Welcome to That Weewoo Show: a podcast where Bex, Alice, and Ellen watch and discuss every episode of ABC’s TV show, 9-1-1.
In this episode we discuss episode 6 of the third season of 9-1-1, titled “Monsters”.
Athena and the 118 respond to bizarre emergency calls on Halloween; Maddie remains convinced that she is doing the right thing in taking a 911 call into her own hands.
Content warnings for episode 3.06:
Car accident involving a car and a pedestrian, gore, child abuse and neglect, stalking.
Mentioned in this episode:
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Episode Transcript
Maddie: [00:00:00] 9-1-1, what’s your emergency?
Bex: Welcome back to That WeeWoo Show, a podcast where we watch and discuss episodes of the ABC show, 9-1-1. I’m Bex.
Alice: I’m Alice.
Ellen: And I’m Ellen.
Bex: As always, thank you to everyone who has listened to our previous episodes and to everyone who has interacted with us, whether that’s liking the episodes on your preferred podcast platform, uh, commenting wherever you’re listening to us, sharing our social media posts, or sending us DMs because you noticed that one of our episodes wasn’t up on our YouTube channel.
Um, thank you to raynor___77 on Twitter for that heads up. Uh, we do apologize for the, For the omission there, but Ellen was on the case, and
Ellen: I think it should be there now. [00:01:00] I’m still learning how to use YouTube.
Bex: So if YouTube is your preferred method of listening to us, it should be there now. And while we’re talking about preferred methods of listening, I was wondering, and I would love it if you could leave us a comment wherever it is you’re listening, um, and tell us what it is you’re doing when you’re listening to us.
Do you listen to us on your commute? Do we come with you on your little mental health walks? Do you put us on in the background while you’re cleaning the house? Um, For example, I listen to podcasts at work, um, and in fact, I had another, um, 9-1-1 rewatch podcast keeping me company over the Christmas period when I was the only one in the office.
Um, so I was listening to, um, Han, Cil, and Rach from The Buddie System, which is a really interesting 9-1-1 podcast, if [00:02:00] you want. They do, they are a rewatch podcast, so they are doing episode by episode. They’re currently midway through season two, but they also discuss the latest seasons and they have fun little episodes like which Taylor Swift album is each character.
Ellen: Oh my God. That sounds like fun.
Bex: So if you’re looking, it was. It was very interesting and very thought provoking. Um, so if you’re looking for another 9-1-1 podcast, uh, or something slightly different from what we’ve got going here, uh, check them out over at The Buddy System. Where do you listen to your podcasts, Ellen?
Ellen: Um, well, I, because I work at home, I don’t tend to drive many places.
So I normally, cause in the past I have listened to them in the car, but nowadays I just have them on in the background while I’m working or playing games sometimes. How about you, Alice?
Alice: Yeah, I used to listen to them in the office. Um, and since I’ve gone back into retail, I am [00:03:00] driving a lot more. So it’s always in the car.
And the worst part about that is that like, I’ll be listening to a podcast and they’ll be like, Oh, like, let us know if this. And then by the end of my work day, I’ve completely forgotten what it was. So I’m just like, Oh my God, I have so much to comment on these podcasts. And then I never do. And I feel awful.
Bex: So I will be fascinated to know where people are listening to us. What are they doing while our voices are in their ears?
Ellen: Oh my gosh. What a strange thought.
Bex: So whatever it is you are doing, you are going to listen to us this week to discuss episode six of season two, which is called “Monsters”. But before we do that, Alice, could you remind us what happened in last week’s episode?
Alice: Yeah. So last week on 9-1-1, Buck threw the members of the 118 under the fire engine by spilling their personal troubles to his lawyer.
Hen and Karen had a setback in their plans to expand their family, Eddie joined an illegal street right street [00:04:00] fighting ring, and Michael and the kids had a traumatic traffic stop. Lots happened last week.
Ellen: Yeah, it was a big one. Uh, so this episode, as Bex said, it’s episode 6 of season 3, which is has the title “Monsters”.
Uh, it first aired on October 28th in 2019, so this was just before Halloween, which means that this is a Halloween episode. Yay!
Bex: This is my favorite of the Halloween episodes.
Alice: Me too.
Ellen: This episode is great. I really enjoyed this one. So the summary says, Athena and the 118 respond to bizarre emergency calls on Halloween, including a flock of crows terrorizing a field trip.
Um, okay. So this is the bit that we suspect was cut out, right? An office employee having a close encounter with an eight limbed creature. Not in this episode.
Alice: No, it was definitely cut out.
