‘Task’ Season Finale Teases After Multiple Deaths and [Spoiler]’s Betrayal

Task is gearing up for a highly anticipated finale tasked with concluding multiple story lines after shocking character deaths — and a surprise betrayal.

During an exclusive interview with Us Weekly, Silvia Dionicio teased what is to come as viewers prepare to see where everyone ends up — including her character Emily who is still facing a tough decision about what to say at her brother’s parole hearing over their adoptive mother’s murder.

“I love the way [creator] Brad [Ingelsby] wrote it because it almost feels like they don’t even know what’s going to happen. By they, I mean the [Brandis] family and the audience is also a little bit like, ‘What is going on with these people? Can they make a decision?’” Dionicio, 28, quipped ahead of the finale, which airs Sunday, October 19. “Is Emily going to say something? What’s going to happen with the family? Is Ethan going to come out? Are we going to see Ethan interact with the family?”

Dionicio praised Ingelsby for building up the suspense, adding, “He’s so good at very slowly revealing what’s going to happen and even confusing us a little bit and having to share that space.”

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Task, which premiered in September, follows Philadelphia-based FBI agent Tom (Mark Ruffalo), who is put in charge of a task force to end a string of violent robberies undertaken by an unassuming family man Robbie (Tom Pelphrey). In the Sunday, October 12, episode of the hit HBO series, a confrontation between Tom, Robbie and the Dark Hearts resulted in multiple deaths — starting with Robbie’s.

However, there is one more episode left, as certain story lines receive their own conclusion. Tom specifically has to face the turmoil in his family as he and daughter Emily decide whether to show support for Ethan (Andrew Russel), who is currently incarcerated for the murder of Tom’s wife. In his professional life, Tom unmasked Fabien Frankel’s Grasso as the detective on his task force who was secretly an informant for the Dark Hearts biker gang.

According to Dionicio, fans can look forward to getting their questions answered while breaking down Emily’s state of mind before the hearing.

“Our showrunner is such a collaborative artist and we had a bunch of meetings. He was sending me articles and interviews of other kids who had been adopted [like Emily]. He really wanted to dive into this concept of gratefulness and kids wanting to be perfect. I feel like I grew up with this — even though I wasn’t adopted — and I really anchored myself to that idea,” she explained. “For my own personal way of navigating getting to know Emily, I started recording diaries and I would pretend to be Emily and I was by myself at home. I was living alone and I think it was really informative that feeling of loneliness and of feeling like no one was listening. Just talking into the void for hours as Emily helped me to really pay attention to the nuances of what I thought her relationship to her family was.”

Dionicio specifically wanted to highlight how Emily struggled to find her place.

“A big theme in the story is that she is not white and is in a white family. She really doesn’t have that kind of community and Ethan still represents that. It also represents her soil, represents her origins and represents how they went through this together,” she shared with Us. “We don’t really hear her speak any Spanish in the show. I think it’s because Ethan was the person she did that with.”

She continued: “People think that Emily is older than Ethan because she’s become a bit of a caretaker given the situation. But I think that also reflects how difficult this is for her. She is the baby of the family, and yet she’s taken care of basically both Ethan and dad.”

As the season went on, Dionicio was able to show Emily’s complicated place in the Brandis family, adding, “I have a theory that Emily is a huge daddy’s girl. Her dad and her were inseparable and that to me makes it even harder that this really did come between them. I feel like they mirror each other a little bit at the beginning. They’re both very avoidant and they’re both — even though they are craving each other’s love and company and forgiveness and support — they’re both being avoidant of the situation.”

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Dionicio was thrilled by the way Emily found her voice as Task went on.

“As the show progresses, she starts becoming a little more confrontational. She starts speaking up for herself a little more. Obviously it sucks that the consequence of something so sad but she really is an anchor in the family,” she noted. “At the end, the family does become stronger and I think she’s a big reason as to why.”

There is also the family’s relationship with Sam (Ben Doherty) a.k.a the boy who is now an orphan and is caught in the manhunt for Robbie. He is briefly taken in by Tom while awaiting an adoptive family to take him home.

“There is this moment when seeing us in now Sam’s room which was originally Ethan’s room. The way that Emily watches [her sister] speak about Ethan where it’s like, ‘We do love each other and we do love Ethan.’ The situation is very difficult and complicated. But they do love him regardless of whether they want to talk to him or not,” Dionicio told Us. “Watching the way her dad takes Sam and the way he protects him and really is looking out for Sam, it heals a little part of Emily that feels like that doubt of, ‘Could they ever fully love me the way they love [my sister] Sara?’ It becomes, ‘No, I can absolutely accept that I am loved and I am here to stay and I am a 100 percent part of this family.’ I think it’s necessary for her to have that firsthand experience of welcoming someone else into their family.”

Task airs Sundays on HBO at 9 p.m. ET.