3.03: The Searchers

Welcome to That Weewoo Show: a podcast where Alice, Bex, and Ellen watch and discuss every episode of ABC’s TV show, 9-1-1.

In this episode we discuss episode 3 of the third season of 9-1-1, titled “The Searchers”. We’re joined by a special guest, Mads (@_themadsbuckley)!

Continuing from last episode, Athena, Maddie, Bobby, and the 118 race to save lives after a massive tsunami hits the Santa Monica Pier; Buck fears the worst when Christopher goes missing.

Content warnings for episode 3.03:

cops doing cop things, children at threat, field amputation, a gas leak, which leads to an explosion, tsunami.

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Our intro music is “Tensions” by Northern Points.

Other things mentioned in this episode:

• Background Firefighter (via X)

Episode Transcript

Maddie: [00:00:00] 9-1-1, what’s your emergency?

Bex: Welcome back to That Wee Woo Show, a podcast where we watch and discuss episodes of the A B C show, 9-1-1. I’m Bex,

Alice: I’m Alice.

Ellen: And I’m Ellen.

Bex: And welcome back to part two of the tsunami arc. We are very excited to, to keep talking about possibly the highest rated, most loved episodes of 9-1-1 to date.

And we have a special guest to join us to discuss these episodes because we want to share the love of the tsunami arc. Um, so welcome special guests. Would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners?

Mads: Hi! Um, so I’m Mads. [00:01:00] Um, do I do shameless, uh, self plug?

Alice: Absolutely.

Ellen: Go for it.

Mads: So I’m, uh, at underscore the Mads Buckley (@_themadsbuckley) over on Twitter or X or whatever we call it.

Alice: We call it Twitter.

Bex: We shamelessly deadname over here. Yeah.

Mads: Okay, cool. Yeah. So over on Twitter. Um, so I do art and edits and, um, I’m starting to work on fics as well over there. So that’s fun. But yeah.

Ellen: Awesome. Welcome.

Mads: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Bex: Uh, so when we started the podcast, we had our very own, um, origin stories.

So would you like to, um, explain how Mads began in 9-1-1?

Mads: Oh God. Um, so I definitely discovered the show through TikTok. I had random scenes, just, you know how like sometimes you get on your for you pages random scenes from TV shows? Um, [00:02:00] yeah, I had those and I thought it looked funny. So I started watching it, I think, during season six?

I want to say.

Bex: Ooh, what an, what an interesting season to come in on.

Mads: Yeah, but I didn’t get to season six during that time. I only got up to like season four, like halfway through season four before the big thing in season four happens for those who have watched it. Um, and so I didn’t know about that. And then I saw about, you know, the events that happened in 704.

And I started re watching, and then I caught up just before Season 7 ended. So, it’s been a bit of a weird journey.

Alice: Very, very up and down, but I love it. Yeah,

Mads: yeah. But yeah, I binged watched it, like, within a couple of weeks, um, before the end of Season 7. And, yeah, I didn’t join Twitter until [00:03:00] like last month, though.

I’d been kind of just skulking. Um, behind the scenes sneaky style And then obviously season eight came, you know started airing and I was like, oh I’ve definitely got to talk to people about this because no one in my life watches it and i’m a little bit addicted. So

Alice: Yeah, just just a little bit

Mads: Yeah, just a tad.

Bex: Why do you think we started this podcast? Cause we needed somebody to scream about the show with. It was so

Mads: bad. Like I was talking to my friends and stuff and like, and I, and they had no idea what I was talking about. They’re like, why do we care? Because you should. Please.

Alice: You should. Just love the gay firefighters.

Ellen: I think that’s probably how we, how we got into Supernatural fandom in the first place by like needing to talk to somebody about this.

Bex: Yes, absolutely. I know this show has been off the air for five years, but please talk to me about it.

Mads: I remember, I think I, I did watch Supernatural, I think I got up to season [00:04:00] 12.

And I think because of the fact that I didn’t actually realize that fandom existed, um, that I could actually talk to people about it. But it did get to, got to a point where I was like, I can’t be here watching this and have no one to talk to about it. Oh, but it’s fine. We’ll watch it eventually, like all the way through.

Bex: It’ll be the reverse. Like the, the pipeline will suddenly become a vacuum. Like sucking people up from 9-1-1 to Supernatural.

Alice: I have actually seen people on Twitter that are just like, “oh, do you think I should get into Supernatural?” that are from the 9-1-1 fandom. And everyone’s like, yes.

Bex: I’m just like, no, no, don’t do it.

Don’t do it!

Alice: I actually told someone like last week, I’m like, You’ll love it. You’ll hate it, but you’ll love it.

Bex: You will hate me for it.

Mads: Yeah. It is one of those types of shows where it’s like you either love it or you hate it.

Bex: Oh no, you love it and hate it.

Alice: We both, yeah. Yeah. Like, we love it, it’s our favourite show, but we hate the show, it’s so bad.

Ellen: There are

Alice: parts

Ellen: of it that are brilliant, and other parts are just like, what?

Bex: Which [00:05:00] kind of explains why we like 9-1-1 so much.

Alice: Yeah, exactly.

Mads: Honestly. We love this show, but also, oh my god. Some of the stuff that happens, you just have to sit there and you’re like, Okay, sure.

Ellen: Except that was the entire, like the last episode that we just recorded previously, we were like, okay, we’re just going to have to hand wave all of this, because… it’s just….

Bex: Yeah, for once, Ellen and Alice were getting up in arms about the inaccuracies of the Miami, um,

Alice: Miami?

Ellen: Wrong place.

Bex: Geography and where the roads were, and I’m just sitting here going, just let it go. Just let it go.

Alice: Like, we full on had Google Maps open last night, like, tracking where the tsunami took, um, Buck and Chris.

Mads: Oh my god.

Alice: Like, it was a whole thing, and Bex is like, you guys are looking way too much into it. I’m like, no, I found the lights that Buck grabs!

Mads: That’s actually impressive, though.

Bex: It was just the irony that it’s usually me [00:06:00] sitting there going, this is completely inaccurate, but this one, I just realized how futile it was going to be trying to explain this one, and I’ve just thrown my hands up and gone, nah, I’m out.

Mads: So you have to at some point be like, okay, the insanity of this situation is just too insane that like, trying to make anything else sane is just not plausible.

Bex: I had reached my limit. I’m like, nah, I’m not doing this one. I’m not touching this one.

Mads: I can’t do it anymore.

Ellen: Well, the good thing is that it’s a really actually a great couple of episodes, so we can forgive their craziness, I guess.

Mads: Yeah. Yes. They’re fantastic episodes.

Bex: So how are we going to start this?

Ellen: Yeah, I’m just thinking like, how are we going to talk about this two episode arc ,

Bex: I think we can just discuss both of them together.

Ellen: Okay.

Mads: I made a few notes, but I’m also not a hundred percent sure which episode started where, because I watched all three, um, cause [00:07:00] obviously I watched the first episode too, just cause like the emergency, you know, starts at the end of that.

Um, so I have notes from the first episode just because I was like, Oh, I don’t know where we’re starting. Um,

Bex: We can start wherever we want

Ellen: so we, the arc starts with obviously the tsunami, but um, with Buck and Chris at the pier, having a lovely day, and the wave appearing in the, in the distance. So like, when you, when did you first watch this episode?

Like it was, obviously you said you’d binged the whole series in a couple of weeks. So you just, um. Obviously, you probably watched these all back to back and everything to start with, right?

Mads: Yes, I did. Yeah. Yeah. Which I, I would have hated being the people watching this as it came out.

Bex: Right?

Mads: I don’t know if I could have handled that.

Ellen: I know. Oh my god.

Alice: Yeah, I was [00:08:00] stressed enough watching it years later.

Mads: Yeah. Yeah. Like, I just immediately went to the next episode going, “What? What do you mean a tsunami hit? What do you mean?”

Bex: What do you mean Christopher’s gone?

Mads: What do you mean?

Ellen: And I think I, like, we can start off with saying that, um, Oliver does such a brilliant job of just looking absolutely distraught.

Alice: Oliver acts his absolute heart out in these episodes.

Mads: These three episodes I think are his best acting, like of the whole show. Yeah. He just fully embraced that role.

Ellen: Yeah, absolutely.

Mads: I think my first notes from the episode two, the first notes I have is just about the scene where, like, the wave has just hit Buck and Chris in the, is it like a soft toy tent?

Like a prize tent?

Bex: Yeah, it’s like one of those baseball tosses that randomly just appeared in the middle [00:09:00] of the pier, even though there are no other kind of sideshow alley games there. It was just like, oh, we need an obstacle somewhere to hide Chris. Let’s just drop a booth there.

Mads: Yeah, it’s so random too.

Like, why? Okay, sure. Why? Because,

Alice: because.

Mads: Just because. But the, like, as that water hits and then there’s that, those camera flashes of just like him in the water, under the water, black, under the water, black, like that is some of the best cinematography I’ve ever seen on TV. Like, it gets me every time just how incredible those one little section is.

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s very disorienting even to watch.

Mads: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I can’t even imagine, but that made it a really good way to imagine that situation.

Ellen: Yeah. We were saying that when we were talking about the last episode that, um, [00:10:00] they got washed some distance and it was really lucky that they actually popped up at the same place.

Like when they, when they actually found each other, they were quite close together.

Mads: The likelihood of that happening is probably not, not very likely, but you know,

Alice: we’ll just have a little bit of magic.

Bex: Look at the, the 136, Lena ends up in the Ferris wheel, Cooper ends up halfway in the suburbs and the rest of the 136, they managed to find them sort of within the staging area.

So yeah, for Lena to end up over there, Ronnie to end up over there, but somehow Buck and Chris managed to end up close together.

Mads: Yeah, and I, Lena’s like, “Oh, I swam.” Girl, come on!

It’s like, there’s no way you swam from wherever you ended up to the Ferris wheel again. Like, there’s just no

Bex: We’re going to hand wave. We’re just going to enjoy. We’re not going to think too hard about it or we’re going to get an aneurysm.

Ellen: But the funny part about the, the [00:11:00] Ferris wheel is that I’m not even really sure where the Ferris wheel is.

I was going to look it up actually before now, but I haven’t. Um, because I thought it was on the pier, but

Alice: Is it not on the pier?

Ellen: When, when the guy

Bex: Off to the side?

Ellen: Yeah, the guy who’s taking, who’s, who’s on the top of the Ferris wheel taking a video, and he is looking at the pier from like, behind the pier.

Mads: There’s also the couple that are in the, you know, the one that we follow in the episode, they also walk past Buck and Chris to get to the Ferris wheel, so it’s like, it’s such a weird framing of how to get there.

Ellen: Yeah, I don’t, I need to have another look at maybe that first part of the episode just to work out where the Ferris wheel actually is.

But when the, when like Bobby and Eddie are coming back from the, like to shore from the Ferris wheel, they walk underneath the sign that says, welcome to Santa Monica Pier. So [00:12:00] the Ferris wheel is actually obviously out there somewhere.

Alice: So the Ferris wheel is on the pier. There’s like a offshoot on the left, and then like the actual pier part is like obviously at the end of the pier.

But I don’t know why they would have walked past Eddie.

Ellen: It’s so confusing, but anyway.

Alice: Because that’s where the harbour office is, is at the end of the pier. Oh, okay. And then when you look back, the Ferris wheel’s, there, behind.

Ellen: So they got washed past the Ferris wheel into the buildings that are behind that. So we’re going back to the map again, this is bad news.

Alice: We’re going to have to just, I’m telling you, we have to take a group trip to LA just to be like, this was inaccurate guys. The park benches also aren’t that close to the railing, but sure, Buck.

Mads: Yeah, I have seen other people point that out.

Alice: They’re also facing [00:13:00] the water, not facing in, but you know.

Mads: I did find that strange when, you know, they’re sitting on it and Buck’s not facing the water.

I’m like, why? Why?

Alice: He’s like, fuck the water. I’m sick of the water.

Mads: He’s like, you have a look, Chris. It’s fine. I’ll just sit here and watch, watch people. It’s fine.

Ellen: All right. Okay. So this episode is called “The Searchers”. It aired on the 7th of October in 2019. And the simple summary just says, in the wake of a tsunami, the first responders race to save lives.

That’s pretty much it. Oh, and, and Buck fears the worst one Christopher goes missing.

Alice: Yeah, that’s it.

Ellen: So the triggers that we have listed here include cops doing cop things.

Mads: Mm-hmm .

Ellen: We have children at threat, a field amputation, which is a new one. Um, fun and games in this [00:14:00] episode. A gas leak, which leads to an explosion, and we have a tsunami.

Alice: Shit, no way.

Bex: Gee, no way! Really?

Ellen: So it actually does get straight into the action, right? Like, we just open with a news reports saying that the tsunami’s happened, and then it’s just Buck screaming. So,

Bex: It was really interesting because remember the beginning of season two, they had the window hanger at the end of the second episode, and then the third episode, it was like the window hanger never happened.

They just immediately went, “Oh, we had people hanging out a window? Nah, we’ve, we’ve done with that.” Um, so it was really nice that for this, for the episode three, after having the cliffhanger of Chris being missing, they did pick up pretty much immediately after that where Buck is still looking for Christopher.

So we had that [00:15:00] little bit of continuity, that yes, this is what happened , but it’s like, 30 seconds and then they jump back in time to 20 minutes before the wave to deal with minor characters who we’ve never seen before and we’ll never see again, but we do We do have the the important moment where he thinks he finds Chris Because there’s a woman screaming about a kid being stuck under a giant neon sign. It turns out it’s not Chris, but Chris’s glasses have been washed up onto a pile of debris.

Ellen: Oh yeah, and it goes all slow mo, and he’s like, putting them around his own neck, just looking so devastated.

So sad.

Bex: He picks them up and keeps them so he can give them back to Christopher when he finds him.

Alice: The costume department’s also actually remembered that Buck is in floodwater, because at the end of last episode, he

Bex: His shoes and his shirt were so white.

Alice: They were still [00:16:00] bright white. And, um, now it’s like, he’s so dirty.

He’s so bloody. Um, he looks defeated.

Ellen: Well, he has just come out of a, an outgoing wave. So, the water’s gonna be a lot more dirty.

Bex: He really wasn’t in, I guess he wasn’t in the water that much in the first part, so everything did stay nice, shiny white. But yes, it is much more realistic that he is filthy right now.

Alice: Yeah, but like he’s, and he’s like, at the end of last episode, I’m pretty sure he still had like a shirt on and now he’s just got a t shirt on.

Bex: I think he lost the shirt while he was rescuing all the people.

Alice: Or did he? Either way, he’s just wearing a white t shirt and it’s very see through and no one’s mad about it.

Bex: And we can see the tattoos. I love that we can see the tattoos.

Mads: Yeah. Thank you, costume department.

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: And then, randomly, we go from this, you know, heart wrenching scene to 20 minutes before the first wave again. We did this in the last episode as well.

Bex: It’s like Groundhog Day. [00:17:00] We keep getting jumped back to 20 minutes before the wave.

Ellen: Ugh. Yeah, but this time we’re with a different, different people.

Bex: We are with Max and Stacey. Yeah. Yes, who, uh, have returned to the pier to end their marriage. As you do, because where else would you sign divorce papers?

Ellen: Apparently this is where they started their relationship.

Mads: It’s such an odd, like, way to do it.

Yeah. Okay.

Ellen: I mean it seems like they’re gonna part ways amicably, I suppose. They’re not, you know, actively hurting each other at the moment. They seem okay to spend the day together before they sign any paperwork.

Bex: Max does say that he has orchestrated this because he’s looking for a sign um, as to whether they should go ahead with the divorce or not.

And I [00:18:00] do, I will give David Fury, who wrote this episode props, um, for the fact that the tsunami interrupts them signing the papers and Max takes that as a, and When he gets hurt, Stacey looks after him, they get to, they resolve that he gets rescued and you would think, like in a normal soap opera, they’d be like, “Oh my god, I just remembered, I still love you, let’s stay married, we’ll live together happily ever after,” but now he’s gone, “Yeah, um, we survived, I still love you, but I do not want to be married to you anymore. This is the sign that we need to divorce.”

Alice: Yeah, I do like that it’s a switch up, like, of the cliche, like, instead of being a first date, it’s a last date

Bex: Yes, and they don’t change their minds.

Mads: I think when I first watched that episode and they actually went through with the signing of the papers, I was like, Oh, okay. Yeah. That’s new.

Ellen: Well, it was kind of like, [00:19:00] it reminded me of that episode in season, maybe one or like early in season two where the mum and her son was trapped in the elevator and then when they finally got out of there, she was like, all right, get out. Like, I don’t want you anymore.

Get out. You know, like, yeah.

Mads: Oh, “Trapped”.

Ellen: It reminded me of that.

Mads: What a great episode.

Ellen: Uh, so now we’ve gone through the entirety of those two and their story in this episode. We don’t have to talk about them anymore.

Bex: Well, not, I mean, we, we need to set it up because we do come back to them slightly later with, um, Lena and Eddie.

Alice: Bex is here just like, I just want to talk about them.

Bex: Yes. I’m sorry. I, I love Lena. I think she’s great. Um, but yeah, they’re up in their little, insert whatever we’re calling those things that are on a Ferris wheel because I still haven’t figured that out.

Mads: Are they carts?

Alice: I think we decided car [00:20:00] yesterday.

Bex: Car, boat, cabin, I have no idea. Whatever.

Alice: The poor people who listens to these episodes back to back are gonna be like, they just spoke about it like 20 minutes ago.

