Blue Bloods Finale: Why Baez Wasn't At The Last Reagan Family Dinner

Contains spoilers for "Blue Bloods" Season 14, Episode 18 — "End of Tour"

After years of speculation, Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg) has finally asked Maria Baez (Marisa Ramirez) out on a date. It's just a quick scene during the closing moments of the "Blue Bloods" series finale, "End of Tour," but it's definitely promising and leaves fans hopeful that there's more to come. Unfortunately, they don't get to see more than that, as Danny attends the show's final Reagan family dinner stag.

There happens to be a behind-the-scenes reason for that. Executive producer Kevin Wade told Deadline that time was a factor when it came to the couple's failure to go public. "[A]t the end of their last scene together, there was a a hint of a whiff of a promise that they were going to leave that squad [room] and go off to dinner and end up at one or the other's house, yes. But it felt like a big leap, with only two minutes left, after 14 years, to introduce them [as a couple] like that at the dinner," he explained. While Season 14 was dotted with teases about Baez and Danny's relationship going from platonic to romantic, there simply wasn't enough time, in Wade's opinion, to get them there. 

To be fair to the show, Maria already attended a her first Reagan dinner during Season 11 — an experience that left Marisa Ramirez feeling emotional at the time. On top of that, one of the show's actors was rooting hard for fans to get a little pay-off in the Danny and Maria storyline — even approaching a writer and asking for this specific scene.

It seems Donnie Wahlberg fought for Maria and Danny to get their moment in the sun, but at first he was reluctant to go there with the pairing. "As the audience started sort of clamoring for a relationship with Danny and Baez, I thought, it's more important for them to grow and for her to start making an impact on him, and him to really respect her in a way that he hasn't always respected certain people in the show," he told Variety. 

With the show's final days coming up, Wahlberg took some credit for pushing the scene into being. "I went to [writer] Siobhan O'Connor, and I was like, 'Listen, you've got to do something. They don't need to go get married, but something would be nice, just to show that there may be a future for them, or that their relationship has really evolved." To lead into that moment, O'Connor wrote the scene between Danny and his grandfather, Henry (Len Cariou). It came as a surprise to Wahlberg, and he was highly admiring of the work O'Connor did. 

While Danny and Maria's future is currently up in the air, CBS has hinted that there's a "Blue Bloods" spin-off series in the works. Time will tell if its protagonists end up being Maria and Danny or another member of the Reagan clan.