Bex: I remember reading this summary for last week’s episode and going, wait, was that [00:05:00] this episode? And I figured it was just my brain conflating episodes and seasons because I remembered watching that scene.
Um, but yet again, this is another instance of they’ve released the promo in advance of the episode actually being finished and they’ve cut a scene. But I think that there is an episode in, I believe it’s season four, where they’ve kind of collected all of these lost storylines and dumped them all in one episode. Because I do remember seeing this one.
Ellen: All right. Well, the rest of the summary just says that a ghost like girl is wandering a neighborhood. Meanwhile, Maddie remains convinced that she is doing the right thing in taking a 9-1-1 call into her own hands.
Bex: Spoiler alert, she was not.
Ellen: Yeah. Um, triggers for this episode include a car accident involving a car and a pedestrian, we have child abuse and neglect, gore relating to the [00:06:00] previously mentioned car accident, and stalking. One guess as to who that involving, um, yeah.
So, Halloween, what, just remind me what the other Halloween episodes we’ve had so far have been.
Bex: Well, season one they had full moon,
Ellen: they had the full moon one, which, which wasn’t Halloween.
Bex: Yeah, it wasn’t quite Halloween, but it was close enough to Halloween that it kind of counts. And then season two, I can’t even remember that Halloween episode. That’s how much of an impact it had on me.
Ellen: They definitely had one. Yeah. I’m not prepared for this question at all.
Alice: I’m trying to remember now.
Bex: Oh, it was “Haunted”.
Ellen: Oh, “Haunted”. Okay.
Bex: So it was
Ellen: Spooky stuff at the Hay Ride.
Bex: It was the haunted hay ride. It was Maddie’s crossing over with the Ghost Whisperer for the ghost calling 9-1-1, and it was Buck being haunted by Abby.
Ellen: [00:07:00] Oh, that’s right. Gosh, that was a long time ago.
Bex: It was, wasn’t it? So I think it’s interesting for not last week, but the previous week for “Triggers”, um, we mentioned that there were three writers and we wondered, like, whether the number of storylines that they tried to pack into “Triggers”, whether each of those writers had a particular storyline that was their baby and they all got credited for when they meshed them all in together.
Um, so this episode, “Monsters” was written by Christopher Monfette who was one of the writers got credited in “Triggers”. So I think that kind of gives credence to our theory because I feel like the Maddie storyline was his baby. So he got credited for “Triggers” for starting the Maddie storyline and now he’s back to sort of move it forward.
Ellen: Yeah. So he wrote, he’s the only writer?
Bex: He is the only writer for this episode. Okay. But we’re not going to start with Maddie. We’re going to start with the Harvest [00:08:00] Festival.
Ellen: We’ve got some school kids who are going to visit the Harvest Festival. And this yellow school bus, as all apparently American TV shows who take kids somewhere, they always have to have this yellow school bus.
I know that there are, like, these are, school buses are a real thing, but it just seems like, to us watching from over here, that seems like a, I don’t know, it’s just always there.
Bex: Yeah, because our school districts don’t have their own buses. We have to rent charter buses for when the kids go on excursions. Or at least we do down here, I don’t know what yours is.
Ellen: Some schools do, some schools do have it, but um, especially rural, I think, they tend to have more of, of a dedicated bus that goes around and picks up the kids, but um, in the city not so much.
Alice: Yeah. I mean, we’re rural and we, um, we just had like generic buses from like the bus service.
Yeah. Yeah. So like we use them in the morning and then [00:09:00] I guess they go do bus things the rest of the day.
Ellen: they go back to their little bus home.
Bex: Yeah, take a nap and then do their bus shores and then come back and pick you up.
Alice: Go to the grocery shops, fight over their son.
Bex: But it looks like LA school district must have its own fleet of buses that they use for pickups and drop offs and excursions.
Ellen: Uh, unfortunately some of the kids that are going on this excursion are absolute little shits.
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: The teacher says that, um, she tells the, them to enjoy the festival, but play nicely and do not wander off and be back at noon and not one second more. And one of the two little kids who are going to be the main kind of culprits in this scene like, give her some sass. And, um,
Bex: they’re so cheeky. Um, we do have names, so it’s Riley and [00:10:00] Dean are our two, uh,
Alice: I was going to say, I know that they were named, but I really appreciate that your notes just have them Smartass 1 and Smartass 2.
Bex: Well, they didn’t get named until later in the, um, in the storyline.
So they were just like Smartass 1 and 2 until I actually got confirmation of their names. Um, yeah, they are complete smartasses. The teacher seems to have no control over them whatsoever. . And so despite her exhortation for them to behave, they definitely do anything but.