It’s the next day. We’ve all had work. We’re very tired.

Bex: Max has slipped the operator 50 bucks to stop them at the peak of the Ferris wheel. So they’re in private position so they can see when the tsunami happens and as it hits and as the wave hits the Ferris wheel, um, Max, who is filming the entire thing on his phone rather than, you know, freaking out, uh, stumbles backwards and hits his, the back of his neck on the edge of the car.

And for some reason, the Foley department decide that glass shattering is the perfect sound to accompany that.

Ellen: Yeah, I was looking at it going, what just broke then?

Bex: Yeah, that’s perspex. That’s not glass. That’s not going to shatter like that. Or if it is going to shatter like that, it’s not going to sound like glass shattering.

Alice: [00:21:00] That’s, um It’s glass underscore shatter underscore three. Oh sorry, zero three.

Bex: They do love that sound. That’s just the default something broke sound. We’re going to use that one. Um, I also have slight issues with how a man as tall as Max manages to stumble and hit the back of his neck in a little container that small, but I’m not going to, um, focus on that.

Alice: It’s fine. For the drama.

Bex: For the drama. Um, but I would like to point out that them signing the divorce papers in that cart in front of each other is not legally binding.

Ellen: Oh, okay. You have to do it in front of a legal representative?

Bex: Yeah, I don’t entirely know how California law goes, but I’m pretty sure that those kind of papers need to be notarized.

Um, and especially here in Australia, having, like, being a lawyer and having gone through this process myself, the number of times I had to go down to the justice of the peace to get them to witness me signing papers was ridiculous. Um, so [00:22:00] yeah, they couldn’t even sign them in front of Eddie and Lena and have them witness it.

It has to be a very specific person witnessing them. So yeah, it’s, it’s a wonderful, like, symbolic, it’s a lovely romantic notion, but it means fuck all legally. They’re still married.

Ellen: But wait till he finds out when he wakes up after.

Mads: As soon as she’s going to take the papers down and they’re like, Ah, sorry, but you actually didn’t do these here.

Alice: Yeah, these are soaking wet with tsunami water.

Bex: And that does not look like your signature because you’ve written it like upside down and while you’re immobilized to a, uh, a backboard.

Mads: Yeah, I’m like,

Alice: Is that blood on it? Like what is, what, what are these?

Mads: The fingers weren’t really even functioning. How did you sign?

Ellen: Did she force you to do this? Like what’s going on here?

Mads: Were you under duress?

Ellen: Yes. Yeah. The funniest thing is that she, she says, “Just like our marriage, this ride [00:23:00] is suddenly going nowhere.”

I’m like, damn girl, like that’s mean.

Alice: Damn Stacey!

Bex: The other thing that bugged me was that, yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s going to be lots of things that bug me this episode, I’m, I was willing to let the tsunami go, but now I’m back on my soapbox with nitpicking, was, so this guy has fallen, he’s hit the back of his neck, and Stacey has decided the best position to put him in is with his neck, like, awkwardly propped up against the side of the little cart thingy with her bag shoved under his neck.

And, uh, And girl, if he didn’t have spinal injuries beforehand, he does now.

Mads: Yeah, it’s her fault because, you know, he started losing sensation.

Bex: Exactly!

Alice: It’s like, I can’t feel anything, and they’re just like, well, yeah, your, wife actually paralyzed you.

Bex: You’ve compressed your spinal cord. Look, I get that he’s tall, I get that you can’t lay him flat because there’s not enough room, but, you know, lay him flat and then have his legs sticking up off the side of the cart or something.

Just, you know, prioritise that spinal column. [00:24:00] Alright, I’m done now. I’m okay.

Mads: Are you sure, like?

Alice: Bex is going back to her cave for a little bit.

Ellen: Alright, so we, the wave hits the Ferris wheel, um, we’ve already gone over that, but Eddie and Bobby are Like jump to the future. Eddie and Bobby are going to the Ferris wheel on their boat.

Bex: Mm-hmm .

Ellen: This is like the scene that we already saw in the previous episode, basically

Bex: with La Bombera.

Alice: Yeah. This is the, yeah.

Ellen: A bit faster. Yeah. The fire lady. The fire lady,

Alice: Stacey like, says that they’ll fix it ’cause everything can be fixed and Max, like, Max is like “Not everything,” which is more foreshadowing their marriage to the end of their marriage.

 Bobby says some technical stuff.

Bex: Yeah, we get the extended scene where Lena calls down for help and we see Eddie start to climb up the Ferris wheel to get to her, to help her, because she is stuck in one of the little carts with a absolutely petrified man who is [00:25:00] refusing to come down until the water’s gone. And Lena is on her last, the last little bit of patience, because she says, “If you don’t come with us, then the whole thing will be gone. You can’t wait for the water to leave.”

But it’s a good thing that Eddie is there, because he has a safety harness that he is able to put the guy in, rather than just trying to convince him to climb down on his own.

Ellen: Yeah, and he finally agrees, but just as he’s about to. be lowered down, the waves start coming again.

And he, and the, uh, what do you call that thing? Ferris wheel. That’s it. God, I’m losing the words already. Um, the Ferris wheel starts to move. No, it’s all right. It starts to move and the guy starts panicking. He’s like, “Get me down. Don’t, don’t let me fall.” They managed to get him down and into a boat.

Mads: I will say, like, as someone who is afraid of heights, I did relate really hard to that man.

Ellen: Yeah, [00:26:00] oh yeah.

Alice: Oh, absolutely, yeah.

Ellen: Can’t fault him for freaking out a little bit. It’s a bit of a nasty situation.

Alice: Yeah.

Mads: Oh, for sure.

Alice: Um, I have the, like, the double thing there. I have, um, fear of heights plus fear of drowning. Oh no! So I’ve just been like, nope, nope! Just like, leave me hanging in the air. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

That’s it. Like, can’t stay up here, can’t go in the water, I’m stuffed. That’s it. I just feel like, um, there’s a pretty firefighter up here I’m just going to stay with, um, Lena, thank you.

Bex: Yeah, the funny thing is that this guy is being lowered down and is absolutely freaking out and these two are just chilling.

Alice: Yeah, they’re just flirting, as you do.

Bex: No, no, it’s not flirting though. It’s so interesting, I, like I said last episode, I don’t sort of look into the inside baseball with these episodes. But I always, I’m curious, um, I wonder whether they were intending for Lena to be introduced as a future love interest for Eddie.

Because the two of them give off such sibling energy. [00:27:00] I could not imagine them getting together.

Mads: I think they were trying so hard to do that because there are certain scenes throughout like the whole like episode where it’s like oh, okay I can see what they’re trying to do.

Bex: And it doesn’t work.

Mads: But it just doesn’t work.

Alice: Eddie’s like punching Lena on the shoulder like yeah, bro How’re your broken ribs bro?

Bex: Yeah, but it doesn’t, it just, they naturally fall into an older brother younger sister dynamic Yeah. Yeah. The way they, they, they bicker with each other. Um, so I don’t know what the intention was, but I love this feisty bantering that he, he ends up with Lena.

Ellen: Yeah, she clocks him as a soldier like right away.

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: Yeah. But they climb all the way up to where Max and Stacey are and sort of, that we’ve been over that part already, they help them out. And he gets like airlifted out of there. Yeah. Yeah. In a helicopter, which must be an absolute terrifying [00:28:00] experience being, like, strapped to a backboard and you can’t see what’s underneath you.

All you can see is this helicopter above you.

Bex: And it doesn’t look like they’re hauling him up to the helicopter either. They just, they just carry him off and he’s dangling under the helicopter for a good while.

Ellen: Terrifying.

Mads: I wonder if they just, like, continually Just hem him underneath the helicopter the whole way.

Bex: Yeah, they have to bring him up at some point. Could you imagine?

Ellen: They’d have to. Surely that can’t be safe.

Bex: They can’t just leave him dangling like that.

Ellen: Dangling under there.

Mads: Just like dodging buildings.

Ellen: Lowering him down to the ground.

Alice: Oh, another wave’s coming. Go higher!

Bex: But just as they get, um, as they get Max out, and I’m assuming that they then use The climbing gear that Eddie has to lower Stacey out because, um, when the, the debris wave that Bobby mentioned at the end of the last [00:29:00] episode hits, um, he and

Ellen: We don’t ever find out what happened to Stacey, do we?

Bex: Yeah, he and Lena are the only two on the ferris wheel.

Ellen: At least she got a name. Yeah, but like she didn’t, we didn’t see her jump into the water or anything. No, so I’m

Bex: assuming that they, they got her to climb down. Um, but then Eddie and Lena have to free drop or free fall into the water to get down so that they’re off the structure before the debris wave hits and completely knocks the ferris wheel over.

Ellen: Yeah, they get away.

Bex: And then we, they, we stick with, um, Bobby for a little bit longer. We end up back on the pier.

Ellen: Oh yeah, that’s right. They get ashore and they go underneath the sign that says Welcome to the Santa Monica Pier.

Mads: Yeah. Sorry, I’m just laughing at your notes with the, “Rhonda was a bit flaily, Ryan looked neat.”

Alice: Bex’s notes are the best.

Bex: I do wonder whether that was a stunt that they left, that they let Ronda [00:30:00] and Ryan do, or whether that was their stunt doubles.

Alice: Yeah, cause like, Oliver got to do a lot, so I’m sure Ryan was just like, I wanna do stuff.

Bex: Yeah, let me jump off the Ferris wheel into the tank.

Alice: Oh, fine, jump in the fucking water. Jesus christ.

Bex: Or whether that was deemed, like, too much. for them to do. The 118 are going to be hoofing it for a bit because they can’t get the trucks to them. Um, and Bobby tells Lena that her crew, the 136, are all alive and accounted for except for Captain Cooper.

And Lena says that she’s going to stick around the pier and look for him, which is when Bobby clocks the way that she’s holding herself. She’s got like one arm protectively pressed to her side and she immediately is under the fence of like, it’s nothing. It’s just a bruised rib. And so Eddie sort of goes over and immediately pokes her in the rib.

It’s not even like a gentle examination. He literally just jabs her. Which of course it’s gonna fucking hurt.

So he [00:31:00] decides yeah, that’s not bruised. That’s broken and Bobby tells her that he’s pulling her from the field. He wants her to head to the VA hospital, and then sics his babysitter, i. e. Eddie, on her to make sure that she actually gets there. Because apparently that’s what Eddie is, he is the designated babysitter for the, um, the pouty

Alice: For every firefighter.

Bex: For the pouty young firefighters that don’t follow orders. First he was hired to look after Buck, now he has to look after Lena.

Alice: Like Buck was so rebellious, finally Abby like pinned him down, Abby leaves, he’s like

Mads: Ah, this one will do. It’s perfect.

Alice: This one’s cute, I’m sure Buck will like it. Bit of a rescue situation.

Mads: Ah, what a man.

Bex: I think he probably thought that Eddie being ex military that he would actually follow orders and that didn’t last very long.

Alice: That lasted terribly.

Mads: Buck was a really bad influence.

Alice: Buck’s a terrible [00:32:00] influence.

Mads: Eddie got there, saw Buck and was like, okay, I can give all my brain cells away, we’re just sharing one now.

Alice: Yeah. Like Eddie in this episode, cool, calm, collected, knows what he’s doing, like good medic, um, deals with Lena. Eddie, the minute that he’s with Buck, um, closed gate mystery.

Ellen: Speaking of Buck.

Bex: Yes! Speaking of. Poor Eddie is still under the illusion that, um, that Buck and Chris are off at the movies.

Alice: Oh, that’s right.

Bex: Yeah, he leaves a voicemail.

Alice: He

Bex: leaves a message for, yeah.

It says, tell Chris I’ll be a little late picking him up. That’s great, Eddie, you gotta find him first. Where are you gonna pick him up from?

Ellen: Hope you guys are having fun.

Mads: Hope you guys are having fun. Good thing you’re missing it.

Ellen: And they’re not having fun.

Alice: They’re not having fun at all.

Bex: Who knows, maybe Chris might be having a ball wherever [00:33:00] he is, but um, but no, Buck is not having fun.

Ellen: Now Buck is on his feet, like obviously the water went out enough that it’s actually shallow enough for them to walk on the road. Yes. And there’s a bunch of other people hanging around, I don’t know why they’re still there, not, maybe they’re all looking for someone as well, but he keeps asking people if anyone’s seen Chris.

Bex: Finally someone has seen him. He was with a group headed to Cupcakery.

Ellen: Yeah, which is like six or seven blocks away. It’s like, wow.

Alice: Yeah, I love that Buck’s just like, “what is that?” And I was like, same. But yeah, apparently it’s just a cupcake bakery.

Ellen: Sounds good.

Mads: I wish we had one here.

Ellen: Yeah, I could go cupcake right now. Yeah, that’s only a short scene, but he, he heads off that way and we go.

Alice: Oh, is this where they look at, they lift up the sign?

Bex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got confused. This was, um, this is where they lifted the sign to find the girl.

Alice: Yeah, so they, um, lift up a sign because they’re like, [00:34:00] “There’s a kid under here! There’s a kid under here!” So Buck immediately lifts it up and it’s just a, it’s a young girl.

Bex: Because I think he sees, like, the legs with a pair of cons, converse sticking out, which is what Chris was wearing. Um, so he assumes that it’s Chris’s legs. But it’s not Chris’s leg, it’s a young girl. So he heads towards the Cupcakery.

Alice: And this is also where Buck cuts his arm.

Bex: Is this where he cuts it or is it just the, we get the closeup of a laceration on his arm?

Alice: No, you can actually, like, they do actually make like a cut noise.

Bex: Oh, so he does cut his arm on the sign, I did not…

Alice: Yeah, so he cuts his arm on the sign, um, and then they do like a close up of the cut.

Bex: The director in this episode just loves doing like these long lingering shots of, I’m gonna show you this, I’m gonna focus on this for a few seconds, I need you to pay attention.

You seeing this? You paying attention? You making note of this? Yes? Okay.

Alice: Well, it’s the general audience, okay? They’re not as obsessive as us. Yes. [00:35:00] Yeah, they don’t watch every scene in slow motion 12 times.

Bex: What are you talking about? That’s normal viewing activity, isn’t it?

Mads: Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

Ellen: Uh, we’re going to dispatch, um, and this whole sequence is just I really didn’t care about any of these people.

Bex: I was just like No. Let’s speed run through this.

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah, so Maddie takes a call.

Alice: Yeah, there’s a couple different calls. There’s some guy with a fishhook in his eye at some point. But then a woman calls because her daughter’s missing and she’s in Wisconsin, but her daughter is at a place near the beach and was texting saying that she was fine, but then her text became gibberish and now she can’t reach it.

So they mention like where it is and they’re just like, “Okay cool, but like we don’t have like any resources to go check.”

Bex: Apparently Linda had also got a call from the [00:36:00] same location, which is the Ocean Plaza apartment complex, along the same lines. Somebody was having trouble reaching their partner and Maddie does a quick Google, like she literally thinks she said she checks social media, and nobody has checked in and marked themselves as safe, so she wants to send resources to check out the apartment complex, and Sue was like, “you realize how thinly we are stretched? You want to go and send help to the only building where people are not asking for help?”

But then we find out why we got introduced to Charlie in episode 2 because Charlie has a drone and

Alice: Yeah, Charlie and her drone are back.

Bex: She calls in to 9-1-1 because she wants to know if anybody knows about the frog man that she found hanging out on the top of a palm tree. She’s been using her drone to search for Reggie.

Ellen: This is the most [00:37:00] incomprehensible phone call. She’s like, “do you know the frogman?” And Maddie’s like, “The who? The what now?”

Bex: Yeah, Linda’s like, I don’t know if I’m getting punked. Um, and so when Maddie jumps on the call and Linda, and Charlie’s like, “The frogman!” Linda’s sort of pointing at the screen going, see, I told you.

Alice: Maddie picks up like Ashton Kutcher, is this you?

Ellen: Yeah, this is, this is the weirdest thing because she’s, she, like Maddie says, like, she says “He’s in a tree. You can’t see him from the street.” And Maddie’s like, “How do you, how can you see him?” And she says , “With my drone.” And she’s like, “If you want, I can send you a link to a live feed.” And Maddie’s like, “okay.”

And she goes, “okay, I can see it.”

Alice: It’s like, where did she send the link to?

Bex: Where did she send the link?

Alice: She’s like, hang on, let me friend you on Discord and I’ll just, um,

Mads: She just sends it so quickly, like, no details were shared.

Alice: DM me the URL.

Ellen: Can you text 9-1-1? Like, [00:38:00] maybe she

Bex: No, you can’t text 9-1-1.

Alice: Sure.

You actually might be able to.

Mads: That you can in the US, I’m pretty sure. I think they have a texting

Alice: Yeah. Like, it doesn’t work like this, but it’s for, like, people who, like, have, um, who are hard of hearing. But I’ve Or, like, if you’re in an emer I remember there being, like, something where if you’re in an emergency situation where you can’t talk, there was a number to text.

Bex: But I’m pretty sure you can’t text, like, a lot.

Alice: But no, it’s not just, like, sending a link and Maddie just pulling it up. Like, she doesn’t just have the access to, like, 9-1-1, like

Bex: The number of firewalls it would have to go through.

Alice: They, they DM’d it on Twitter and Maddie for some reason has the Twitter, um, the Twitter messages open and it’s like, yes, sick.

Bex: Yeah, it’s just, it’s ridiculous.

Alice: Anyway, they magically get the link through the cloud.

