Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for Fire Country Season 3 Episode 11.Fire Country brings the flames back in a big way this week with an episode centered on the Edgewater Renaissance Fair. Poor Eve (Jules Latimer) is just trying to have a nice day off with her ex, Francine (Katie Findlay), and maybe rekindle that romance. Instead, a fire-breather loses his balance and sets off a calamity that culminates with the stash of fireworks exploding and sending the whole fair up in smoke.

It’s all hands on deck to cover the litany of hazards at the fair. Sharon (Diane Farr) oversees Three Rock because Eve is off duty and tries to make sure Manny (Kevin Alejandro) follows the rules and stays out of prison. Vince (Billy Burke) is on incident command, but is distracted when he finds out that Sharon and Bode (Max Thieriot) are taking his father for neurology tests behind his back. Jake (Jordan Calloway) tries to mend the deteriorating fences in his found family, but new emerging fires keep him busy trying to secure the scene. Despite the tension in the episode, everyone is still acting like an adult for the second week in a row. I don’t know what’s gotten into the water on this show, but I love it. And our reward for being patient with these hot heads was not one, but two romances emerging at the end of the episode. The Ren Faire may have gone up in smoke, but Fire Country is cooking up the good stuff now.

Vince Is No Longer in Denial in ‘Fire Country’ Season 3 Episode 11

Vince really wanted to test my belief this week that we don’t blame him for anything on this show. We discover at the top of the episode that Bode has been hiding out at Jake’s to avoid looking Vince in the eye and risk spilling the beans that Walter (Jeff Fahey) is sicker than he has been letting on. But the cat is out of the bag when Bode leaves his phone out at work, and Vince sees that a neurologist is calling him. If we wanted to split hairs about this situation, the doctor should have called Walter with any test result information because doctor/patient confidentiality is supposed to be a thing. Since Walter is dealing with memory issues, it’s possible he listed a proxy for the results, but that proxy would have been Sharon instead of Bode. And Bode could have just saved the doctor’s name in his phone — not his full title, position, and hospital. A lot of weird things had to happen here purely for Vince to find out that Sharon and Bode had taken Walter in for some tests.

Vince does not take the development well, immediately starting to freeze Bode out. He snaps at Sharon on the scene and is dismissive of Jake, who tries to offer some really sound advice about Vince needing to listen to his family instead of insisting he knows best. Nothing really penetrates until Vince has to triage on a Ren Faire knight who was impaled by his own sword during the chaos. The knight refuses to give Vince his real name because he feels that his real life is too pathetic, and he wants to die as the brave knight he pretends to be at the Faire. Vince has a good heart-to-heart with him about bravery and what it means to face the scary things in life.

Taking his own advice, Vince admits to Bode and Sharon that it was difficult for him to admit that Walter was sick because his father had always been a domineering figure in his life. Admitting that Walter needed help was admitting that the man who raised him was entering the twilight phase of his life, and Vince didn’t know how to process that. It turns out that he’ll need to figure that out sooner rather than later, as Sharon gets the call from the neurologist (because she is the obvious medical proxy for Walter!) that her father-in-law has early signs of dementia that could potentially develop into Alzheimer’s. The Leones are going to have to band together to take care of Walter, and Vince will have to step up to take care of a man he has a very complicated relationship with.

Manny Joins the Adult Club in ‘Fire Country’ Season 3 Episode 11

Vince isn’t the only one who has a bad day at the Ren Faire; Gabs (Stephanie Arcila) is determined for Manny to get early parole, but Sharon tells him early in the episode that he is still on very thin ice after leaving the scene at Eve’s family farm. He needs to be grateful he isn’t back in prison and work on rebuilding some goodwill before he can consider applying for early parole. If that isn’t enough of a rain shower on Manny’s parade, the Three Rock crew are given strict orders not to touch any civilians while working the Ren Faire fire. That becomes difficult when Manny encounters a woman who suffered a crushed lung after the crowd stampeded her tent in the chaos. He gets Sharon to help, but the woman starts to code when Sharon has to walk away for another emergency. Manny has the paramedic training to help the woman, but if he touches her, he’ll be sent to prison for violating protocol.

Manny does the responsible thing and goes to get help instead of taking over himself. This is what we call growth! Unfortunately, it takes several extra minutes to find a medic who could help, and they’ll have to see if the extra time caused any permanent brain damage. Manny clearly hates prioritizing not going to prison over saving the woman, but both Gabs and Sharon reiterate that he did the right thing. His situation is temporary, and he needs to show that he can follow the rules if he ever wants to make it back to being a captain or even a full-fledged firefighter again. He and Gabs have another heart-to-heart about it, and she still encourages him to strive for early parole. In the meantime, she’s on the lookout for a new hobby. She’s recognized her toxic pattern of making things she cared about her entire personality, and she wanted something she could enjoy that would give her some work-life balance. It’s astounding to hear this coming out of her. Both Gabs and Manny are doing so well! Cross every appendage you have that they keep it up.