Ellen: They just run around laughing and like knock pumpkins off things and
Bex: One of them steals the head off a scarecrow and uses it to terrorize the girls in his class.
Ellen: Yeah, what a great guy. And then they eventually, they go through, there’s a big corn maze there, which is, um Always really cool to see, I love those things. Um, and they, they run through the maze and then they see a crow [00:11:00] sitting on top of a scarecrow inside the maze. And one of the kids sees some rocks on the ground, so they like pick up a bunch of rocks and hand it to the other one.
And, They don’t actually show them throwing rocks at the bird, which is good because, you know, I don’t think the birds need to have rocks thrown at them.
Bex: I don’t think they need the depiction of animal cruelty on the screen, I guess. The implication is very much that they started pelting rocks at the bird, which means that everything that comes next, they so, so very much deserved.
Ellen: Yep. So all the kids are getting back in the bus, and the teacher is counting them as they go, but there’s two missing.
Bex: Funny that.
Ellen: And she’s like, of course there is.
Bex: And she knows immediately which two it is too.
Ellen: Yeah. And then she sort of looks around to sort of work out where they might have gone, and then sees all these birds like flying over the, the maze. And turns out the crows didn’t like having [00:12:00] rocks thrown at them.
Bex: Yeah, the, uh, the poor crow that got attacked has called in its buddies, And the, uh, Riley and Dean are being swooped and attacked en masse as they are frantically running through the maze to try and get away from the birds.
So the teacher, Mrs. Beckerson, calls 9-1-1, uh, which prompts for the dispatch of the 118 to the Harvest Festival.
Ellen: Yeah, at first when they were on their way, and after the 9-1-1 call, I was like, why would you call 9-1-1 for, like, birds attacking. Like, that just seems like, like, I don’t know who they could have called otherwise, but the firefighters,
Bex: Animal control?
Ellen: I don’t know, but then later it turns out that one of the kids is actually quite badly injured, so that’s okay. Like, they do need paramedics there, but um, yeah.
Bex: There are many, many calls in many, many episodes where I just look at the screen and go, why did you call 9-1-1 for that? [00:13:00] I mean, I know it’s for the drama because there would be no storyline if they didn’t call 9-1-1 for this shit, but yeah, but it’s so funny because they, the 1A team roll up and all of the school kids and the teachers are sheltering in place in the bus.
Like they’re not the ones being attacked, yet they are hiding to the point where the teacher won’t even open the door to talk to Bobby. She’s like, cracks it open a little bit as if she’s afraid that if she opens the doors up too much, the birds are going to swoop inside, even though all of the birds are now gathered by a barn on the other side of the, the like, farm area.
Ellen: Randomly, I did appreciate, they all turn up and they’re all wearing sunglasses and we, we hardly ever see them do that. It’s like, oh, except Hen, who’s got like these big kind of brown rimmed glasses and they look really cool, but she’s not wearing sunnies like the rest.
Bex: Chim’s rocked the aviators a couple of times, looking very cool when he does so.
Ellen: Yes, yes.
Bex: Yeah, but it’s [00:14:00] not often that we see the others in sunglasses. Yeah.
Alice: Yeah. Um, noticeably as well, when the 118 rock up, it’s just Bobby, Chim, Hen, and Eddie. There’s no Bosco.
Ellen: Oh yeah.
Alice: And still no Buck.
Bex: There is a driver, but the poor thing doesn’t even, isn’t even allowed out of the rig.
He has to stay in.
Alice: Maybe he’s scared of birds, it’s fine.
Bex: I don’t know. But yes, the, uh, the Awesome Foursome get out of the rigs and they take in the sight of all of the birds. There’s like over a dozen of them perched on top of the barn and all of the sort of things gathered around the barn and our pop culture expert just looks and goes, “I think I’ve seen this movie.”
Alice: Because of course Chim does.
Bex: I think I’ve seen this film before and I didn’t like the ending.
Ellen: Well, if he’s talking about that Crows movie, the Doesn’t everyone get eaten by the crows?
Bex: I think he’s talking about Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Ellen: The Birds? Yeah, the birds. [00:15:00]
Alice: Yeah, definitely The Birds.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Uh, so Bobby orders them into turnouts and head protection.
Even though the, the crows aren’t actually doing anything at the moment, just in case.
Ellen: Yeah. I love this part because they’re, they’re so carefully pushing, um, like a gurney forward, like a, like a tank, basically, and they’re all, they’re all creeping really, they’re looking really tense and kind of worried about the whole thing, and the crows are just sitting there, they’re just not doing anything, but yeah.