Ellen: Yeah, and she can see it. And so now she’s like roping Charlie into her purposes. She’s like, how far can this drone fly? [00:39:00] I am going to use it for my own benefit now.

Bex: Yes. You have been commandeered.

Alice: Maddie also makes a comment about how, like, she knows the kid’s name’s Charlotte, um, because they’ve got really good caller ID, and that’s where Charlie’s just like, oh, you’re like big brother’s big sister.

Um, but also, Charlie’s name is Charlotte Rain, which is an interesting choice, but anyway, yeah, so, so Maddie commandeers a drone.

Bex: Apparently it is, uh, strong enough to be able to fly from Charlotte’s apartment to the ocean plaza and head up to, I think they get about to the 10th floor. Um, where,

Alice: I mean, our drone goes pretty far and

Bex: they can see that there are a group of people just passed out in one of the apartments on the 10th floor. It looks like the aftermath of a party.

Mads: Did we map the distance between Rose and Third and the Ocean City Plaza?

Bex: No, because the geography in [00:40:00] this version of LA doesn’t make sense. I mean, this is the same show that had them take six hours to drive two hours, so I’m not trusting anything when it comes to distances in this show.

Time and distance make no sense.

Mads: That drone could have a really good reach.

Alice: It also got to um, what’s it called, Big Bear or whatever.

Ellen: Oh my god, that’s a long way for a drone to get to Big Bear. Over the mountains and far away.

Alice: It took Doug three days, but it took the drone five minutes.

Bex: So now Maddie has her proof that there is something going on at the Ocean Plaza apartment and she can now send help.

Ellen: Then we get a bit of a time jump because now it’s night time.

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: Um, Athena is on shift.

Bex: And she is raring to arrest people.

Ellen: She’s been put in charge.

Bex: Oh God, who put her in charge?

Ellen: She’s very [00:41:00] good at it. She tells everyone what their assignments are.

Bex: Which is to arrest anybody that’s looting. She does not like looters.

Alice: Or people charging too much for bottles of water.

Bex: She says like, “If you see anything that looks more than a misdemeanor call for backup, we are not looking the other way on this. Arrests will be made.” They are going to hit their quota tonight, whether they like it or not. Um, so she sends them on their way and there is one officer is talking to a group of people and Athena heads over, um, to see what’s going on.

And the officer, Suze, says that these people are just trying to find their people. And Athena’s like, I need you to skedaddle. Go to a shelter. And the, the guy

Alice: Fuck off you dirty looter, uh, loiterers.

Bex: Yeah, the guy’s like, “You’re not gonna help me?” She’s like, “We are doing everything we can to help, but the people at the shelter will be able to help you, uh, more. They’ll be able to take your [00:42:00] name and connect you with your wife or whoever is missing.”

Um, he seems, you know, rather agitated, but there is, um, another woman who I initially assumed was his wife. But then he says that he’s actually looking for his wife. So she’s just a random tagger on and she has got pantyhose dummy in a red hoodie strapped to her chest, um, and the camera lingers on her.

Ellen: She’s holding it in her arms, but it really doesn’t look like she’s carrying anybody.

Alice: The worst thing is, I’m pretty sure every time I’ve watched this episode, I’ve missed this scene. Because I’m watching it now, and I had no recollection of this scene.

Um, I’m pretty sure every time Athena does cop things, I just tune out.

Mads: That’s real.

Bex: And like, the camera, the camera lingers on, on her, it’s like, you’re watching, this is important. But, um, Ellen, I think you mentioned , in the group chat that you completely missed the significance of that shot. That that [00:43:00] was meant to be Chris.

Um, I don’t know when I watched it for the first time, I had no idea that that was meant to be Chris.

Ellen: No, no. But I did notice the second time when she runs into Bobby and whoever else she sees. Um, they, they do like a lingering shot on her and I was like, why are they showing this lady again? And then it didn’t even twig until later that it was Chris in her arms.

It was like

Bex: Cause number one, it doesn’t look human cause it’s completely the wrong size and shape and weight.

Alice: It’s not even moving. Like

Bex: Um, number two, we’ve had Buck telling us all episode, it’s Like, Chris has got a yellow shirt and brown hair, and we can’t see this kid’s shirt or hair, so we have no idea.

Alice: But also, Chris was just at Athena’s house.

Bex: He knows Athena!

Alice: Like, two days ago.

Bex: So, I’m, like, the only thing I can think is that he is absolutely exhausted, and she is carrying him like that because he is asleep. And he does not hear [00:44:00] Athena because, yeah, if he was awake and conscious, he would have heard Athena and just gone, “Wait, Athena, it’s me, Chris. Have you seen Buck? Have you seen my dad?”

Um, but obviously that doesn’t work for the storyline that they’re telling. So they’ve just, you know, knocked him out for the entire episode. So they can have the big reveal eventually.

Mads: Night, night.

Ellen: And so she heads off to go and arrest some people and we go back to, Buck, who’s still wandering around looking for Chris, um, he does see a young child, and he runs over and says, Chris, Chris, Chris.

But, It turns out this kid is not Chris, and the mum’s like, “What are you doing? You strange man.”

Alice: It looks nothing like Chris. I’m pretty sure at this point Buck’s forgotten who Chris is.

Ellen: He does look a lot younger than Chris.

Bex: But like I said, they made the big thing about Chris having a yellow shirt on.

This kid had a blue and green shirt on.

Alice: Yeah, like it has stripes. That’s it.

Mads: Yeah. Buck’s just so frantic to find Chris.

Ellen: He probably just saw a kid and went, Oh my god.

Bex: [00:45:00] Yes. He, at this point, he is willing to steal any kid and hand it over to Eddie, like, look, I found Chris!

Alice: One way or another Eddie is getting back a child.

Mads: I can’t come back empty handed.

Bex: Yes, exactly.

Alice: Oh, it just reminds me of the scene in Friends where Monica and Chandler are trying for a baby and they leave. Rachel’s kid, like, unattended in the other room, so Joey comes in and takes her, and Monica, like, freaks out because the baby’s missing, and she’s like, You better hope that we’re pregnant, because one way or another, Rachel’s getting back a baby.

Anyway, yeah, so Buck tries to steal a child, the mother steers the child away from Buck, looking very concerned.

Bex: as, as you would when a strange man tries to snatch your child from you.

Ellen: To be fair, Buck does buck… Buck…Buck backs [00:46:00] away when he realizes.

Alice: He bucks away.

Ellen: When he realizes it’s not Chris, he’s like holding his hands up going, okay. Sorry, I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry.

Alice: And then we get. Uh, random extra go, “Are you okay? You’re bleeding.” And then we go down to that cut that Buck got on the sign earlier that they lingered on nicely. And his whole arm, like his whole arm from there down is just covered in blood.

Bex: See Buck, and this is why you weren’t allowed to go back to work when you’re on blood thinners, cause shit like this happens.

Alice: So Beck’s had questions. So many questions.

Bex: I have, from like, the very first moment the tsunami hit and Buck is covered in lacerations that do not seem to be bleeding. It’s only this one that they seem to remember that, oh, the dude’s on blood thinners. Maybe his wounds should be bleeding excessively.

Alice: Yeah, so my mum is actually on blood thinners, so I sat her down and forced her to watch these two episodes, uh, these three episodes.[00:47:00]

Um, I think she’ll probably be, like, on the, She’ll probably be on the podcast like later talking about it in more detail. But basically, um, she said that, yes, no, this is actually all like medically accurate. A lot of the show is not, but this part is.

Bex: Okay, that’s good to know. Um.

Mads: That’s cool, yeah.

Alice: Yeah, so she was actually really impressed.

So she said that, um, the ones on his face are too shallow. Like they’re more like grazes. Okay, yeah. And if she just grazes herself, it doesn’t really do anything. It just sort of sits in the wound and that allows it to like clot. Yep. Yeah. But when it’s deep like the one on his arm that he did with the sign, um, they don’t, like, they don’t stop, basically.

So, like, and it looks exactly like that. Like, it looks like just, like, water, basically, running down your arm or whatever. So she cut herself on a cat food tin back when we were feeding the cat tins, we’ve now moved to pouches for this reason, um, cut herself on a cat food tin. She like put [00:48:00] pressure on it, cause she’s an ex nurse, so she knows what to do.

Um, cause it just would not stop bleeding. So she put pressure on it, um, the next morning she woke up and it was still just bleeding everywhere and ended up having to get it stitched. And it was just like a little cut on her thumb that she’s done a million times before and it would not stop bleeding.

Bex: Okay. So that’s good to know.

Alice: But she says that like little scratches and stuff, not an issue at all.

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: So yes, the ones on his face, like, cause when the, like after the tsunami hit, I’m just like, wouldn’t he be bleeding more? And like, didn’t even mention the thing and Mom, she’s like, nah, I’m like, even on the blood thinner, she’s like, nah.

And then when he cut his arm on the sign and it lingered on it, Mum’s like, “oh, that’s gonna bleed.”

Mads: Okay.

Alice: Um, and she said if he was bleeding and like, even if it stopped and then he went back to back into the water, it’d open it up again.

Bex: Yeah, which I guess is why also when they go from season, from episode 2 to episode 3, because Buck’s been back in the water searching for Chris, the [00:49:00] cuts on his face are a lot redder and angrier.

He’s been back in the water.

Alice: Yeah, so they actually do really well on this part. Yay!

Bex: I am very impressed. Congratulations 9-1-1, you actually got something medically correct for once.

Alice: We’re very proud of you.

Mads: Props to the medical, medical accuracies.

Ellen: Alright, we go back to the Ocean Plaza.

Bex: Do we have to? Yes, we have to!

Because we get new members of the 118! Yes!

Ellen: Okay, tell us all about it.

Bex: So, No, well, John is back. John is apparently stuck around. Um, he must be replacing

Ellen: Oh, he didn’t die in the, uh, explosion.

Bex: No, he didn’t die in the explosion. John survived. He’s, I think he must be a paramedic, though, because he seems to be hanging with Chim a lot in this episode.

So they, they’re approaching the Ocean Plaza and Chim makes one of his pop culture references and points out the Sword of Damocles, which in this instance [00:50:00] is a street lamp that is leaning precariously and sparking, which, you know, could be quite dangerous. Bobby just sends John to put some caution tape around it so that nobody stands under it and gets nailed by it.

So, yay for John.

Ellen: So safe. Very safety.

Bex: Um, and then Geary gets sent off with Hen to check the building maintenance, um, because there is apparently a carbon monoxide leak in the building.

Ellen: Oh yeah, so they’ve all got to get their little gas masks on.

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: Hopefully they’re all sealed up properly this time.

Bex: I think their gas marks are fine, it’s just the, the um, the Big Bird suits that aren’t properly sealed.

Alice: Yeah, the hazmats that are terrible.

Bex: Okay. Uh, but I, I do enjoy that everybody on the carbon monoxide poisoning is just absolutely batshit insane. Yes. So, they wander through the building and they come across one guy who sort of jumps out at them. [00:51:00] He says to them, “Need to very much. Nomenclature.” And then throws up.

Mads: “Did he just say nomenclature?” Thanks, Chim. Chim asking the real questions here.

Ellen: They find a bunch of other people who were passed out on the ground.

Bex: Yeah. They find the group of people that Maddie saw in the drone.

Ellen: Yeah. The drone found. And Bobby’s like, “We’ve got to get some fresh air in here.” So he just bashes in the window.

Bex: I’m assuming that whatever whoever built the Ocean Plaza apartment didn’t put like that special reinforced glass because you know in some high rise buildings you literally can’t break the window because it’s a safety hazard Or maybe that’s you can’t open the windows, but you can smash them.

Alice: I’m starting to think that Bobby, like, moonlights as an insurance dealer, though.

Bex: He has a hard on for building safety.

Ellen: He’s very free with smashing things.

Bex: Uh, so [00:52:00] they get everybody out of the building and down into the street. We meet the young woman whose mother called 9-1-1, um, looking for her. And, uh, this is Joe Nana.

She’s so high on carbon monoxide she can’t even say her own name properly.

Mads: I love the, “Joanna?” “Yeah, that’s it.”

Bex: Yeah, that’s it. She’s stumbling around, not really following Hen’s instructions, and we find out through her that there’s something going on with the water, because the water is spicy. It stings when she steps in a puddle.

But it’s not the same spicy water that Athena was dealing with. This is petroleum infused. water because there is a petrol tanker up the road that has… I spent so long trying to think of the word that applies to trucks because all I could think of was capsized. I’m like, no, that’s for boats. I don’t know what the vehicle [00:53:00] equivalent is.

But the petrol tanker has capsized, and it is leaking petrol across the ground, and it’s getting into the water.

Mads: I mean, it’s in water, so, theoretically, it is capsized.

Bex: But doesn’t capsize simply, doesn’t that apply just to, I don’t know.

Ellen: Upturned?

Alice: It’s fine, it’s capsized. Okay, okay. I like it. Um, like, you definitely probably smell all the gasoline, but it’s fine.

Mads: I think the correct term is overturned.

Bex: Yay! Yes! That’s the word I was looking for. Thank god.

Alice: This is why we have guests on, because we don’t know what we’re doing anymore.

Bex: Uh, so yes, Hen looks from, um, petrol tanker, to spicy water, to sparking lamp, and then hurries over to Bobby and says, “We need to get everybody out of here.”

And Bobby’s like, “yeah, I’m trying.” She’s like, no, no, no, no.

Alice: Yeah, I’m working on it. Jesus Christ.

Bex: “We have to get everybody out of here because we are standing on top of a bomb.” Dun, dun, dun.

Alice: And then we have [00:54:00] a commercial. Dun, dun, dun.

Bex: And then we get an Athena scene, which I don’t care about because it’s stupid as fuck.

Ellen: I thought these guys, okay, so these guys are looters

Bex: Oh, they are hilarious. I love them. They’re great.

Ellen: They have big ghost facer energy. Yes.

Bex: Yeah.

Mads: Literally.

Bex: Yes. Yes. Tito and Ray, I think you are hilarious. I loved you. I just thought that this particular plotline was so ridiculous and it got more ridiculous the more I thought about it.

Ellen: But there was just no point to it, really. The only point to it was that they show those cute cats. That was it.

Bex: Oh, like, hats are adorable. Yeah, so Athena is, um, all excited because she thinks she gets to bust a couple of looters. Um, when, in reality, Ray and Tito are, yes, looting people’s houses for their pets.

Um, yeah.

Ellen: They’re “rescuing”.

Bex: Well, they’re part of the West LA Pet Rescue, and [00:55:00] they, their intention is to reunite pets and owners who have been separated by natural disasters. But the thing is, they’re breaking into people’s houses, so the pets are secure. The owners can come home and find their pets.

Alice: No, no, it’s, it’s not breaking in because, like, they left their windows and back doors unlocked.

Bex: But the thing is, the pet is inside the house. Like, if the, if they were down sort of on the pier and they were picking up animals that were on the street, if they were searching through the houses that had flooded and taking those animals, 100 percent I could get behind you, but these guys are stealing people’s animals out of their houses.

Animals that like, the street does not look that bad, I know down the other end where Cooper is looks pretty bad, but where they are, it does not look like it has been that affected by the flood. So these animals are fine.

Mads: Yeah, like their owners will probably get back to them in like a day.

Bex: Or later that night and go like, where the fuck is my dog?

Mads: Yeah.

Bex: And did they leave [00:56:00] notes? Yes!

Ellen: Yeah, did they? Assuming they have to pay the people to return the animal. They’re kidnapping them.

Bex: They’re kidnapping them for ransom.

Alice: Stolen by the raiders of the lost barks, yeah.

Mads: The raiders of the lost barks. Cracks me up every time.

Ellen: Yes, that was funny. Especially when the guy’s like, “No, don’t, we are not, that is not what we are called.”

Alice: Ray, we talked about this.

Bex: Like, come on, it’s a good name. Yeah, I’m not walking around with that on a shirt.

Mads: I think they should.

Ellen: That was the ghost facers part. I was like, yes.

Bex: Yes, the Ray and Tito were hilarious, that storyline is stupid.

Ellen: It reminded me actually of the, when we had the big floods in Brisbane, in, say, 2011? Fun! It was a long time ago now. Um, but there we had this mud army thing, which was like a bunch of volunteers and they did great work in actually cleaning out a lot of the mud that was all over some of the suburbs.

But they also went into [00:57:00] people’s houses and took a load of stuff out of there and dumped it on the street to be taken away as rubbish, which is a very excellent and worthwhile thing to do. But they didn’t ask people.

Bex: Oh.

Ellen: What they wanted removed. And there was loads of people who were just taking stuff out of the houses that didn’t need to be removed, that wasn’t wet, that wasn’t like damaged.

Mads: Yeah.

Ellen: So it’s like that thing where if you are going to help somebody, make sure they actually want help.

Alice: Yes.

Ellen: Or require it, before you just go ahead and Yeah. Yeah.

Alice: Um, I’m just gonna tangent for a moment because More tangents, yay! We haven’t for a while. Um, we haven’t for a while and Ellen just needs things to cut out because she gets bored otherwise.

Um, I just opened up Twitter and the discourse of the hour, um, on 9-1-1 Twitter, is that someone did a poll whether Buck was an introvert or an extrovert. And people are like, [00:58:00] Buck’s not an introvert, he’s just a loser. I’m just laughing so hard, because poor Buck! They’re like, “this is the man who like, starts crying if he hasn’t had human interaction for ten minutes. He just doesn’t have any friends.”

That’s so mean!

Bex: I really don’t like the introvert extrovert label because it kind of doesn’t count if you’re neuro spicy.

