"The Last Ship" has just wrapped up its third season, but its future for the next two summers are already secured. TNT has renewed the series for a fifth season, just a month after confirming its fourth season return.
"The Last Ship" is coming back for Season 4 and Season 5, which will be produced back-to-back. According to Deadline, doing this would provide the show some money savings. Both seasons will consist of 10 episodes each. The renewal did not actually come as a surprise given the stellar performance of the show. "The Last Ship" Season 3 had been attracting around 7.1 million viewers per episode across different platforms and had made it to the top 10 summer dramas.
The publication also noted that Hank Steinberg and Steven Kane will still be the showrunners for Season 4. However, in Season 5, only Kane will be the showrunner although they will both remain as executive producers of "The Last Ship."
While the show will return to the small screen, at least two stars are not coming back. John Pyper-Ferguson, who just returned in the latter part of the third season, was done. In the final episode of "The Last Ship" Season 3, Tex Nolan had to be killed off as the writers lay the story for Tom Chandler (Eric Dane). And then Allison Shaw (Elisabeth Rohm) was also killed by Chandler himself as he took the vengeance in his own hands.
At the end of the episode, Chandler leaves the Nathan James and his crew, thinking that he is no longer worth it to be a leader. In his dying breath, Tex told Tom "You're a good man," in a way that he was trying to tell Tom not to do what he was about to do (killing Shaw). And that will surely haunt Tom.
Will he get back onboard Nathan James when the next season returns? Will Tom become the hero he is destined to be? That is something fans can look forward to when the show returns. Showrunner Steven Kane told TVLine that when the next season kicks in, it could well be over a year since Chandler walked off the ship and didn't look back.