Bex: Yeah, but while the rest of them are, um, are acting like they’re about to walk into war, Chim’s futzing with the name badge on his duty uniform.
Ellen: He keeps dropping it.
Bex: It keeps falling off, it keeps dropping and it keeps trying to pick it up.
Ellen: Yeah, I was wondering why they were bothering with this and then I realized that they, it’s like a shiny thing that, [00:16:00] like it’s,
Alice: it’s Chekhov’s name tag.
Yeah.
Bex: It’s very much Chekhov’s name tag. This is obvious. Yeah, it’s shiny and it’s very definitely Chim’s, so, uh, the last time that he drops it, one of the crows flies down and lands on, on a, these, what are they? There’s weird metal frame y things that are
Alice: It’s kind of fence ish?
Bex: It’s like gazebo shaped? Whether you would train trees to grow into them, into shapes. I don’t know, but it’s something, it’s a structure in front of them, and the crow lands on it, and everybody freezes. And Bobby orders Chim to leave the name badge.
Alice: And stay calm.
Bex: And Chim very, very carefully, um, lowers his visor and starts buttoning up his turnout as they move past the crows and head into the barn, [00:17:00] where they find the two kids.
Alice: I like that Hen, this entire time, as well, is just, like, the crow encyclopaedia. Um, like, Eddie’s like, “Oh, there’s crows all over the city. never heard of them attacking everyone.” And Hen’s like, “Yeah, that’s because crows are very docile. They don’t attack unless they’re provoked.”
Bex: Yes.
Alice: So they get to, they get to the barn past the crow that’s just staring at them.
And of course it’s Chim that’s being stared at the most because of his hatred for animals. But yeah, so they get to the barn and one of the kids who wasn’t really the instigator more just like the backup. Says that Dean is cut up real bad, but he’s fine.
Ellen: Just saying Dean Winchester would never throw a rock at a crow. Although he has sworn at birds.
Alice: I was going to say he tried to shoot a pigeon, but
Ellen: [00:18:00] Yeah, yeah. But yeah, that, that is a really strange, strange sentence to say, but anyway, yes.
Alice: But yeah, Supernatural was a fever dream of a show. It’s fine. Yeah.
Bex: Um, but this Dean has massive gouges at the back of his neck where the crows have attacked him while they were running.
So Hen and Chim are working on him while Eddie checks out the other kid just to make sure that he’s okay. Hen 100 percent is blaming these kids. Yeah. For what’s happened to them.
Alice: Hen’s being openly hostile here.
Ellen: Yeah, well, the kid’s like a bit worried because Hen says, “Make sure no major arteries were hit.”
And he’s like, “Am I going to die?” And Chim’s like, “No, she was just kidding. It’s all right.” But Hen doesn’t have a bar of it. She’s like, “Those crows just attacked you from out of nowhere, didn’t they?” Dean tries to get, he’s like going with the story. He’s like, “it was crazy. Tell them Riley.” Riley’s just like, [00:19:00] “Um, yeah. It was like they were possessed or something.”
Bex: Yeah, but then immediately, when Hen reveals that she is 100 percent knows what they did, they turn on each other so quickly.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Hen’s like, “Are you sure it didn’t have anything to do with those rocks?” And Riley is immediately like, “Dean did it!”
Dean’s like, “No I didn’t!”
Ellen: Meanwhile, Chim is freaking out because he can see the crows out the window and he’s like, “They know we’re in here.”
Bex: And Hen corrects him. Like “They know the kids are in here. Crows are smart and they don’t hold any grudges.” Bobby’s a little bit,
Ellen: No, they do hold grudges
Alice: Yeah, they do hold grudges.
Bex: Bobby’s like “You think they’re waiting for the boys to come out?” And Hen’s like, “Well, yeah, 100%. They haven’t been known to remember the faces of their tormentors years later.”
Ellen: She’s trying to put the fear of God into them. [00:20:00] “They’re bye crows.” Is that what he says?
Bex: Yes, and I don’t understand it.
And I don’t know whether it’s just because the transcript has spelt it B Y E, or whether it’s B I, um, I don’t know. If anybody, if anybody can explain what Chim means when he says, “Oh, they’re bye crows,” um, I would love, I would love you to educate me as to what the hell he’s talking about.
Ellen: No, I don’t know that one.