Mads: Yeah,

Bex: because he acts like an extrovert, but that’s the ADHD and the RSD kicking in.

Mads: Yep. Exactly. A hundred percent.

Alice: That’s it.

Mads: I’m like, I hard core relate to Buck, uh, and dear.

Alice: Oh yeah, Buck. I am Buck.

Mads: Yeah. Like the ADHD

Bex: he presents as an extrovert, but that’s his mask.

Mads: Yep, he is. Yep. He goes home at the end of the day and he is like, oh my God, I’m so tired.

Alice: Yes. I just wanna curl up under my doona which Eddie will then rip off me for no reason.

Ellen: And force me to babysit his child.

Bex: Yes!

Ellen: Thanks a lot, Eddie.

Alice: Like, man, [00:59:00] I’m just trying to decompress for the day, why do I have a child in my house? My baby Buck.

Ellen: You’re going to make me cut all that out? It’s good stuff, come on.

Alice: There are so many tweets that are just like, he’s not an introvert, he’s just a loser. No. Just like, oh my god, same.

Um.

Bex: Alright, back to the episode. Anyway. So the only, literally the only point of that scene with Ray and Tito was getting Athena into this suburb so that she could hear Cooper calling for help.

Alice: Yeah. And to see some cute cats.

Bex: And some, because as she’s walking back to her car, she hears, um, this clanging noise, um, like something hitting metal repeatedly.

So she grabs her torch and goes to investigate. So then we’re going to cut back to the VA hospital where, um, the, the siblings are squabbling.

Ellen: Yeah. So this is the, this is the decommissioned hospital that Maddie sorted out last episode, [01:00:00] right?

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: So it’s not a real hospital. I mean, it is a real hospital, but

Alice: it’s a gutted hospital.

Ellen: Yes. It’s, it’s like it’s temporary kind of set up.

Bex: Yes. It was a hospital, it just wasn’t operating as once. So now they’ve like recommissioned it and set up tents and turned it into a field hospital. Um, so Eddie has dragged Lena’s ass down to Sawtell. She finds out that they have a list and just snatches the clipboard out of the nurse’s hand so she can start rifling through the pages looking for her captain.

And Eddie snatches it back out of her hand to give it back to the nurse while scolding her. And I’m looking at this, and this is like the one scene I’ve gone, there is no way that they can have these two romantically involved because that is sibling energy right there. But, uh, the point is that he got Lena down there, but Cooper is not on, her captain is not on any of the lists.

So he takes, he takes Lena inside, and she has got the best pouty face. [01:01:00] She looks like she’s about to start crying when she finds out that they’re down there and Cooper’s not there.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: He takes her inside, puts her down, Like he takes it to reception.

I don’t know why he takes it to reception. There’s no receptionist there. Um, And they’re hanging out at the desk and Eddie’s attention is drawn to this boy who is sitting on one of the cot beds while his mother is getting patched up and he’s just, he’s coughing.

Alice: He’s like, gee, I’m glad that Christopher’s so far away from this.

Bex: Well, yeah, Lena, Lena sort of notices what’s caught his attention and she’s like, does he remind you of your son? And Eddie’s sort of distractedly watching him and he can see that. His brain is like, I know something. I know something about this. I don’t know what it is. I know about this, but I know something about this.

And he keeps watching.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: Like my

Alice: spider senses a tingle. Yeah.

Bex: Um, Lena’s trying to make small talk about Chris and about Shannon, um, the kid keeps coughing and then the penny drops.

Alice: Eddie’s like, who’s Shannon? [01:02:00] Oh, fuck, yeah, Shannon. Yeah, okay, yeah.

Bex: He’s not even paying attention to Lena at this point and then races across and grabs the kid.

Um, and I forgot this scene. I forgot this scene and I was watching it and writing the notes and then just started like gagging because Eddie says that the kid is drowning. And Um, there is something lodged in his throat, there’s trapped water in his lungs, and like he gets the kid on the ground and, and digs his fingers, nope

Ellen: Yeah, he pulls out a leaf, and a load of water comes out of there.

Alice: Yeah, the leaf’s a weird thing, but um, yeah, like dry drowning is actually a thing, and it’s really deadly, because it can happen like ages after the first event. It can also cause Aspiration pneumonia, which is also super deadly. Um, but yeah, I was just impressed that they actually finally treated a [01:03:00] drowning victim properly, because usually they just, like, start doing CPR and do it wrong.

The way to treat people who have water in their lungs is to immediately put them in recovery position and try and get the water out before doing anything else, which they actually do in this episode, so I was very impressed.

Bex: I wonder if they got a new medical consult for season three.

Alice: Yeah. Heh. Heh. Just for the first two, like, three episodes of Season 3.

Bex: Well, maybe, like, we’ve only seen the first three episodes of Season 3. Maybe as we continue on, the response that the 118 have to medical calls is going to get better compared to what it has been.

Ellen: Who knows, maybe.

Mads: Maybe.

Bex: But so far, they’re doing well.

Mads: I was going to say, the medical accuracies in this episode are a little bit better than other episodes.

Bex: Yep.

Alice: Yeah. Very impressed.

Bex: Um, the medics are also very impressed with Eddie, um, and basically beg him to stick around and help them because they are very short on hands in the hospital. So Eddie volunteers his time and sort of looks at Lena and says, it [01:04:00] looks like you’re not going to get rid of him any time soon, and she doesn’t seem at all unhappy about that.

Mads: I think this was one of the scenes where we, they’re really trying to

Bex: They, yep, they were trying

Mads: set them up.

Bex: It just did not work.

Mads: No, because like the writing is very flirtatious.

Alice: Yeah, I think my original notes after Eddie’s like “Looks like you’re not getting rid of me anytime soon,” pretty sure I was like, Eddie, stop flirting, your son’s missing.

Ellen: He doesn’t know that.

Alice: But then like, on secondary watch, I’m just like, yeah, nah, like, no.

Bex: No, that’s, that’s the big brother going, heh, you’re not getting rid of me.

Mads: Yeah, genuinely.

Bex: But Lena is just so lost because she doesn’t have a beloved captain that she’s just gonna cling to anybody that’s gonna, like, look after her and take care of, and she’s like, excellent. Just, you are my person for right now. I do not want you anywhere else.

Speaking of her, her captain. Athena found him.

Ellen: I didn’t recognize him at all until, because I, we saw him at the beginning of the previous episode, right? Because he was

Bex: Yes, they, [01:05:00] they did one of those lingering shots on him. I mean, to be fair, it’s dark, he’s half under a car.

Alice: He’s missing an arm, almost.

Ellen: Until he introduced himself, I didn’t realize who he was.

Mads: But I think there’s also been like so much has happened between those shots.

Ellen: Oh, yeah, it was a long time ago, yeah.

Mads: But it’s understandable that you kind of go, uh, are we meant to know this guy?

Ellen: Yeah. So, Athena tries to radio for help and the dispatch says that it’s gonna be like 30, 35 minutes because they’re a bit stretched.

Bex: They’re busy. Understandable.

Ellen: And so, he knows, Cooper knows that that’s not gonna be enough time. It’s gonna be too long. So, he’s like, you’re just gonna have to cut it off. And Athena’s like, oh, what the fuck are you talking about? I am not cutting off your arm. He’s like, yes, you are. Go find some things.

Bex: But first we have to go back to the Ocean Plaza.

Ugh. Where the [01:06:00] Sword of Damocles finally falls. The streetlamp tips over, hits the ground, the glass shatters, the sparks land in the water and, or land on the ground and ignite the petrol. Which then starts slowly snaking its way through the debris across the ground towards the apartment building.

Mads: Just in the most slowest fashion.

Bex: It looks really effective when they do the overhead shots. This little, like, trail of fire just weaving its way.

Ellen: It was cool, yeah.

Bex: I don’t know how realistic that is.

Mads: It would have lit up a lot faster, I think.

Bex: I think so, especially with all of the debris on the ground that would also have been petrol soaked and just would have lit up.

Um, but we’ll go with this. It looks cool and it gives them more time to get everybody out of there.

Mads: It’s kind of like one of those, like, um, you know, in like old timey movies where they have like the long line of gunpowder to the [01:07:00] main event. Yes!

Bex: Yeah. Yeah. Um, so. Chimney and John have been sent on a bus hunt to try and get the people out of there because they can’t wait for, um, rescue ambulances.

And they, they come through, um, Chimney pulls up, Chimney and John pull up in postal vans and Chim jumps out and very proud, Chim jumps out very proudly, says, “Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor tsunami stays these couriers from their appointed rounds.” And you can so tell he’s been practicing that.

Alice: Yeah,

Bex: like he had that, like, on the go the whole drive over.

And Hen is completely unimpressed.

Ellen: Even beforehand, um, Bobby made me laugh with, he, he got on the radio and he’s like, Chimney, we need transpo right now. And I’m like, what are you saying, transpo? If you’re gonna say transpo, you may as well just say transport, like, come on.

Bex: It’s the same number of syllables, [01:08:00] dude.

Anyway. But then Chimney comes back with “Copy, Skip.” Like, why are you calling your captain Skip all of a sudden?

Ellen: Skip, yeah.

Alice: Because they’re in the water, and it’s the Skipper. The captain is the skipper.

Ellen: It makes sense.

Alice: The captain of a boat is skipper, and so he’s being boaty. I liked it.

Bex: Okay.

Ellen: Does he call him skip any other time?

Bex: Nope.

Mads: Nope.

Alice: No, it’s just because he’s there in the water. That’s cute. Leave him. Leave Chimney alone.

Mads: He’s done nothing wrong. He doesn’t deserve this.

Bex: I will leave him alone. So he and John have come through, they’ve got the postal vans, they, um, they start loading everybody into the vans. Geary and Forrest have joined the 118 for this evening, um, and they are helping to load everybody up.

We also have, um, Cabell from the back of his turnout and. Either, um, Geary or Forrest or Cabell is Background Firefighter from Twitter. [01:09:00] Because we get a shot of him.

Alice: Bex very frantically messaged us today as she was finishing the notes, and she’s like, I found Background Firefighter.

Bex: So for those of you who don’t know, um, I think Alice, if you want to explain, because you’re the one that, you’re the one that showed it to me.

Alice: Um, so Background Firefighter is, like, as, if, if you’ve listened to this podcast, um, you know that Bex is obsessed with like finding the rest of the 118. Um, like we’re making a list of

Bex: There is literally a list of everybody who is stationed at Firehouse 118.

Alice: Yeah, um, and then there was a Twitter account made like just this month, like it’s very recent and the Twitter account is literally just “background firefighter” (bkgdfirefighter) and it’s just like blurry photos zoomed in of this guy in the background who has like a mustache and a generic, like, firefighter haircut. [01:10:00] Um, they’ve only got 22 followers, so they’re very new. But I said, I found it and sent it to Bex and, like, we will link the background firefighter account.

Bex: But then I was so excited because he shows up at the Ocean Plaza apartments and he’s helping people.

Alice: So, like, he’s been there since at least season three. Like, that’s amazing.

Ellen: That’s great spotting! Well done.

Bex: So yes, all of our brand new members of the 118 are helping the dream team load all of the, um, people from the plaza into the makeshift postal van ambulances. So while they’re doing that, we cut back to Athena, who is now looting houses.

Alice: Yeah. Athena is supposed to be arresting them, but instead just

Bex: she’s looting,

Alice: starts looting them.

Ellen: She’s got heaps of stuff with her. She’s got like a bottle of vodka or something and she’s wrapped up this kitchen towel that’s got a bunch of knives and like random stuff.

Bex: [01:11:00] Gardening shears as well?

Ellen: I don’t know, it just

Bex: And Cooper sort of like cranes his neck to look at what she’s got and then gives her like, “woman are you crazy” look?

And she just goes, “You didn’t tell me what you wanted.” She said, “It’s bad enough that I was looting houses. I wasn’t about to loot a house and then come back and find out what was the wrong thing.” So she just kind of took one of everything.

Ellen: And so he tells her to use the shears because the bone’s already broken. And so she just does. Oh, yep. Yes. And not before she, not before they have a bit of a moment like where she’s like, that’s my husband’s domain or whatever, and they have like a, Oh, I know who you Bobby is. Um, and he introduces himself as Ronnie Cooper, yeah.

Bex: Yes, this is when we officially find out that this is Cooper.

Ellen: I don’t even know where this is, like, it, it feels like just a suburbia, like.

Bex: It does. Which is why I was saying

Ellen: It can’t be that close to the beach.

Bex: I was saying that it’s, it’s insane that, [01:12:00] um, Buck and Chris ended up so close to each other while Lena ended up on the ferris wheel and Ronnie ended up here.

Mads: It genuinely makes no sense.

Alice: Well Lena didn’t end up, like she wasn’t thrown onto the ferris wheel, cause she said she swam there.

Bex: No, but she was at least

Alice: But she was pretty close, like she was close to the pier.

Bex: She was on the pier, and she sort of stayed within the pier area. Whereas you assume that Cooper was also on the pier, and yet he’s ended up three suburbs over.

So I don’t understand.

Alice: Maybe he was like moving around and then the, like, the surge going back out.

Bex: I don’t know, I’m not going to think about it too hard, because otherwise I’m going to drive myself insane, because it does not make sense.

Alice: He teleported.

Bex: Yes, it was the magic tsunami that should not have happened.

Alice: It was the magic teleport.

Bex: And it teleported him out here and trapped him under a car, and now he is

Alice: Big wave, Bex, big wave.

Bex: So now he is slugging down the vodka as fast as he can. He is biting down on Athena’s leather bound notebook. While she uses garden shears to cut his arm off.

Mads: Doesn’t alcohol make your blood thinner as well? Like, [01:13:00] isn’t it like the worst idea?

Bex: Yes.

Mads: Okay, I thought that I was like a little bit crazy when I was watching that. I was like, is that not like the worst idea?

Ellen: It’s just a thing that you do on TV when you are doing surgery

Bex: Yeah, I mean, I guess in this situation, he’s already put a tourniquet on his arm. So he’s already like cut off the blood, cut off the circulation.

To that area anyway, so blood loss is going to be not minimal, but it’s going to be lessened And it’s it’s going to hopefully knock him out and numb the pain a little bit.

Alice: Not gonna lie, I didn’t watch the scene.

Bex: No, because, because foley went nuts with the squelching and the cutting noises.

Alice: Oh, it’s so bad.

Like, it was on, but I was like, oh no.

Ellen: The closed captions say something like, “Flesh squelching” or something, and I’m just like, what?

Mads: I was watching it and my mum was sitting in the room and she was just like, “oh god.”

Alice: I love that we’re just subjecting our poor mothers to this show.

Mads: She wasn’t even actually like, watching it with me, she was like, doing [01:14:00] something else.

She just happened to look up at that scene. She heard the noises and she was like, oh my god, what’s happening? Yeah.

Alice: So Mum and I both watch, um, both watch TV with subtitles. Dad can’t stand it. Like he’s one of the people that it distracts him.

Mads: So is my dad.

Alice: Um, and yeah. And so he had it on and like, he just kept reading out the weird sound effects that they were captioning.

But yeah, anyway, Cooper starts screaming. It’s awful.

Ellen: Yeah. He’s not enjoying it.

Alice: I can’t imagine why. Anyway.

Ellen: Back to the Ocean Plaza, the flames are coming, they need to get out of there, they jump in the trucks, they leave, that’s it. Oh, and not before they almost run into a horde of zombies.

Yep. Yeah. Which is like, a bunch of survivors who are walking towards them, and it’s like, don’t come this way.

Bex: But they’re shuffling so slowly, and they’re all clumped together in a group.

Alice: They’re shuffling so slowly, yeah. It literally looks like a horde of zombies.

Ellen: Yeah, I said the same thing, and I was just like, what are these [01:15:00] zombies doing?

Alice: And then Chim, like I love Chim so much.,

Bex: his jaws line?

Alice: Um, he just goes, we are gonna need a bigger mail truck. , like, they’re not, they’re not even in water anymore and he just keeps pulling out, like calling Bobby Skipper or skip pulling out the Jaws lines like the water’s gone, Chimney.

It’s, it’s gone.

Mads: The other thing in, in, in the scene is. Bobby says, “Yeah, we got kissed a bit” by the, like, they weren’t close to the, no, like, it didn’t even go near the mail trucks.

Bex: You probably got a little bit hot. That was the extent of it. Yeah. Dramatic Bobby Nash drama bitch 101.

Alice: Oh, so the Horde of Zombies as well, very important to note.

Who’s front and center of the Horde of Zombies?

Bex: The woman with the pantyhose dummy?

Ellen: She’s right in front!

Alice: Yeah. The woman with the pantyhose dummy. With, yeah, red hoodie.

Mads: A good friend.

Alice: Child blob.

Bex: Back in the hospital, Eddie is, uh, patching some guy up.

Alice: This is when it all starts getting real. Yeah.

Bex: He makes, he and Lena [01:16:00] have a little bit of baseball related, um, banter, uh, which sent me down the rabbit hole of the Ryan Guzman wiki, um, to discover that basically Ryan Guzman is Eddie Diaz and Eddie Diaz is Ryan Guzman.

Mads: Yeah.

Bex: Um, because the implication here is that. Eddie was a baseball pitcher, and funnily enough, Ryan was also a baseball pitcher until he blew his shoulder out. Yes. Oh. Yeah. Um, I also discovered that, uh, Ryan’s father is Ramon, which is the same name as Eddie’s father.

