to find a way, “but I just felt like that this was kind of right.”

Gavin and Izzy were the ones at Levi’s side at the end, and while the men had a very complicated relationship due to Eve and the aforementioned destruction of the tower, none of that mattered in the end.

Filming Levi’s death scene “was actually really sad, I think, for myself and Nick as friends,” Macken says. “It meant he wouldn’t be there for the last couple of weeks filming in Australia, and Nick is a person that I love and adore, and we get on very well. That, I think, fed into the characters a little bit, so the characters always trusted each other even though we were having that [conflict]. And I think you can see that, especially in Season 3, they cared about each other. So us filming that scene was actually sad for the two of us because we knew that the show was coming to an end. We knew that we weren’t going to work together as characters anymore.”

Adds Gonzalez, “These guys had been through so many missions together, and that never goes away. I think that there’s a certain respect, there’s an understanding there. His death wasn’t the time to put anything in his face about what they had done. So much had gone wrong. They had both done things, but they get it.”

Still, he points to those issues as to “why Levi ultimately died,” adding, “there was a lot of pity involved. There was a scene, I think, that’s cut from the first episode of Season 3 where we see Levi’s hurt from the explosion at the village. He’s by himself, and Ty [Chiké Okonkwo] comes to check on him, and you get that he’s just a shell. Nobody wants him around anymore. …We have a real moment where I say, well, look, if Levi’s not going to take his own life, then he’s going to lay it down to make sure he’s going to bring that family that he tore apart back together. But that death, I’m so happy that there were so many layers to it.”

Mark Taylor/NBC

That’s what he wants people to take away from the death scene. “I just really hope that that emotion sans melodrama is there because they really loved each other, Gavin and Levi, despite everything. And I think his gift to them, too, is he kind of goes out with a smile, or at least that was one of my plans, that there’s a calming kind of, ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ve had my time, and I did what I needed to do. Now go, be together, save her.’”

For Macken, Levi’s death, from both Gavin’s and Levi’s points of view, “was a really beautiful culmination to what that story arc had been because Levi did go full circle and did basically become a martyr in a way. That was very important to Gavin. He also realized that he’s lost his best friend, and at the end of it all, you can be fighting with the person you love or care about or your best friend, but you still care about them. I think that Gavin and Levi had this bond that circumvented everything that happened to them. I thought it was a beautiful end for Levi’s character because he did become the character that he should have in terms of sacrificing himself for everyone. When it happens, then you realize, ‘Yeah, it couldn’t have happened any other way.’”

That’s also really the only way that Gavin and Levi could have ever fixed their relationship. “Saving Eve and putting this family back together was my entry back,” Gonzalez says. “I don’t know if I saw an end where we were all hunky dory then hanging out together. But I just think if Levi knew that they were together, then he could move on because he had, in some ways, too. We gotta remember he had 10 years of a life, of a love, a real love, not a, ‘Oh, I guess I don’t have Eve, so I’m going to move on.’”

As for what Macken thinks it would’ve taken for the two to be brothers again? “It would’ve taken him dying or something like that.”

La Brea, Series Finale, Tuesday, February 13, 9/8c, NBC