Bex: Nobody in the 118 pays any attention to this. They’re obviously used to Chim just spouting non sequiturs. Um, and instead they hatch a plan because if the crows are waiting for the boys to get out, how are they going to get the boys out and to hospital? So the idea is if they’re looking for two little boys, the 118 will give them something else.
So instead of two little boys coming out, they instead get a [00:21:00] body on a gurney and the tiniest fire captain known to mankind.
Ellen: I was totally like, why don’t they just put one kid on the other kid’s shoulders and then put the big flying paper to the top? That would be fine. But no, one of them is on the gurney.
And he’d look, the other one looks so cute in the, you know, turn out coat that’s way too big for him.
Bex: Yeah, they literally put him in Bobby’s turn out coat and his helmet and it’s like down to his feet. Um, he’s absolutely swimming in it. But apparently it’s enough to disguise them from the crows because the crows, for the most part, let them pass.
Except for one. One does land in front of Chim and Chim kind of acts as cannon fodder, allowing the rest of the 118 to go around him and head towards the rigs.
Ellen: Because Hen [00:22:00] tells him that if you make eye contact with a crow you can, you know, influence it to do stuff. Or like, you know, get it to trust you.
And, but Chim goes one step further and just like takes out a muesli bar from his pocket and gives it to the crow.
Bex: I love that when you were watching this you’re like, Chim, don’t feed the crow.
Ellen: Why are you feeding them? They’re all going to come to you now and you’re not going to like that.
Bex: No, you have to give offerings to the nice symbol of pestilence and death to, uh, to let the rest of the crew go past.
Ellen: Yep.
Bex: And it works. They’re all able to leave the Harvest Festival and they get the kids to the hospital, except while Hen is pushing Dean into the, uh, the emergency room, um, Chim hears a cawing and turns around and there is a crow sitting on top of the ambulance, except when he tries to bring it to Hen’s attention, it’s no longer there.
So the crows are gaslighting Chim, It’s great.
Ellen: [00:23:00] Yeah. They’ve got some more of those brownies from the um, you know, the public, hallucinations.
Alice: Well, Chim missed out the first time, so it’s about time it’s his go.
Ellen: Yeah, and all that before the title card, really?
Bex: Yeah, that was our cold open. So after the title card, we are at the Grant household where it looks like May is having a Halloween movie night.
Ellen: That’s a huge screen that they’re setting up the back there.
Bex: That’s, that is such a cool setup.
Ellen: It is amazing. They’ve got all, I don’t, I don’t know if they’re beanbags or just seats that are covered in blankets or whatever, um.
Bex: I don’t know, but it’s.
Ellen: Around the garden.
Bex: I mean, I remember having sleepovers and movie nights where it was just us, like, in the living room, just spread out, sprawled out, grabbing whatever, with sleeping bags, whatever pillows we could find.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Like, Athena has gone all out. There is a massive snack [00:24:00] table, um, they’ve set up a giant screen in the backyard.
Ellen: And Bobby and Athena are going out. They’re not going to be there when they’re there.
Bex: Yes, that’s crazy. Why aren’t they just like staying in their room just in case anything happens?
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah, Bobby’s having a bit of a worry about the whole thing.
Bex: But he’s not just worrying about this. I think he’s worried about everything in general. Like, anything he can worry about, he is worrying about it. Which is why he’s up at three in the morning stress baking.
Ellen: Yes, I think it does say “There’s seven different kinds of baked goods in our kitchen.”
Um, because apparently tomorrow is Buck’s first day back. So, Bobby is a little stressed. But, uh, he says that Buck has signed all of the liability waivers and he thinks that they could drop a piano on Buck’s head and he wouldn’t be able to sue them for it.
But yeah, he does let it out a little bit where [00:25:00] Bobby says, “I don’t know what I’m doing. He just doesn’t think things through. He acts and then leaves the rest of us to deal with it.” Yeah, Athena does tell him that he’s allowed to be mad with Buck.
Bex: Yeah, he’s worried about what’s, he’s worried about what’s going to happen to Buck. I don’t think it’s so much a worry about the implications for the department.
I think he is worried about Buck for Buck’s sake.
Ellen: Yeah, well he’s pushed so hard to come back and, I mean, he’s still got the blood thinner problem, you know?
Alice: Mm hmm.
Ellen: So
Alice: Not to mention he just threw the entire team under a bus, and if you can’t work as a team Yes. And if you can’t trust the people you’re working with
Bex: And, uh, as we see when Buck walks into the station house, this is not a team that’s going to be likely to forgive and forget easily.
Um, because as Buck walks in, he is obviously thrilled to be there, and he tries saying hi to [00:26:00] everybody as he walks through, and he’s just ignored. They’ve got a good old fashioned shunning going on in there.