Mads: It’s like, the more you look into Eddie and Ryan’s similarities, you’re like, oh, this is just a self insert.

Alice: I’m honestly one, like, I’m waiting for Eddie to be like, oh yeah, this is like that summer that I And they’ll all just be like, you what? It’s the

Bex: only thing that’s missing, right? They’ve had the baseball, they’ve got the family, [01:17:00] they’ve got the ancestry, they’ve got other things that have come up.

Alice: They’ve had the fighting.

Bex: It’s And I’m just waiting for them to bring in the dancing.

Alice: Yeah, just the dancing. I mean Yeah.

Ellen: I’ve seen some, I’ve seen some.

Bex: Oh, you’ve seen some of that?

Ellen: I have seen some of them.

Mads: Alice is just like, forget about it, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything.

Bex: We won’t go into it, we’ll go into it later on.

But yeah, we get more of the sibling energy between Eddie and Lena because Lena’s all patched up and she’s ready to go back out and keep looking for her captain. Um. And Eddie is like, trying to stop her and telling her, you’re like, man, you’re stubborn. And Lena’s like, well, you can try and stop me if you want to know exactly what two broken ribs feels like.

She’s like this little feral cat, just, just spitting and hissing, but still desperate for love. Um, but yeah, now, sort of, shit’s about to get real because over [01:18:00] Lena’s shoulder, he notices Athena. Races over and is horrified because she is covered in blood. Um, but as she says, it’s not my blood, it’s his. And Lena, who has followed Eddie out because she can’t let him out of his sights, sees the man on the gurney that they’re wheeling into the hospital and discovers that it’s her captain.

So she at least finds what she’s been searching for.

Ellen: Yeah, and she stays with him.

Alice: Well, most of what she’s been searching for.

Bex: The episode is called The Searchers. Everybody’s searching for something.

Alice: I just meant because he’s missing an arm.

Ellen: Um, she does, as she leaves with Cooper, she turns around and gives, you know, she says thank you to Eddie.

Bex: Yeah, I think that’s supposed to be like the long lingering oh, I’m going with my captain but I wish I could stay with you, but she doesn’t pull it off. It’s just like sad puppy eyes. She’s like, bye.

Alice: Thanks bro. You’re [01:19:00] welcome bro. Thank you so much.

Bex: But yeah, everyone is now converging on the field hospital. So we’ve got Eddie has been there, Athena has arrived, Buck now arrives at the field hospital.

Ellen: Buck looks like one of the zombies that was shuffling just before. Yeah.

Mads: He’s not doing good. So exhausted.

Yeah, he’s not doing good at all. I don’t honestly know how he’s still standing at this point, like, other than the adrenaline, obviously.

Bex: Oh, it’s pure adrenaline.

Mads: Yeah. Yeah. He looks dead on his legs.

Bex: He flags down another nurse with a clipboard. Not the same nurse that Lena assaulted earlier.

Alice: She went home on stress leave.

Mads: She was like, I can’t take this anymore.

Bex: And he’s looking for Chris. She’s checking her list, and again, how do they all have the same list? It’s like, there’s somebody that’s just frantically printing out every five minutes. It’s like that scene in, um, Devil Wears Prada, where Emily And, um, Anne [01:20:00] Hathaway’s character are like fighting for who’s got the most updated phone list for Miranda, depending on who’s called.

Like, they both hang up the phone and print out the list and like slap it on top. Like, I imagine that somewhere in the hospital, there’s someone doing that with the lists for all the nurses.

Alice: Hang on, hang on. Just sidebar, sidebar very quickly, Ellen. Please tell me you’ve watched Devil Wears Prada.

Ellen: Yes, yes, I’ve watched that.

Alice: Okay, okay, good.

Ellen: I’m not a complete dinosaur, it’s okay.

Bex: Okay. So, yeah, so the nurse checks her list. Um, she doesn’t have a Christopher Diaz on that list, but she very heartlessly tells Buck that he might want to go check the black tent.

Alice: Yeah, go check the morgue. Which is the morgue. Um, can we also mention, like, Buck says, cause the nurse asks how old, and Buck’s like “8, maybe 9,” so like earlier he was like, “yeah, yeah, 8 year old.”

Has he had a birthday since then?

Bex: Oh no!

Alice: Like, [01:21:00] Buck’s like, I don’t, like, I’m pretty sure his birthday was tomorrow, I don’t know if it’s midnight.

Bex: Oh, that’s an awful thought. Chris gets back to school, “so what did you do for your birthday, Chris?” “I got swept up in a tsunami and then I got lost by my caretaker.” Yeah.

Alice: I hung out with my Buck that day.

Bex: Until he lost me and then I got holed around like a pantyhose dummy for the rest of the night.

Alice: Also, like, my dad and his situationship made eyes at each other. It was really awkward. It just keeps happening, you guys.

Mads: I just can’t escape it.

Alice: It’s always in the kitchen.

Ellen: Oh, Chris is also a number one shipper, I’m sure. He’s in love with Buck first.

Bex: Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Ellen: No, no, no, not in that way, in like a

Bex: Because I know that those fics exist. I have unfortunately seen those fics.

Alice: No.

Mads: I’m [01:22:00] sorry?

Bex: Yes. Yes.

Alice: No.

Ellen: No, I don’t want to know about those.

Bex: Okay.

Ellen: No, I totally mean in a…

Bex: yes. No, I understand what

Ellen: This is definitely my second father way.

Bex: I understand what you mean. Other people, not so much.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Um, so yep, the zombie Buck slowly starts to stumble towards the morgue and we cut to Back to 9-1-1 Dispatch, um, where we find out that Charlie’s friend Reggie has been found, um, he drowned.

Mads: Yeah, unfortunately deceased.

Bex: And that’s all we get of that, because then Maddie’s phone rings.

And Buck has stolen someone’s phone to call Maddie, and props for him to have had memorized Maddie’s phone number. Because I don’t know that many people’s phone numbers, that if I didn’t have my phone that I could call them

Mads: I could literally only call my mum. That’s it. Oh, and my brother, maybe. [01:23:00]

Alice: Yeah, I know my mum’s number, I don’t know my dad’s even though he’s had it for my entire life.

Mads: Yep, same. I know some of the numbers.

Bex: I mean, worst case scenario, I guess Buck could have called 9-1-1 and just begged someone to put him through to his sister.

Mads: I mean, we’ve seen that happen before in Athena style, so.

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: But yeah, he, he needs Maddie’s help because he’s, he’s finally come to the conclusion that he’s just, He can’t find Christopher.

He has tried everything that he can do, um, and now he needs help. So he reaches out to his big sister, and Maddie has the horrific realization that Buck was not safe somewhere in the city. He was there on the pier when the tsunami hit, and she’s like, Buck is trying to get her to help him, and she’s just like “I need you to reassure me that you are okay. Are you hurt? Are you bleeding? I don’t give a fuck about Christopher right now. Tell me about you.”

Mads: So you’re my child, so

Ellen: But Buck [01:24:00] doesn’t, Buck’s like, “it doesn’t matter.”

Bex: Yeah, it’s the perfect, it’s the absolute quintessential Buck response. “Are you hurt?” “It doesn’t matter.” Because Christopher is gone.

Mads: One day, Buck, I hope you realize that it does matter.

Bex: And then he, he’s sort of sort of spinning on the spot while he’s talking to Maddie because he can’t stand still and as he turns he looks at the front doors of the VA hospital and Eddie is standing on the front steps and Buck bolts and hides because he cannot, he cannot see Eddie.

Ellen: Yeah, Maddie tells him Like, he says to Maddie, like, “Oh, Eddie’s here,” and Maddie’s just like, “You have to tell him.”

This is where she says, “Evan, you have to tell him.”

Bex: Does he know what, does he know, “Does Eddie know what has happened?” And Buck’s silence is just so loud. And so she Evans him. Like, “Evan, you have to tell him.”

Mads: I think there was a really good use of [01:25:00] his name, though, too. Like,

Alice: Yeah,

Mads: it really made him kind of like listen.

Bex: Yes, if you if you want him to pay attention, you use Evan because that’s that’s how he knows that you’re serious.

Mads: 100%.

Ellen: Evan Emmanuel Buckley. Go and tell him!

Bex: That’s a good middle name.

Alice: Yeah, I like the new middle name.

Ellen: I was thinking about that emu. Have you seen that video? Anyway, don’t worry. I’ll send it to you.

Bex: No, no, no, no, no. Is that the one that keeps trying to get on TikTok?

Ellen: Yeah, that keeps trying to steal the phone.

Bex: Trying to steal the phone? Yeah, yeah, I do. I do know of that.

Ellen: “Emmanuel! Don’t you dare.” Okay.

Bex: Yeah, I gotcha.

Ellen: Good, good. I’m not making things up. Um, so, Maddie tells him to go and tell Eddie. And, and, and, um,

Alice: Yeah, and this is where we get the heartbreaking, “how do you tell your best friend that you lost his son?”

Mads: [01:26:00] Oh Yeah, how do you tell like that’s such a hard situation to be in

Alice: and I like I do have to just sidebar like Oliver acting his little heart out.

He he’s just Like, is just devastated. He’s doing such a good job, but I’m here just like,

Bex: He’s so pretty?

Alice: He’s hot covered in blood. (laughter)

Mads: I’m just like, damn, stop being so distracting.

Bex: He’s, he’s dirty,

Alice: He’s just covered in blood at this point and I’m just like, mmmm.

Bex: His hair is all messy because obviously the product is not tsunami proof.

Um, and yeah, he’s, Like, it’s got that little bit of curl in it because it’s not being like, And yes, yes, he has never looked hotter.

Mads: There’s something about Buck being put through the wringer that just (laughter)

Ellen: Poor Buck.

Bex: But back on a serious note, um, Buck is adamant

Alice: Yeah, what happens in this scene?

Bex: Sorry, I just Buck is [01:27:00] adamant that he cannot tell Eddie that he lost Chris, and Maddie is like, um, “You are in no condition to be looking for Christopher. I am coming down there.” Um, and hangs up the phone and Buck is like frantically talking into this, into the dead air going, “No, no, no, no, Maddie, Maddie, Maddie,” but she’s already gone.

But then we get the rest of the 118 arrive at the VA hospital because the, um, the postal vans pull up and Bobby calls for help. So Eddie starts coming down to grab the people that they’re unloading for the postal vans and sees Buck.

Ellen: This is where I was like, oh, here we go.

Bex: He’s like, wait, Buck, what are you doing here? Takes in his appearance. “Holy shit, are you okay?” Takes in the fact that he’s alone, like, “wait, where is Christopher?” and then notices the glasses hanging around his neck.

Ellen: Yeah, Buck’s trying to explain what happened, but he can’t, he can barely get it out, and he’s like, about to burst into tears. It’s so,

Bex: he’s trying to like, I’m Be like, “I tried, I swear to you, okay? I tried.” [01:28:00]

Ellen: Yeah, we were at the beach.

Bex: And like, like Eddie just lost his wife.

Mads: Yeah, like this is like, what, a month later or something, you said?

Ellen: It’s five.

Alice: It’s in the first episode. Five months?

Bex: Is it like three months?

Ellen: I think it was five, yeah.

Alice: Five months, that’s right, yeah.

Ellen: Yeah, and he, Eddie just doesn’t react to start with, he just stands there and is staring at Buck going, what, what are you talking about?

Alice: Like, it’s like he’s trying to process, like, I don’t believe you.

Bex: It’s too, it’s too much.

Ellen: like, You can almost see the wheels turning and it’s like, um.

Bex: Yeah, like, does not compute.

Mads: Well, he spent the whole day thinking he’s okay.

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: And then you just see, like, his eyes widening and he’s just, like, you just see the panic, but he, Eddie doesn’t panic.

Bex: No. He doesn’t panic. Of course he doesn’t panic.

Ellen: No. But then, before any of the, anything can come of this, um, Eddie actually looks over, notices something over Buck’s shoulder, and the woman carrying the pantyhose dummy is actually carrying Gavin this time. [01:29:00]

Bex: Okay, but, you, you’re telling me that Chris, like, I, let’s say that Chris was asleep when they ran into Athena.

You’re saying he slept through the entire postal van ride and did not notice that he was in the truck with Bobby? Or anyone else from the 118. And that nobody saw her get into the truck holding Chris?

Alice: Clearly he was in the truck with John, okay? He doesn’t know John. John’s not allowed at this table.

Bex: No, no, no, but John would have at least had like a firefighter shit on, um, so surely Buck surely Chris would have yeah, it I just don’t understand, but, um, yeah, so it is interesting that the size difference between the pantyhose dummy that was supposed to be Chris, and then the actual size of Christopher.

Yeah. Yeah. And she’s struggling to hold him up because she’s like, she’s a small woman and he’s like eight years old, but he’s a long, lanky eight year old.

[01:30:00] And Eddie recognizes him immediately, even though he’s got the red hoodie on, which he wasn’t wearing when Eddie dropped him off. And he just bolts across the car park to his son.

Ellen: And Buck’s kind of just staring

Bex: like, wait, he’s, he’s here, he’s okay?

Alice: And then, you know, Eddie’s like, thank you. Thank you. And the. The woman’s like, “oh, you’re Buck.” And Eddie’s like, “no, I’m his father, Eddie.” And, “oh, he was looking for Buck.” It’s so sad.

Bex: And it’s just, like, So as much as Eddie, as much as Buck has been looking for Chris, Chris has been looking for Buck this whole time too.

Alice: Like, and so Eddie looks over at Buck, and like Buck’s, like, about to pass out at this stage. Like, he, Like, is not doing great. And Bobby’s just looking between.

Bex: Yeah, because as, as this stare off is happening, um, Chim and John and Hen [01:31:00] arrive and Chim notices Buck, and like, sends John with the, with their, um, their patient into the hospital and sort of stops at Buck.

And again, it’s the, um, “wait, Buck, you’re here? Wait, Buck, you look terrible. What happened to you?” And Buck is just not answering. And so Bobby steps up, and like, “hey kid, are you okay?” And Buck is still not looking at Bobby and not responding, so Bobby’s sort of looking backwards and forwards at what Buck is looking at, and turns to see that it’s Eddie staring back at Buck, and, you know, he looks at him and she looks at me and he looks at him and she looks at me.

Mads: I was going to say, cue that song.

Bex: And then turns back to Buck and says, “Are you two okay?” Like, not, are you okay? Not, is everything okay? But, are you two okay? And, uh, Bobby Nash, OG Buddie Shipper.

Alice: Yeah, absolutely.

Mads: Yeah, [01:32:00] he’s definitely got those papers signed already. They’re sitting in the top drawer of the desk.

Bex: Um, and something about Bobby’s voice asking that question snaps back out of it and he just sort of very slowly says, “Yeah, we are great.” And then collapses. It’s like a house of cards.

Alice: Completely collapses.

Bex: It takes all three of them to hold him up.

Alice: And he just looks so relieved. Like he’s got like this little smile on his face but he’s exhausted, like he’s done.

Bex: Because, I mean it’s

Mads: He’s not walking away.

Bex: It has to be like nearly 24 hours since

Mads: Oh for sure.

Bex: This has happened. So he hasn’t slept

Alice: Well it’s, it’s night time and they

Bex: Is it night time or are we up to early morning? Like,

Ellen: yeah, well, the sun’s not up but dark, but it’s, yeah, it must be late at night.

Alice: And they, they didn’t start it at dark, so like it’s, but it’s like, it’s been hours.

Bex: It’s been hours. He has not eaten. He’s gone through a lot of,

Alice: and he’s still bleeding, like so. [01:33:00]

Bex: Yeah. Yeah. So he collapses and he’s just clinging to Hen as he’s staring at Eddie, who is staring back at him,

Alice: and then we get the most interesting music choice in 9-1-1 history.

Bex: I don’t know, I think there’s some more on the nose ones, but this is definitely

Alice: Oh, on the nose, but this is a choice.

Mads: This is a very distinct choice, uh, and I think we don’t talk about it enough, to be honest.

Alice: I think we all forgot about it until recently.

Mads: Yes. Thank you, Oliver.

Alice: Thank you always to Oliver Stark. Um, if, if Bobby is the number one Buddie Shipper, then Oliver Stark is number two.

Mads: Yes. Yes. A hundred percent.

Alice: Anyway, “Photograph” by Ed Sheeran comes on. Yeah. Ed Sheeran, who may as well be the wedding singer.

Mads: Yep. It’s definitely a choice.

Alice: It is a choice.

Bex: I mean, on the surface level, it makes sense [01:34:00] because we, we get to see, we see a, a montage of them cleaning up after the tsunami and there is a memorial that’s been set up on the pier, which is covered with photographs of the people who are missing or who died during the tsunami.

Alice: Yeah, and like the song starts with, you know, loving can hurt and, you know, at the start of it, it’s like, yeah, yeah, I see this. So yeah, like there’s, there’s a whole memorial set up, um, Buck starts doing a voiceover while people, like, are cleaning up the streets.

It’s, It’s the end of this that makes it interesting.

Bex: Yeah, once again, the voiceover doesn’t really match with what’s going on with the episode. It’s just like a, they’ve obviously thrown, um, Oliver into the ADR booth just to have something to tie up the last few minutes of the episode.

Alice: Like there’s a lot of lost at sea talk.

Bex: Yeah, a lot of, like, yeah, water imagery and being swept away and

Alice: The waters rise and sweep us away.

Bex: Searching the shore for everything that we lost. [01:35:00]

Alice: Yeah, you know, Buck’s got no job at the moment, but it’s fine.

