'Flashpoint': Hugh Dillon sees his police character 'go off the rails'

Hugh Dillon knows, thanks to his "Flashpoint" character, just how bad a day someone can have.

In the Canadian-made, Friday-night CBS police drama's most recent episode, hostage-negotiation-team veteran Ed Lane was trying to get to a hospital for his child's birth while occupied with an on-the-job psychiatric evaluation -- which, he was dismayed to learn, had been ordered by his friend and superior Greg Parker (Enrico Colantoni).

Making matters much worse, Lane got stuck in heavy traffic en route to the hospital, then became the victim of a road-rage shooting. "Flashpoint" fans will learn the outcome of that cliffhanger soon: After two weeks of repeats, new episodes resume Friday, July 8 ... and there's a big hint in the fact that Dillon is still filming episodes for the current fourth season in Toronto.

"My initial reaction was, 'Holy f***!'," Dillon tells Zap2it about his "Flashpoint" alter ego getting shot, "but it made sense. It's taking these situations and how people react to them when they become explosive, and that's why the show is great. These things happen, right down to the everyday and mundane. You don't expect that's where the train will go off the rails."

Lane has been tightly wound since the start of "Flashpoint," and the latest episodes finally have allowed some of his anger to come out. "This character is based on a couple of real people I've met," Dillon reports. "When that uniform is on, they're very intense guys. They're always on guard and always watching, and that's how they do their job.

"That's why it's interesting to see, in the upcoming episodes, how someone like Ed deals with life when he can't predict it. The tension and the stakes are so high on this show, I can't wait to get the next script. Really, it's like reading a thriller novel, with each script like another chapter. You're just constantly tearing through it to see how it's going to land."

Early in the run of "Flashpoint," Dillon also starred in the serialized mystery "Durham County," seen in America on ION. That network has acquired the rights to future "Flashpoint" episodes once the series' CBS run is over, and those episodes definitely are coming; CTV, the show's originating network in Canada, recently renewed it for a fifth season.

Also a longtime musician whose current rock band is the Hugh Dillon Redemption Choir, Dillon gives bountiful credit to Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern, the married creators of "Flashpoint" who are also among its executive producers.

"They make this show what it is," he says. "It starts at the top, with how they've delivered this show week to week. We never get tired of it, and it never gets commonplace. You add all the action on top of that, and for actors like us, it's a great thing to be part of. We're very proud of it."