Alice: To be fair, he doesn’t know all their names.
Ellen: It’s funny because all the other people who are in there, yeah, they’re not, they’re not people that we know because they’re all, you know, background 118.
Bex: But they don’t even, they don’t acknowledge him at all. There’s like not even a turn to look at him. It’s just as if he doesn’t exist to them.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: And I think what really, really sort of, um, drives it home for Buck is that he gets to sort of the middle of the, The garage, the station house, where that beam where the loft of the, it’s like the bottom of the loft, where they would normally hang a banner, it’s just empty.
There’s no banner up there. Even though it’s his first day back.
Alice: Yep. There’s no welcome back Buck. There’s nothing.
Bex: Nope. Which, I mean, like, what did he expect? [00:27:00]
Ellen: Yeah, he’s not coming back under any like, you know, joyous circumstances for anybody else, really.
Bex: And even his lawyer warned him that he might not be welcomed back.
Alice: Yeah. I think he definitely, like, because they did do the smash room as well, right at the end of last episode. Yeah. And so I think he was like, oh, like, we’re fine now. Like, it’s chill. They’ll be fine.
Bex: Yeah, but he wasn’t in the same smash room as the others. He was off to the side with Lena. Yeah. Who’s not in this episode.
Alice: Poor, poor Bosco.
Bex: So even whatever tentative truce he had going on with Lena, that, that doesn’t even exist right now because apparently she’s gone back to the 137? Is that her house?
Ellen: I don’t know, you’re the numbers girl. I don’t remember.
Bex: That’s, that’s scary, that I’m the numbers girl. Um. Yep, but Hen is the only one who [00:28:00] makes any kind of overture.
Because she comes in and she’s got a little cupcake for him. It’s not a full sheet cake, it’s not a, um, you know, a bust, a fondant bust of Buck.
Ellen: Under a firetruck.
Bex: Under a firetruck. Um, but it’s, I too love, it’s a red velvet cupcake and it bleeds when you cut into it. Which I think is just perfect.
Ellen: And Buck does say that “you’re the only, you’re the only person who’s actually welcomed me back.”
She said, she says that that’s, you know, Bobby’s fault, basically. They’ve got to follow his lead.
Bex: They all feel like they have to follow his lead, yeah. Yeah.
Ellen: Buck asks her about the baby making. “Are you and Karen knocked up yet?”
Bex: Gotta throw in that storyline.
Ellen: Yeah, gotta remind everybody that, um, of what happened last week.
So she [00:29:00] doesn’t actually give anything away. She just sort of said, “Oh, it’s a long process.” So maybe they haven’t quite decided yet, but yeah. But she does sort of tell him that it’s good to have you back.
Alice: Yeah, she missed the puppy, really. You might chew your shoes and pee in the wrong places, but It’s sad when they’re not around.
Bex: So then, Eddie arrives at the station house. I don’t know where he’s been, or what’s going on. He looks absolutely exhausted. Um, so whether he’s been on shift already, or Fight Club’s keeping him up at night, I don’t know. He’s got a massive bruise on his elbow. Which Buck comments on as he walks up to Eddie.
And, oh! I just twigged um, Buck. Buck is responsible for the episode title.
Ellen: Oh.
Bex: He looks at, [00:30:00] um, Eddie’s bruise and he goes, that’s a monster.
Ellen: I think other people mentioned the, um, the word later as well. But yes.
Bex: Well, Buck’s got, Buck’s got the first, the first mention. And Eddie is so pissed at Buck and he does not want to talk to Buck at all, that he forgets who he’s talking to and he blames roughhousing with Christopher on his bruise.
Which
Alice: Like, what’s Chris doing, smacking him with his crutches?
Bex: Exactly! I mean, that kind of answer would probably blow off anybody who did not know Christopher.
But Buck is very aware who Christopher is, and is very aware that Christopher, unless Eddie was laying down and just submitting as Christopher wailed on him with his crutches, Chris is not capable of creating that kind of bruise on Eddie.
Alice: Like it’s a massive bruise.
Bex: It’s massive.
Alice: It’s like, it’s Like, yeah, it’s bad. Um, and Buck Immediately just [00:31:00] goes, “Were you playing with hammers?”
Bex: And Eddie is so cold, he just says, “There’s nothing that you need to be concerned with.”
Ellen: Yeah. What? Keep going. Ooh.
Bex: I never want Eddie to be, I never want Eddie to be pissed at me ’cause he is just so mean when he’s mad.