Bex: Yes, we’ve got memorials, we’ve got, um, we catch up and we see that Chuck and Adele finally got married in the hospital.

Ellen: Adele’s son has survived.

Bex: Yes, he survived. Um, Chim and Hen are at the wedding, for some reason.

Mads: Just the 118 inserting themselves into their patients lives like always.

Alice: Is it just Hen and Chim?

Bex: Yes, it’s just Chim and Chim.

Mads: Just Hen and Chim.

Alice: So Eddie and, yeah, okay, yep. Eddie and Bobby, you know, contributed to that too, but it’s fine.

Bex: Chim wasn’t even on the boat. Chim was out on the, um,

Alice: Literally, I’m just like, where, Chim was, was Chim even there?

Bex: Yeah, he was dealing with the Padre.

Mads: Yeah.

Bex: Out on the bow.

Ellen: That’s right. Yeah. Outside.

Alice: Yep, cool. Still in the hospital, Cooper’s there, surrounded by his crew.

Bex: His little feral kitten who’s finally [01:36:00] happy that she’s got her captain back.

Alice: Oh, we go to the, the Grant Nash household where like Harry, Athena, and Bobby are hanging out and May is like disassociating in the living room, but then Athena calls her to join and she comes over. She’s now got something to write an essay about for college. We go to, back to the memorial where Charlie’s putting a, like, poster up saying, “miss you, Reggie, with a photo of Reggie she had.

Mads: Yeah.

Alice: I guess.

Mads: What’s her side note with that? Screenshot the drone maybe? With Buck’s, like, voiceover saying, “And for the ones who couldn’t swim,” and then cutting to that is so brutal.

Alice: Yeah, it’s so, it’s so bad.

Mads: It’s like, ouch.

Bex: Yeah. Talk about victim blaming.

Mads: Yeah.

Bex: But funnily enough, Charlie is down at the memorial [01:37:00] with Maddie.

Alice: Yeah. Yeah, like, she thanks Maddie for being there, so like, maybe Charlie, like, called 9-1-1 and was just like, hey, can like, big sister come down and like, hang out at this memorial?

Bex: My mom won’t let me leave the house, can you come take me to the memorial?

Alice: Charlie has a weird habit of hanging out with strange older people, apparently.

Mads: She has no, uh, stranger danger.

Alice: Literally.

Bex: But we finally end up. Buck’s apartment as the, um, as the voiceover sort of wraps up.

Alice: And as the song wraps up, which is the most interesting part of

Bex: Yeah, because, um, Buck’s voiceover stops and we get the last sort of line of the song.

Mads: “Wait for me to come home.”

Bex: And then there’s a knock on the door.

Alice: And it’s Chris and Eddie.

Ellen: Chris gives him a big hug.

Bex: He wanders in and just like flops against Buck to force him to hug him.

Ellen: He leans on Buck.

Bex: He’s got [01:38:00] another pair of crutches so he can’t actually like hug him. So he just does that thing that cats do where they just like lean against your legs.

Ellen: Yeah.

Mads: Christopher the cat.

Bex: Yes. And Buck automatically, to his credit, automatically puts his arms around Chris. Even though he’s like completely shocked to see Eddie and Chris. And Eddie just like bulldozes his way into the apartment and starts rattling off instructions for, um, like Buck and Chris’s babysitting day two.

Alice: Oh my god, it’s amazing.

Bex: He’s got a backpack, he’s like, “There’s a morning snack and a midday snack, there’s coloring books, there’s a bunch of Legos between you and me, he’s never built anything that looks like anything, he just kind of likes sticking them together. TV’s over there, buddy, have at it.”

And Buck’s like, what the fuck is going on?

Mads: Buck is like shell-shocked.

Alice: ” There’s 20 bucks for pizza, if I were you I’d eat a couple extra slices because you look like you’re wasting away to nothing.” And Buck’s just like, “uh, [01:39:00] Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.” And Eddie’s like, “You know, honestly, you being laid up is working out for me. I mean, you’re no abuela and you’re half a Carla, but you’ll do in a pinch.”

Bex: The front door is still open, Buck hasn’t even closed the door yet. He’s still in shock.

Alice: Buck’s, like, “you want me to watch Christopher?” And Eddie’s like, “Yeah, it’s easy. He’s not very fast.”

Mads: This line gets me every time. Like, it’s such an insane choice.

Alice: Like, Eddie, he’s right there. He can hear you.

Bex: He heard the line about the lego too apparently

Alice: I know the lego as well.

Ellen: If the end of this scene wasn’t so cute, I’d be, like, so mad on Buck’s behalf right now, because this is just ridiculous.

Bex: I mean, it’s obvious that, like, Eddie is overdoing the chipper-ness. Um, he’s just

Alice: He’s trying to make Buck laugh, he’s like, deflecting.

Bex: Yeah, he’s like, we’re not going to talk about like the elephant in the room, we’re just going to go straight to, I’m going to [01:40:00] drop my kid and force you to babysit and then I’m going to bounce. And it’s all going to be fine, everything’s fine.

Ellen: It’s funny because this is the first time, it comes across as this is like the first time that they’ve actually spoken about what happened.

Bex: It might be.

Ellen: But it feels like it’s been a while, like, obviously Buck had to get out of hospital again because he probably had to, you know, be checked over quite a lot if he lost a lot of blood or whatever, but maybe they, maybe they did have a chat and now he’s just reminding Buck that a natural disaster happened. It’s not your fault.

Alice: I feel like Eddie’s been trying to call and Buck’s just been hanging up on him the whole week. And so Eddie’s just like, fuck it. Going to pull the covers off again.

Bex: Buck’s been pleading him. Yes. So it’s like, I am just going to, I’m not going to let you talk. I am not going to give you a chance to protest. I am just. We are doing this.

Ellen: Yeah, I feel like it would have been better if they’d actually showed some of that, rather than just him bulldozing his way in.

Bex: This show does not show. This show just tells.

Alice: Yeah. Okay. This [01:41:00] show lets fan fiction have its way, okay?

Mads: Yeah.

Alice: Anyway, Buck goes, ” You want me to watch Christopher after everything that happened?”

And Eddie just goes, “A natural disaster happened.”

Ellen: “It’s not your fault.”

Alice: And Buck’s like, “But I lost him.” And Eddie’s like, “Nope, you saved him. That’s how he remembers it. And now it’s his turn to do the same for you.”

Mads: Which I think is such a cool line. I, like, you know, it’s really Eddie putting Buck at ease, saying like, it’s, you’re not at fault for what happened, I know you’ve been blaming yourself, but you are not to blame and you did everything that you could.

Um, yeah. Yeah. So I think it’s such a cool line, and it just shows that dynamic between Buck and Eddie of like, Eddie being like, I know that you go into these spirals, but we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna do that. You know, nothing ended up, Nothing bad ended up happening. We’re good. It’s fine.

Alice: And Buck still tries to deflect with, “I was supposed to look out for him.”

And Eddie’s like, “What, you think you [01:42:00] failed? Because I failed that kid more times than I care to count, and I’m his father. But I love him enough to never stop trying, and I know you do too.”

Bex: Yeah, and then we get the most insane moment where he, yeah, Eddie puts his hand on Buck’s shoulder, and Buck is, desperately trying to avoid Eddie’s gaze and Eddie just like ducking and weaving and moving to, to catch his eye line and says like this seminal Buddie line which is, “There is nobody in this world I trust with my son more than you.”

And if the intense eye contact didn’t do it for you, um, when Eddie puts his hand on Buck’s shoulder, it’s not on his shoulder, it’s on the curve of his neck and he’s like, his thumb is resting on his collarbone. Yeah, that is not a friendly hand placement.

Mads: No No, it is not.

Alice: It is, this [01:43:00] whole scene is insane.

Mads: It’s like, it gives me just like, uh, How can they not?

Bex: That’s, I’m about to slide my hand up your neck and just cup your face hand placement.

Mads: Yeah, it’s, it’s so, it’s so couple coded, it’s ridiculous. Like, I can’t believe, yeah, okay, yeah.

Bex: And then Eddie immediately just walks over to Chris and gives him a big smooch, he’s like, love ya, have fun, and then tells Buck “Maybe try go to the zoo this time, go somewhere inland.”

And I love that that little joke is what finally snaps Buck out of it, he’s like, we must be okay about it if we can joke about it.

Alice: Yeah, and now that Buck’s snapped out of it, Eddie stops and goes. “Thank you for not giving up.” And then just leaves.

Mads: He’s like, that’s all I need to say. Goodbye. Have fun.

Alice: Have fun. Love you.

Mads: I [01:44:00] wish.

Ellen: And then you can see that Buck’s spirits are being lifted by this. And he does have the voiceover that says, “A few choice words, it can sometimes be the life raft that gets you home.” It’s like, oh, he’s feeling better about it.

Bex: “To be seen, to be found. Isn’t that what we’re all searching for?” It’s still, I still think it’s a bit of a clunky voiceover, but like, it works.

It’s fine, they don’t tend to do well with voiceovers, summing up major story points, but that’s fine. I’ll forgive them for that.

Alice: That’s it. And then the episode ends with Buck sitting down on the coffee table with Chris, and they just share these big grins.

Mads: Yeah. Which is so cute.

Alice: So cute.

Ellen: So yeah, I’m guessing that, um, Buck’s gonna be totally fine next episode and back into

Bex: Oh yeah, because we’ve done…

Alice: Yeah, I’m sure, yeah.

Bex: We’ve done the tsunami. No problem. We’ve done with our trauma. We’re not gonna bother with anything else now.

Mads: Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah, no worries. [01:45:00] Everyone’s fine.

Mads: The city will be clean. People will be healed. Everything will be fine.

Bex: Yeah. Okay, so, Ellen, um, Did we oversell the Tsunami Arc? Because I know that we were all very excited about you getting to watch these particular episodes. Did it live up to the hype?

Ellen: Well, yeah, I think it did. I really enjoyed, like, the, the action and kind of suspense of the whole thing was amazing. Obviously you had the added bonus of the Buddie element. But, um, I mean, some of it.

Bex: Which to be fair is the only reason that we were really excited for you to get there.

Ellen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel you. Um, no, the, that part of it was great, but also the, like, okay, there were some elements of the individual kind of storylines that were a bit, we just have to hand wave a lot of things. But, um, in general, yeah, great storyline. I [01:46:00] enjoyed it.

Bex: Excellent. I think it would have really sucked if we’ve been hyped it up so much and you watch it and you just come back on the podcast and like, “What was that? Why did you guys want me to watch that?”

Alice: What the fuck is this episode?

Bex: I hated all of it.

Ellen: I’m a little bit sad because apparently it’s downhill after this. I’m like, oh, this is the peak?

Alice: This is the best you’ve got?

Ellen: No, no, no. It was, it was extremely well put together. And also. Just the, the cinematography of the whole, like, the water rushing and the, and all of that stuff was just brilliant, like, very, very well made.

Bex: Yeah,

Ellen: so.

Bex: They really took the, um, the earthquake from season two and went, we have to escalate, we have to elevate above the earthquake. We need to do something bigger, we need to do something better, and I think they did it with the, with the tsunami. But unfortunately, it seems like they’ve set a very high standard for all of the future emergencies.

Mads: Oh, for sure.

Alice: Very high standard.

Bex: Like, it’s, it’s [01:47:00] not every season that they can, you know, drag out the Titanic tanks and, and fly everyone down to Mexico.

Mads: Yeah. That’s right.

Ellen: So we were saying about how, um, Buck can’t help himself with saving people. Like he can see someone in danger and he has to go and rescue them. That’s just what he does.

Mads: Yeah, he puts everyone else before himself.

Ellen: Yeah, to the point where he actually loses Chris in the end because he didn’t keep a hold of him because he was trying to help other people.

Mads: Yeah, he, I guess that’s kind of like one of his, uh, many, um, lovable traits, I guess.

Ellen: Yeah, like he, and also the fact that he’s like, just recently before that was in hospital with like a blood, like several blood clots. So him to just go to all his trouble when he’s not well himself. It’s pretty amazing.

Mads: And I think you see that kind of repeated right near the end as well.

Bex: It’s probably one of those things where he doesn’t feel unwell though, is the problem.[01:48:00]

Mads: No. Yeah.

Bex: It’s one of those things where he feels fine, he feels fit, it’s just he doesn’t want to accept that he needs to take things easy because regardless of how he feels his body is not operating at a hundred percent capacity.

Mads: Yep. I mentioned to, um, Alice in our chat that I had one thing that I noticed from, again, like not long after the tsunami hit.

So I saw a, um, tweet yesterday, I think it was, about Buck and how he acts around children. Um, but he also has this thing that he does throughout the whole series. And it’s like, when he picks up a child, he, like, will make a noise and say, like, “I got you, I got you.” And that’s a thing that he does, he does that throughout the entire series, um, but I, while watching the tsunami episode, realizes that he says it as soon as he gets his hands on Chris in the water.

He says, “I’ve got you, I got you.” And like, realizing [01:49:00] that was just, it kind of made me go, Oh my God, Buck. Yeah. Cause it’s just this thing that he does just every time he has you know, like, it’s this happy kind of noise that he makes, or like, you know, the words that he says is like a comforting thing. And he says it to Chris when he finds him.

Ellen: I’m gonna have to go back and watch now. Oh, that’s so cute.

Mads: Like, I saw it and I just was like, oh, oh my god.

Ellen: Aw, he’s such a caring boy.

Bex: Yeah. See, now that makes me wonder whether that was something that was scripted, or whether that was just Oliver. And whether that’s a decision that Oliver has made that this is how he’s going to act.

Um, cause I do love the fact that he is like an evil British princess off camera, and then he’s just this ball of sunshine golden retriever energy on camera. Especially the kids. Yeah, he’s like

Mads: Yeah.

Alice: Yeah, right? Like, um, and the way [01:50:00] that Like, he gets Buck to run, especially when he’s frantic.

Mads: Gazelle run.

Alice: Like, every time Buck runs. Yeah, like, it’s so not Oliver.

Mads: He has, like, no control over his limbs. It’s incredible.

Alice: Yeah, that’s it. Like, he, he just, he runs with all four limbs, and it’s like, what are you, how are you, what?

Mads: How do you do this?

Bex: Yes, the, uh, the Oliver Stark acting choices are fascinating.

Ellen: We didn’t ever come up with a name for that, did we?

Bex: Well, it doesn’t, I mean, it doesn’t quite, yeah, it doesn’t really roll off the tongue the way the, the Jackles Jacting Joices.

Ellen: Oliver’s…Oices. Yeah. I don’t know.

Bex: Should we then just jump to the end of episode three? Because this is one of the seminal Buddie episodes. When you’re talking about, when you’re talking about, like, where on screen, what is your proof for Buddie, you point to, “There is no one in this world I trust more with my son than you.”[01:51:00]

Alice: They play an Ed Sheeran song.

Mads: Yeah. Oh my god. Like, what choices? Like, what? The way that the song ends, like, wait for me to come home, and it ends in the knock knock knock. Insane editing choices.

Bex: And Chris walks in. Yeah, I made a note about that. I’m like, because. I’m doing the transcripts and for some reason the transcripts have the Ed Sheeran lyrics mixed in with Buck’s voiceover.

Um, and then all of a sudden,

Ellen: he says something about the way that you kiss me or something and I’m like, Whoa, hang on a minute. A bit early for that, isn’t it.

Mads: I think that was my, yeah, no, sorry, I can’t say that. Sorry, Ellen.

Ellen: No, don’t tell me.

Bex: Spoiler free zone. Sorry. Literally just episodes two and three, or one, two and three, yeah. Okay.

Mads: No, I was going to make a joke about the 6th Street, um, lyric, but I can’t say anything about that because it will reveal the fandom stuff from this season.

Alice: But yeah, it’s like, actually insane. They play an Ed Sheeran song, and [01:52:00] then, like, the eye contact?

Bex: Oh my god. I, there’s, like, there is a rant in the notes about the way that Ryan chose, you know, like, So Buck is obviously, Oliver has chosen like, I am not going to look at you because I am ashamed and Ryan’s gone fuck that You’re gonna look me in the eye and he’s like ducking and weaving trying to get into Oliver’s eyeline until they’re locking gazes

Mads: And just with like the widest, widest brown eyes too. Like he’s not even like, he’s like wide eyed trying to get his eye contact.

Bex: Yeah. Look at me.

So we talk about the Oliver Stark acting choices, but we need to have a special separate category for the Ryan Guzman acting choices. Like, what are you doing, dude?

Mads: And it’s also the fact that that little moment happens right after he’s been like saying just, the funniest stuff about Chris? Like, you have like the, he’s not very fast, or like, he’s just like sticking things together.

Bex: Between you and me, he’s never actually made anything of the Legos, he’s just like [01:53:00] sticking them together.

Mads: It’s so funny, so you have this like moment where it’s just like really funny, and then you just get that, and you’re like, whoa, hello.

Alice: Yeah, insane. Like the, who wrote the script? Who directed that? And how much of it was just acting choices?

Bex: I mean, we can answer that question, because it was David Fury. Um, and it was Chad Lowe, um, but I have a feeling that it was a lot of Oliver and Ryan making decisions on the day and both the director, um, and the editor just going, yeah, this is what we’re going with. This looks good.

Alice: Georgie Tunny Like, just, just act like you’re in love with him.

It’s fine.

Mads: I think Chad Lowe does do some good episodes.

Ellen: And somehow he manages to pick up Buck’s spirits just with saying those few words about you’re the only person that who I would trust with Christopher

Alice: There’s no one in this world. I would trust.

Ellen: Yeah. Sorry. I haven’t watched it as many times

Alice: The audacity What do [01:54:00] you do with your free time?

Oh, that’s right edit several podcasts

Ellen: I’m sure it’ll come. It’ll be like

Mads: Step up your game!

Ellen: “I’d rather have you cursed or not,” kind of level of shippingness.

Bex: That entire speech from, um, 15.18 that we’ve all got carved into our ribs.

Ellen: No, I can’t, it makes me cry. Sorry, sorry, Supernatural stuff again.

Mads: No, no, no, I know the scene. I know the scene.

Ellen: Yes, there is no escaping.

Mads: I may not have watched all of the show, but like, I have definitely seen a lot of the show. Yeah. Yeah.

Bex: But yeah, it does say a lot about, um, Buck in particular, that that line really goes deep to reassuring him, um, because he’s obviously been beating himself up. The rejection sensitive dysphoria is very real with him at this moment.

Um, and then for Eddie to very [01:55:00] sincerely say that, I trust you more than anybody else with Chris. Really hits Buck hard.

Mads: Yeah, you can kind of see that on his face. He just kind of looks like he’s been smacked.

Ellen: Yeah, well I mean, I, he obviously is, uh, devastated that he lost Chris in the first place, but then thankful that he was found again.

But, he’s now really worried that Eddie is not going to be his friend anymore. Like, because he’s just almost had his son killed. You know?

Alice: Yeah, like, not only is he not working with Eddie, but like, he also just lost his son.

Ellen: Yeah! So, like, for him to just turn up at the door and like, number one, surprise babysitting again, which is kind of like, fuck you Eddie.

Um, but also for him to say that he trusts Buck with Chris’s life. Like, yeah, that’s the best thing he could have said to Buck to pull him out of that funk, you know.

Bex: You can [01:56:00] imagine that Buck has had a lot of instances in his life where he’s screwed up and people have just like taken whatever he’s screwed up away from him.

Like, uh, you can’t do this, fine, let me do it, or no, you’re not going to do that because you fucked it up in the past. Um, this is the first time someone’s gone, yeah, okay, that happened, but now you’re going to try again.

Alice: Yeah, like a natural disaster happened. It wasn’t your fault.

Mads: I think you can even see that in, in Edie’s face, like, when Buck is trying to tell, like, Eddie that he’s lost Chris.

You can kind of see Eddie kind of being like, I want to be angry, but I can’t. And I’m also really upset.

Bex: The psychology of Eddie around this is fascinating. Because as, because as a parent, yeah, you would be absolutely terrified that your kid had, was one, caught up in the tsunami, two, went missing at some point, and the, so you show [01:57:00] up and the person that you thought you had entrusted your kid to no longer has your child.

Mads: Yeah.

Bex: And then trying to wrap your head around, be, like, is he angry with Buck? Um, is he, like, Does he trust, does he keep trusting Buck? Is he gonna bring Chris back, or is he gonna try and find something else, but in the end he decides that, yes, he does actually trust him? This is, this is where fanfiction is great, because I need to explore what exactly was going on in Eddie’s head, especially in that scene where, um, where Buck is telling Eddie that he lost Chris.

Alice: Yeah. I feel like the thing, like, Chris would have filled in the gaps a lot as well. Like, between You know, the tsunami hitting and being found by, being reunited with Eddie. Eddie would have been like, okay, what, like, what happened? Let’s talk about it. And, like, as Eddie says, Buck saved him. That’s how Chris remembers it.

And yeah, like, [01:58:00] if an eight year old is just like, no, like, it wasn’t Buck’s fault.

Mads: And I mean, , I think it is a case of you can’t really blame Buck anyway. You know, he did exactly what Eddie told him to do, you know. Take him out, have fun. So it is a case of just, he did what he was asked to do. It just so happened that something tragic happened on the same day.

Alice: Honestly, the most tragic thing is that like, Chris didn’t get his bear.

Mads: No, that’s so sad.

Bex: What happened to the bear?

Mads: And he lost his crutches. Like, yes.

Alice: That’s okay, he has new ones that are very exciting.

Bex: I’m pretty sure they’ve got multiple pairs.

Ellen: He’s probably got others. I’m sure the bear is out to sea somewhere being eaten by some sharks.

Alice: It’s okay, a baby shark has the bear.

Being 9-1-1,

Mads: I was like fully expecting them to like also find the bear and just be like, “We got it still,” but no, alas, they did make one thing [01:59:00] realistic.

Ellen: There were plenty of other waterlogged toys hanging around that could have grabbed them. Although I don’t, I don’t think that water was very clean. Like,

Bex: ew, no,

Mads: no, I can’t say I would want to, uh, keep anything from out of there.

Ellen: Yeah, um, okay, so we’ve covered, we’ve covered Buck and Chris, and is there more to say about the Buddie part of it, or?

Bex: Oh, can we, can we talk about, uh, Bobby Nash, the OG Buddie shipper?

Ellen: Oh my god, yes. Are you two okay?

Bex: I love this scene.

Alice: It’s, like, you could, you could hear. I’ll be watching you, playing in the background, doing that scene.

Ellen: I love it. He’s so funny, he’s so concerned.

Bex: But he’s so concerned, but it’s his choice of question that makes me feral.

Because it’s not, Are you okay? It’s not, Is everything okay? It’s, Are you two okay?

Alice: Or, Did something happen? It’s, Are [02:00:00] you two okay?

Bex: And like, I’m sure that, I could be like realistic and go that he’s, you know, he’s sensing the tension between the two of them and he’s thinking oh shit It’s gonna be like Eddie’s first days in the 118.

These two are gonna be at each other’s throats. It’s gonna be tense I don’t want to go back to that. But my little delulu heart is going no Bobby’s picking up on what’s going on between these two

Alice: Buck’s not even at work at this stage. So like It doesn’t matter what the firehouse is like, because Buck’s not there, and like, Buck is covered in blood, and Bobby’s question is, are you two okay?

Yeah, no, are you okay? Like

Ellen: That’s a weird question, actually.

Bex: Right?

Mads: Is he actually, is he saying like, are you two okay, as in like, Buck and Chris? Or is he saying it as in like

Bex: No, no, no, because

Alice: No, because Chris isn’t even near him at that stage.

Bex: Because he cuts back, they cut back and forward.

Ellen: Chris and Eddie are together.

Mads: I think that scene is also kind of like You see that, um, you know, Buck putting himself before others come back, um, like I said before. [02:01:00] Cause you see that whole thing of, he was fully prepared, like he was saying to Maddie on the phone, like, I’m fully prepared to continue looking, like I can’t stop looking.

And then you see that, like, him find out that Chris is okay, that Chris is safe, and then he finally lets himself be the one to be taken care of, like he, you know, he, collapses because he’s just so tired and he’s been bleeding. Oh, yeah, you know,

Bex: He’s been he’s been running on fumes all day and then finally the adrenaline just leaves and he just collapses and he’s clutching onto Hen like she’s a lifeline

Mads: Yeah, and it’s just it’s just crazy to see like he how fast he went from being like I can’t stop looking I’ve got to keep moving.

I’ve got to keep you know, trying to be the hero be the person that Chris can rely on and save Chris, but In reality, he was just absolutely just, yeah, like you say, running on fumes.

Ellen: Yeah, the adrenaline was keeping him upright.

Mads: Yeah.

Alice: Yeah. That’s it. And I think we’ve all been there, like when, you know, [02:02:00] stuff’s going down and you just keep moving and moving and the second you stop, you drop.

Bex: You stop. You stop completely. Yeah.

Mads: It just overwhelms you. Yeah. I think another cool moment in that scene is that we see, obviously, that lady bring back Chris, and you see her twice before that. You see her with Athena, so then Athena guides her to go to a certain area. Um, I’m not exactly sure where she tells her to go.

But anyway, she gets directed and then she comes across Bobby and um, the rest of the 118. So it’s kind of like this cute moment where the 118 really does bring Chris back to Eddie.

Bex: Which I’m gonna go on a rant about because

Because what do you mean that he went from Athena to Bobby to Back to his father and nobody recognized him and [02:03:00] he didn’t recognize anybody else Like I’m sure the kid is a heavy sleeper, but come on I’m also gonna go on a rant about the return of the pantyhose and newspaper dummy

Ellen: Yes. Yeah. Because later when she is, um,

Bex: actually holding Gavin, she’s probably

Ellen: pretty, yeah, yeah she’s struggling with him because he’s taller than the dummy was. Yeah.

Alice: Yeah. He’s a lanky kid. Like he’s not small . Yeah.

Ellen: It’s hard to carry like a 10-year-old.

Alice: Like he looks small when he is in Oliver’s arms. Well, that’s because, ’cause Oliver’s six, like, you know, six twelve.

Mads: Yeah.

Alice: But, um,

Ellen: six-twelve?

Mads: It’s the way she’s holding him too, like it’s not even a way you would hold a child.

Yeah. Like, it’s just this like weird, awkward, like, I don’t know.

Ellen: It’s the way you hold a tall child that you can’t hold on your hip or whatever. But still, yeah, it’s weird.

Mads: But like any normal person would like, would [02:04:00] you not like piggyback them?

Like, that would make so much more sense. I don’t know.

Alice: I guess Chris was probably tired.

Bex: Honestly, I’d probably have him on my hip, but that’s like, I’m a mum, so I’m used to carrying kids like that, and you can still carry them like that even when they’re big.

Alice: And if you did that, like, you’d see his face a bit easier, like, the point was that he was, you know. Yes. Yeah. Um, but yeah, but the fact that Like when Eddie runs over to him, she’s like, are you, like, “You must be Buck.”

And he’s like, “what? Like, no.” So Chris has also been looking for Buck while Buck’s been looking for Chris. Which, and like, it’s Buck that Chris hasn’t shut up about, like, oh, not, like, let’s find my dad the firefighter. No, I need to find Buck.

 It’s like, I’m trying to find Buck. Yeah, I’m looking for Buck.

Bex: I mean, to be fair, he probably has no idea where his father is.

Alice: Oh God,

Bex: whereas he knows the buck was down there somewhere.

Alice: Yeah, but he was still like, no, I need to find Buck, which is super cute.

Mads: It’s so cute. His Buck.

Alice: His Buck. [02:05:00]

Bex: He’s hanging with his Buck today.

Mads: He’s hanging with his Buck today will forever be a crazy line.

Alice: I’ve seen it mentioned a few times as well.

The, like, ambiguity of it, I guess. So, if they really wanted to cement, like, no, there’s nothing going on between Eddie and Buck, Buck would have always been Uncle Buck.

Mads: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Alice: Because, like, You know, everyone has those family friends that are, you know, your uncle or your auntie that aren’t actually related to you.

Like, I am auntie to several children that are not biologically related to me. They’re just my friends kids.

Mads: Oh, yeah, same. Like, one of my, um, best friends, I think we’ve been friends since we were, like, three. I, she’s had two kids and I am auntie. Like, yeah, I have to be, you know, because I’m around all the time.

It just, you know. Makes sense, but

Alice: whereas it’s not Uncle Buck.

Mads: No

Alice: Like, it’s Chris’s Buck. [02:06:00] It’s his Buck.

Mads: Yeah, and I mean, I guess you could make the argument that Chris is a little bit older, but he’s only what eight? So yeah, it’s still kind of that age where you probably would say uncle.

Bex: Oh, yeah Eddie could definitely have introduced him or started talking to him in conversation as Uncle Buck this Uncle Buck that and Chris would have picked it up

Alice: Yeah, exactly,

Bex: but it’s just that testament to Buck’s position in Eddie’s life that he doesn’t even consider the separation.

It’s just like, this is Buck.

Alice: Like, if they really wanted to be like, know their brothers, that would have been the easiest way to shut it down.

Mads: Oh, 100%.

Ellen: Just when you say Uncle Buck, it just reminds me of that movie.

Mads: I’ve seen so many people say that.

Ellen: That John Candy movie. No, it’s awful.

Bex: Which movie?

Ellen: No, please, no. Uncle Buck, it’s a movie. It’s from like the 80s or something.

Mads: I haven’t seen it.

Alice: Oh yeah, I’ve seen reference to that. [02:07:00]

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: It’s got um, Macaulay Culkin in it.

Ellen: Yeah, yeah, when he was, it was around the Home Alone era. Is that the one

Bex: where Macaulay Culkin’s sitting at the table and like, where do you live in the city, do you have a house?

Is that that movie?

Ellen: Yeah, yeah, I think so, yeah.

Bex: Ah, okay, yeah, never seen it, but I have seen that scene.

Ellen: It’s, it’s like the same kind of, I don’t know, low brow kind of humor as Home Alone, but not Christmas. I don’t think.

Bex: Okay.

Ellen: But no, Buck is definitely not Uncle Buck, you’re right. No. He is.

Mads: It’s his Buck.

Ellen: His Buck, yeah. It’s very cute.

Mads: I think the bafflement on, um, Buck’s face in that scene just, it always cracks me up every time I watch it. He’s just like, what do you mean he’s hanging out with me today? Like, what? Yeah. I was fully prepared to stay in my bed. I

Ellen: I just can’t get over the audacity of Eddie just turning up and like being like, okay, you’re looking after Chris today.

Bex: Oh, but not even like knocking, just letting himself in, letting his son in, and then [02:08:00] storming up to the bedroom and just literally pulling the covers off him.

Alice: And again, Buck could have easily been naked. Let’s

Ellen: Yeah, I mean, he hadn’t left the house for a week. Like, why put on pants?

Alice: Exactly.

Mads: I think this is like one of those moments where you just truly realise like, oh, you know, they definitely have keys to each other’s houses.

Um, like, that’s also

Alice: And like, you can bring it back to season one where like, Hen has a key to Bobby’s house. Yeah. Like this, it’s just, it’s so much, it’s such a different energy because Hen never used it unless there was an emergency. Eddie just lets himself in.

Bex: You could argue that it was an emergency on Eddie’s part.

Alice: I need to go to work.

Ellen: He needed a babysitter.

Alice: I sent Carla to the casino.

Mads: It’s like, when he says that joke, like at the end he goes, “You know, you being laid off is working out real well for me.” [02:09:00]

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Like, you’re not Abuela, you’re half a Carla, but

Ellen: It’s like, what the fuck, Eddie?

Mads: He’s like, you know, you’re doing a pinch, I guess. Yeah, yeah.

Alice: I mean, to be fair, Eddie had um, had Chim babysit when Chim was in a coma, so

Bex: Yeah, very low standards for babysitting as far as

Alice: Yeah, very low standards.

Like, Shannon’s not allowed near him, but it’s fine. Anyone in the 118 can go near him, it’s fine.

Mads: Oh, we really took it there.

Alice: I am the number one Shannon apologist, I should say. She is my wife, so I’m allowed to make jokes about it.

Mads: No, valid, valid.

Ellen: Um, do we want to cover, like, is there anything we want to say about the other members of the 118?

Bex: There are other members of the 118 in this episode? Yeah, who?

Mads: I think the main one that I mean, I think the main scenes that I [02:10:00] remember are the ones that Maddie does, I think.

Ellen: Yeah.

Mads: With all her calls. Those are all devastating.

Bex: I do like that moment where, um, Buck calls her, because he can’t find Christopher, and she’s She starts off calling him Buck, and then shit gets real serious, and she slips back to Evan.

Yeah. And it’s when you know that things are serious because she’s calling him Evan.

Mads: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like she’s going back to, you know, their childhood, I guess, going, oh, things are serious. She’s gone into mum mode. Yeah.

Bex: Yes. Which is interesting, like, how quickly she’s, um, they’ve written her as picking up that he is Buck.

Because I think after the first couple of episodes, she’s calling him Buck constantly, except when things go wrong. And then he’s Evan again. Yeah. I guess maybe it’s [02:11:00] her way of acknowledging that he has grown up.

Mads: I think it’s also, it makes it a little bit easier, I think, with it being just kind of a shortened version of their last name.

I don’t think it’s a name that’s too hard to remember, I guess, for her. I think if he’d had something crazy, maybe it would have been a little bit more difficult to slip into calling him that.

Alice: Like if it was Chimney or something. Yeah.

Mads: Fire hose.

Bex: Oh no!

Mads: We just won’t go there.

Bex: No, no, that, that, that would go with the, like, the fanfics where Buck walks in on her with a shower and then just doesn’t leave, which I’m sure exists out there somewhere.

I was

Mads: about to say, that exists? Oh my god. It has to.

Bex: What is it, Rule 134? If it exists, there’s fanfic of it somewhere on the internet? Oh please, no. I don’t want to think about it. And I mean, we come from the Supernatural fandom where they write fic about two brothers, so of course we expect that somewhere out [02:12:00] there there’s going to be, like, incest fic for

Mads: 9-1-1.

I don’t want to think about it, actually.

Alice: No, no. Oh god. But yeah, to be fair, like, I rarely call my brother by his name. Like, he literally calls me and he’s like, “Hi sister”, and I’m like, “Hi brother.”

Mads: Yeah.

Alice: It’s just, I think that’s just part of being siblings.

Mads: Yeah. I’m so glad that that nickname just didn’t stick around for Buck.

Like, obviously cause Chimney’s one has. I’m so glad that that just didn’t. Because, imagine if just everyone called him that. Yeah.

Bex: I don’t know whether that was a nickname or whether that was just his, like, online handle.

Alice: Yeah, true.

Bex: So it’s not something that he sort of walked in, um, And, you know, Bobby says, uh, you know, “Sit down, Evan,” and, and Buck goes, “Oh, actually everyone calls me Firehose.”