Alice: Chris is clearly so sad about Buck’s absence that he’s taken to violence. .
Ellen: Yeah. Oh, well, Chim’s happy that he, that Buck’s back. He says, welcome back and, and, uh buck’s sort of like, “oh, at least someone’s gonna welcome me back. Thanks, Chim.”
Bex: Bobby doesn’t acknowledge him at all. Just tries to get straight into the morning briefing. Um, but is cut off by the bell. They’re being sent out on a call. We don’t hear clearly what the call is. But everybody starts to run for the trucks. Bobby immediately tells Buck that he’s the man behind today. And so once [00:32:00] again, Even though he theoretically got his job back, even though he’s technically working today, he has to stay behind and watch as everybody leaves him again.
So, Bobby was serious. You, you questioned last week whether, um, Bobby was serious when he said, my house, my rules. Yeah. Yeah. He was serious.
Ellen: He was deadly serious.
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: Poor Buck. He looks really sad again.
Bex: It’s like, because he fought so hard and he went through all this shit to get back with his team and now his team is leaving him.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Although I can imagine the other members of the 118 are thrilled that they actually get to leave the station house and they’re not forced to stay behind.
Ellen: And they don’t have Lena to back them up, so they are a man down.
Bex: Yes, they are.
Ellen: Okay, so after, so now we’ve got to go and see what Maddie’s up to.
Bex: Uh, yes.
Ellen: So apparently Maddie has driven Tara home, [00:33:00] to her house, in her car.
Bex: Yes, because, um, Vincent made Tara buy a car that looked cool, but does not work. Which I’m guessing means it’s some kind of swanky European model. I don’t know. just like breaks down and nobody has the parts in stock.
Ellen: And apparently that’s Tara’s fault, according to Vincent.
Bex: Although the, um, the really cynical part of my brain wondered whether Maddie hadn’t done something to the car.
Alice: Oh, I did wonder that too. It’s just,
Bex: it’s so convenient. The Tara’s car breaks down. And so Maddie has to drive her home and then she wrangles an invitation into the house.
Ellen: Oh my god, yeah.
Bex: See?
Ellen: Yeah, it could be.
Bex: I’m sure, I’m sure that it was just a coincidence and Maddie is just um, taking advantage of this but
Ellen: It looks [00:34:00] bad.
Bex: It does look bad.
Ellen: Oh dear, oh well, she, she said like Tara thanks her and says “I owe you.” And Maddie’s like, “Oh you can repay me by letting me use your bathroom.” and so Tara’s like, “Okay, come on in.”
So Maddie just puts on her snooping shoes.
Bex: And Vincent very conveniently calls again, um, as they walk into the house. So Tara sort of excuses herself and locks herself away so she can be berated by her husband. Um, and yeah, Maddie decides to go snooping. She ends up the upper level and then in the main bedroom.
And I’m watching this going, what the, what are you looking for, Maddie?
Alice: Literally like a typewriter that’s just like,
Bex: Has like a sheet of paper.
Alice: “All work and no play [00:35:00] makes…” yeah.
Bex: Like what are you expecting that Vincent has a diary just laid out on the desk, with like, or like some kind of planner, like “Monday, hit my wife. Tuesday, hit my wife. Wednesday, hit gym, hit my wife.”
Ellen: Like a trash can with like a bloodied rag or something.
Yes. What? What exactly?
Bex: I mean, she even goes rifling through the medicine cabinet in the ensuite.
Ellen: And sure enough, Tara does sort of catch her at it, but she’s sort of, she’s like, “I thought you needed to use the bathroom. You walked right past,” and Maddie’s like, “Oh, sorry. I just had to see what the view was like up here.”
I don’t remember if we get to see the view?
Bex: We do get to see the view. It is beautiful.
Ellen: Okay, okay. But I have a feeling I should have rewinded and have a look.
Bex: I have a feeling that Maddie didn’t actually need to go into the master bedroom in order to see the view.
Ellen: No, no. It is a strange thing to do in a [00:36:00] stranger’s house.
Alice: Yes. But Tara, instead of throwing Maddie out, offers her a drink.
Bex: She does seem very lonely.
Alice: Yeah. Yeah. So they have some wine. Tara says that they don’t even have anything to go with it, because they don’t entertain much, because Vincent hates having people over. and this is Maddie’s opening.
Bex: Maddie commiserates. Yeah, apparently Doug was exactly the same.
Ellen: They do have a little heart to heart here about husbands and getting out kind of thing.
Bex: Yeah, I think Maddie thinks that she’s making some progress.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: That she’s at least sowed the seeds that will convince Tara that she can leave if she wants to.