Mads: Could you imagine? The look on Bobby’s face, like? Oh, I can only [02:13:00] imagine.

Alice: He’d be on the phone with the chief so fast. Like, yeah, no.

Mads: Like HR.

Bex: Oh, they don’t have a HR department. Gerard would not have lasted as long as he did if they had an HR department that actually was functional.

Alice: Oh my god. Which is funny because they do in Lone Star. Yeah.

Ellen: Oh, do they?

Alice: Yeah.

Mads: They do. I think the one scene with, um, Maddie that always confuses me in this episode is the one right at the end when she’s with Charlie, the girl with the drone.

Bex: Oh, yeah, yeah. She randomly shows up to take Charlie to the memorial.

Mads: Yeah. Why?

Alice: And how?

Mads: It just seems like, just something you wouldn’t do.

Ellen: It’s because Maddie likes to creepily involve herself with the outcomes of everybody’s stuff.

Bex: Yeah. Oh, you say that and then we’ve got next episode. Next week.

Mads: Oh, is it that episode?

Alice: Yeah. Except we’re not recording next week, it’s next year! [02:14:00]

Bex: Don’t tell me.

I’m not going to tell you. I’m just going to foreshadow that you think Maddie likes to involve herself now.

Mads: Yep. Yep.

Ellen: Uh, it was funny when though, when Maddie, um, was talking to Buck at the end there and she, after she said that, she said something like, uh, you have to tell Eddie about Chris. I’m coming down there.

Bex: Oh yeah. And then immediately hangs up the phone.

Ellen: You’re like, I don’t know where the dispatch center is, but you getting there is not going to be an easy thing right at the moment. Like, you can’t

Alice: Yeah, like the roads are blocked. It’s flooded

Ellen: like, what do you think you were going to do?

Bex: But I mean, to be fair, this is the woman who managed to summon a cell phone signal out of thin air during the earthquake.

So if there was anybody that was going to be able to make her way from the Seymour Center to the VA hospital in Sawtelle, it would be Maddie.

Mads: Yeah, true. True. She finds a way. She finds a way to get to Buck. Always. But also we just don’t see her [02:15:00] show up either, like, that whole plot of her coming down just doesn’t end up even needing to be a thing.

Bex: She probably showed up like two hours later. “Where is my brother?”

Mads: He’s just like, passed out in a cot.

Alice: Buck just texts her “lol jokes, found him.” Like a selfie of them both. All G bro.

Mads: Yeah, don’t worry about coming down. It’s fine, we’re good.

Alice: Yeah, DW, all G.

And Maddie, who’s like 10 years older, is just like, what’s DW? What’s all G?

Ellen: God. Um. Actually, now that you mention that, they don’t show, like, at the end of this arc, they don’t show any of the, like, clean up or anything, or anything that’s happening to the characters until much later. Oh, yeah, yeah. [02:16:00] Like, until Buck’s actually back at home and still feeling sorry for himself, or whatever.

They show Buck and, like, um, Bobby and Athena and the kids at home, you know, like, after everything is resolved, I guess.

Alice: They’re still trying to scrub Buck’s blood off the footpath outside.

Ellen: So I guess once they, I guess it makes sense because once they’ve resolved the Chris disappearance, um, then, and everyone is in a safe place, then there’s not really any more drama to deal with.

Bex: Exactly. We’ve, we said over and over again that this show loves to ramp up the drama, but then as soon as the drama has like hit its peak, they’re not interested in the aftermath.

Mads: No.

Alice: And we’re done.

Mads: Yep.

Alice: Yeah.

Mads: Yeah. Next episode, there was never any tsunami at all, like, what do you mean?

Alice: Yeah, like the next episode there’s like an emergency on the pier and the pier’s fine.

Ellen: I was gonna say, I’ll be interested to see if there’s any repercussions [02:17:00] of any of this next time, but okay.

Bex: Probably not.

Alice: I think they just never show the pier again. Yeah. Like what pier?

Bex: It got demolished.

Ellen: It doesn’t no longer exist in the 9-1-1 universe. Yes.

Alice: That’s it.

Ellen: Maddie, were there any other scenes in This arc that particularly stick in your mind apart from the, like, obviously the last one?

Mads: The scene with May in the car.

Ellen: Oh, yeah.

Mads: Yeah, that’s a big one from this arc, I think. Obviously for reasons that happen later as well. But just, I think, it’s Corrine, right, who plays May? Yes. She acted her ass off in that scene. Can I say that?

Alice: Oh, absolutely.

Bex: Oh, yeah. Yeah. This, this, many, many of these episodes are rated explicit mostly because of me, so it’s fine.[02:18:00]

Alice: I mean, we did that, have that whole Omegaverse chat in one of the episodes, too, so. Yes.

Mads: Yes. Yes.

Um, but yeah, that scene there is one that has always stuck with me since watching the episodes for the first time. I think it was just such a incredible scene, especially like when it goes, you know, it starts fading out and all you hear is just kind of like, it’s all muffled because it’s kind of mimicking May’s shock, I guess.

Um, and then you just hear in the background, she’s got a, like, “She’s got a pulse.” And then you get the, “She’s alive?” Yes.

Ellen: Yeah. A surprising number of people actually survived, like people, named people that we know actually survived this. Like it’s just the guy who drowns in his own house. And,

Mads: oh, that’s so sad.

Ellen: Oh, yeah, that’s awful, that scene.

Alice: And Chad.

Ellen: Yeah, we don’t care about him. Oh.

Bex: No, but we’re never meant to care about him. They set him up to die from [02:19:00] the very beginning.

Ellen: Yeah. The guy who was on the pier sketching, he died.

Mads: Oh, yeah. What was his name? I can’t remember. That’s the one that Charlie

Bex: Reggie, yeah.

Mads: Reggie.

Ellen: But I think everyone else survives, like the guys who are impaled together.

Mads: Who’s Chad?

Alice: Oh, Chad’s the name that we gave the guy who gets electrocuted.

Mads: Okay, cool. I was gonna say, like, that guy? I’ve just listened to what the “Karma’s a Bitch” episode. So, my first thought was just like, karma’s a bitch!

Bex: I was for the notes, I was trying to work out what the male equivalent of a Karen would be.

And I got told that the male equivalent is a Chad, so he became a Chad. Otherwise, he was going to be a J name, because J names also act like that.

Mads: Yeah. Yeah. Just a Jared. Ha!

Alice: Jensen. No, wait.

Ellen: We can’t say that in our fandom, we’ll get attacked.

Bex: My ex husband is Jared. So [02:20:00] I 100%.

Mads: Okay, we’re changing the name. It’s not Chad anymore.

Oh, I have, I have one note here that I made, um, while I was watching and it’s like, when Buck first shows up at the, um, It’s at the VA hospital and, um, he’s like trying to check the lists. One, that lady checking the lists way too quick. There’s no way she’s read all those names before saying, “Nah, not on the list,” by the way.

Bex: Well, see, I wonder because we saw two different nurses with lists. So how does everyone have a copy of the same list?

Mads: Because they, where are they printing it? Exactly, but also you see them physic. Like you see the nurse physically write down Eddie and Lena’s names too. Like does she then go to the other one and be like, “okay, these two people have shown up.”

Ellen: Yes. . Yeah. But see, you can’t have two lists. That’s just gonna be, [02:21:00]

Bex: yeah. Otherwise, like you have the list for that particular tent and you’re like, no, there’s nobody in that tent go to like. This tent, this tent, this tent, and then if I’ve been to all of the tents and I can’t find him, then I go to the black tent.

Mads: But it’s that scene, the way that their nurse just goes, “You may want to check over there.” Hello?

Ellen: Yeah, that was mean.

Mads: That’s so uncaring.

Ellen: That was really mean. That was cold.

Bex: Yeah, you can understand, like, she’s tired, she’s overwhelmed, she’s like, All of her, um, sensitivity is just gone, but yes, it was a very abrupt, “No, we don’t have your kid, go check the dead people out. He might be over there.

Mads: It was like, wow.

Alice: Because, like, we have it in the, um, plane crash episode, where, Buck’s looking for the guy who Abby asked him to find. Yes. And, like, that nurse is so much more, like,

Mads: Caring.

Alice: Sympathetic? Yeah.

Bex: To be fair, she’s probably not as run off her feet. I think the, um, the casualty rate for the plane [02:22:00] crash was a lot smaller than for the tsunami.

Mads: Yeah, very true.

Bex: But yeah, um, that, that actor is probably watching that footage back like, Oh my God, why did I choose to say it like that? Why did they pick that take?

Alice: Kids dead.

Mads: Like even like an, “I’m so sorry, but like maybe check over there.” Um,

It’s just that, you may want to check over there. Girl, please!

Just for, um, Bex and Alice. So, Chad Lowe, the writer. Is it the writer for this?

Bex: Director. For this one. Yeah.

Mads: He also directed, uh, “Buck Bothered and Bewildered” and “Confessions”.

Bex: He is a fan favourite. We love Chad.

Ellen: The director’s name is Chad and you just named that guy Chad.

Alice: Yes. Sorry Chad.

Bex: I know.

Alice: We love you, Director Chad. Yes. [02:23:00] Director Chad, I’m sure you’re listening right now. We love you. Um, we will actually send you a muffin.

Bex: Director Chad and writer Andrew Myers.

Alice: We will send you muffin baskets. We’re sorry for naming a terrible character.

Mads: Please come back for 8B. Please, please.

Alice: Just like do every episode of 8B. Thank you. Bye.

Mads: Please.

Ellen: Hey, so, um, Maddie, was there anything else that you wanted to tell us about this arc that you particularly love, or have we covered everything?

Mads: I think we’ve covered everything, to be honest. I think it’s just, just yeah, overall, I think it is just one of the best opening emergencies, easily.

I think just the way the characters interact with each other, and all the scenes that, you know, we get that kind of do set up a little bit of stuff in the future. I think it’s really cool. Just in subtle ways.

Ellen: Alright, so what do we have to look forward to next week?

Alice: [02:24:00] Well, it’s not next week.

Ellen: Oh, well, yes.

Alice: We’ll be taking a bit of a break, because we’re very quickly coming up to Christmas time.

Ellen: Yep.

Alice: So, like our, um, favourite wee woo show, the wee woo show is, um, taking a bit of a hiatus.

Bex: Thankfully, we haven’t left anybody in peril this time.

Alice: And we also won’t, like, we’ll be back a long time before March, because we’ll miss it.

Um.

Bex: So, the next time we record, we will be discussing Episode four, which is called “Triggers.”

Ellen: Oh, that’s confusing.

And the Triggers.

Bex: The triggers for Triggers. Well, no, for the summary for Triggers. It’s the first responders race to save workers in a high rise during a fire drill, a mother and her sons are involved in a perilous car accident, and squabbling siblings fight over a family heirloom.

Meanwhile, Buck delivers surprising news to Bobby, Eddie helps Christopher cope with the trauma of the tsunami, Hen and Karen debate expanding their family, and Maddie [02:25:00] decides to take action against a possible abuser.

Alice: Jesus, what an action packed episode.

Mads: That is a lot of stuff.

Bex: I think they named literally every storyline that happens, um, in this episode.

And as in with the last couple of episodes, we’ve had a special note that Rhonda Rousey guest stars. So we get more Lena Bosco. The triggers for triggers. Um, ironically, the first trigger is that a character gets triggered. So if your trigger is other people getting triggered, then that’s going to happen.

Stay clear. Um, there is, there is a discussion of cancer, domestic violence. There is an epileptic seizure shown on screen. There is a family at threat. There is stalking. Um, there is discussion of PTSD and childhood PTSD, and there is a very vague misuse of the [02:26:00] law trigger, which, guessing relates to, uh, Not so much misuse of the law, but just 9-1-1 dispatchers doing what they do and, uh, breaking privacy laws again.

Mads: Yep, yep. Love to see it.

Ellen: Those pesky privacy laws.

Mads: Just, just hold me back.

Ellen: All right, well, we have to say thank you, Maddie, for coming to talk to us about this Episode.

Alice: Thank you so much for joining us!

Bex: And for sticking around for the entire rant as well.

Mads: Yeah. It was just, like, great hearing it live.

Ellen: Well, we appreciate you coming on.

Mads: Oh, thank you for having me.

Alice: Everyone go check out, um, it’s underscore the Mads Buckley. Yeah. Um, go check out Mads artwork, because it’s amazing.

Mads: Thank [02:27:00] you. I put a lot of time into them.

Ellen: Okay. So, uh, if you want to let us know what you thought about this episode arc, like we’d love to hear what, if this is your favorite disaster arc or what you think of the Buddie scenes or whatever, whatever you want to tell us about, you can contact us in lots of ways and you can find all of that information on our website, which is thatweewooshow. com, or you can leave us a comment directly in Spotify as well now, or on our social media. including blue sky. Come and find some blue sky we’re there too. It’s much nicer than Twitter. Um, so thank you everyone for listening. And we will talk to you next time for episode four, “Triggers”. Happy holidays as well.

See you then.

Bex: Bye.

Alice: Bye.

Ellen: 9-1-1 is a fictional show, but many of the situations portrayed happen in the real world too. If any of the topics [02:28:00] we’ve discussed in this episode have affected you, please know you’re not alone. You can call or text numbers in your country for help. Just Google crisis support in your location to find out the number.

If you enjoy our podcast, you can help us out by leaving us a review on Spotify or your preferred listening app, and by sharing our social media posts. Find out more at thatweewooshow. com.

[first outtake]

Alice: As you can tell, we never go on tangents. We always stay very much on topic.

Bex: Oh yeah. Smooth sailing from point A to point B.

Mads: I’d be really disappointed in you guys if you didn’t go on tangents, in all honesty.

Ellen: That’s always great to hear.

Alice: Look, Ellen and I had to record something quickly just to like stitch in the other day, and we completely forgot Angela Bassett’s name because Bex wasn’t with us with her notes.

And so there was like a full like two minutes of just like us being like, um, What is her name? It’s not Her name’s Athena, right? Oh my god. It’s not [02:29:00] Athena. Her name,

Bex: seriously?

Alice: It was really sad. But we worked it out. It starts with an A, but it’s not Like, to be fair, we both, like, finished work for the day. We were so fucking tired.

It was the day before the episode came out, and we just had to stitch it in. And we were both just like, It’s not Athena, but what’s her name?

Bex: What would you guys do without me? Seriously.

Alice: We would cry just constantly.

Ellen: We’d be hopeless.

Mads: There would be shambles.

Bex: Apparently.

[second outtake]

Ellen: Sorry Mads, we’re a bit unstructured with this.

Alice: We’re also very tired, this is our second recording in a row.

Mads: That’s okay.

Bex: Uh, speak for yourself, I shot a black coffee and then a large Red Bull, so I am vibrating.

Alice: Oh my god.

Mads: Just sitting there, just like vibrating.

Bex: I see colors.

Alice: Episode three later and it’ll just be Bex like talking real fucking fast and then the whole episode will go for 30 minutes.

Bex: [02:30:00] Nobody will need to, um, up the speed on this episode because I’ll just be like, like, 0. 2 per month on my own.

Mads: They’ll put it faster and then, then Bex will start talking and they’ll be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Alice: There was one episode where literally Bex and I started writing a fanfic about the background firefighters, which is where the obsession with the background firefighters started. Because it was so boring. I was focusing on the rest of the, like, team.

Mads: Have you finished this, this, uh, fic?

Alice: No, it was like, it’s very, it’s snippets.

Bex: It’s just in the group chat.

Alice: It was like, but it was like Bobby calling them all the wrong names and like them being like, do you think he even knows our name? Um, and like all of them getting like, being made to stay back after a shift because of [02:31:00] something that was happening with Chimney and they’re just like, he, they remember fucking Chimney’s name, date of birth and like everything that’s going on, but he can’t even remember like me.

Mads: I think you need to write this, though.

Bex: I think there was one snippet where one of the, um, one of them comes racing out to the others like, “Guys, do not go in to the locker room, Buck and Eddie are in there.” And everyone’s just like, “Again?”

Alice: I’ve got the screenshots, like in my season six notes.

Mads: I need, I need you guys to write this. I genuinely need it in my life.

Alice: That was so funny.

Bex: Might be a hiatus project. Once I get this, um, this threesome fic out of the way. Maybe I can take a stab.

Alice: Once I’ve, um, once I’ve finished ice cream before dinner.

Mads: Yeah, this is like me and one of my other, um, friends, we were discussing how we should write a fanfiction that was based [02:32:00] on, um, like the old One Direction fanfics, you know, how like the person would get sold to One Direction. We’re like, what if we just sold it to Eddie?

Bex: They put their hair up in a bun and they come downstairs for breakfast and discovers that their parents have sold them to One Direction.

Mads: Yeah, so we had, we had Buck putting his, we had Buck putting his hair up into a messy bun and we’ll be downstairs and his parents are selling him to Eddie Diaz.

Alice: Oh my God, thank God Craig’s still recording!.

Mads: We were pissing ourselves,

we were like, Oh my God. And then we heard the, like, um,

Bex: Oh, it’s perfect because he would have like the beautiful blue orbs staring at him.

Mads: I was like, I was like, and he, you know, “Buck let out the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.”

Alice: And you can only publish it on Wattpad. Like you can’t publish it anywhere, only Wattpad.

Mads: With a really, really cringy cover.

Bex: But you know what’s really sad? I could imagine, um, I could imagine Buck’s parents doing that. [02:33:00]

Mads: Yeah. That’s what makes it realistic.

God. Oh my god.