Alice: When Tara was like, I Oh, is that why your ex is an ex?
Maddie’s just like, uh, no, it’s because I smashed, like, killed him. Uh, what? Um, Oh, because he kidnapped me
Bex: and then I had to stab him to death.
Alice: Yeah, um, but yeah, Maddie says she [00:37:00] spent a lot of years trying to be the perfect wife. Then she realized one day that she deserved better. And leaving’s always scary, but Maddie’s proof that there’s always a way out.
Bex: And then we cut to the start of As bad as this sounds, this is one of my favorite storylines. This is why this episode is my favorite of the Halloween episodes. Uh, although I do want to note something, um, that when I, when I’m preparing the notes that we use, when we’re talking about these episodes, I, I use a website that’s pulls the closed captions, um, from somewhere and the closed captions usually make a note of what song is playing.
When a needle drop happens when it, in the episode. When I was watching it on Disney, this scene starts with an REO Speedwagon song. But, when I was looking at the transcript, it says that it’s a [00:38:00] Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song, “American Girl”. And when I went to, there’s a website that I’ve used and that um, one of our followers has recommended, uh, which is Tunefinds, which kind of lists all of the music that’s used in TV shows and they have a, a page for 9-1-1.
That one also just mentions REO Speedwagon. So I’m wondering where the Tom Petty song came from. And whether in the original, like when it originally aired, maybe it was a Tom Petty song? Because I’m wondering if perhaps if, uh, they got the license to use Tom Petty and then, um, considering what happened in this scene, maybe the people that granted the license went, no, hang on.
You didn’t tell us that that’s what this song is going to be associated with. And so they pulled permission to use the song. So for streaming services and for everything else, it’s now REO Speedwagon. And I don’t know.
Ellen: Or, I mean, this also [00:39:00] was, um, aired, like, five years ago, so it could be that it’s, whatever permission they had has expired.
Bex: I don’t know. There, it’s, it’s sometimes weird that, um, the licences are very specific, like, it might have been, they had the licence for it to air on television, but it, they didn’t get the licence.
Ellen: Oh, for streaming it might be different.
Bex: For streaming? Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Yeah. Because I just watched, I just saw a TikTok today about Wayne’s World.
Yeah. Okay. So, like, um, Led Zeppelin gave them permission to use a tiny, tiny snip of “Stairway to Heaven” for the theatrical release, but they didn’t give them permission, or they wanted more money for the rights to use “Stairway to Heaven” for the television release.
So they had to pull the, the music from that scene, um, and then they got permission again for when it went to streaming so they were able to put it back.
Ellen: How weird.
Bex: Anyway. So that was in my head when I saw this this [00:40:00] Tom Petty /REO Speedwagon thing going on. I just wondered what was going on. Because it’s not exactly a pleasant scene.
Ellen: No.
Bex: It starts off fine enough. We have a woman driving. It’s nighttime. She’s talking on speakerphone about some kind of party that she is planning.
I don’t know if it’s her party or if she’s just planning it. She’s conferring with somebody on the phone about the details for the party. Um She does mention that she has to get a costume, so I’m guessing it’s some kind of Halloween party. Uh, when suddenly she looks up and she sees that there is a cyclist on the road in front of her.
So she swerves to avoid the cyclist, but instead hits a jogger, and he goes over her bonnet and straight through her windshield. And as that happens, she slams on the brake, her head slams into the steering wheel.
Ellen: Yeah, when [00:41:00] she kind of wakes up again, she’s got blood all over her face and her ears are ringing, she sort of comes to, and then she just drives off.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: She doesn’t even notice.
Bex: And see, the song is still playing at this point, which is why I wonder whether Tom Petty decided he did not want his song to be associated with a woman. In a gruesome hit and run.
Ellen: Maybe!
Bex: REO Speedwagon apparently okay with it, Tom Petty apparently not so much.
Ellen: It’s like, literally a hit and run, she runs away with the body.
Bex: Yeah, she runs all the way back home, parks her car in the garage, and then gets out and goes inside. And he is still in the windshield, and just before it cuts to commercial, we hear him take a breath. So he’s still alive. I So it was, it was bad enough when we thought he was just a dead body hanging in her windshield, but now [00:42:00] it’s a very badly injured, but still alive man hanging through her windshield.
Ellen: I mean, it’s, yeah, I don’t know how hard she hit her head, but obviously extremely hard.
Bex: I’m going to say extremely hard.
Ellen: Yes.
Bex: Uh, this is a, um, this storyline is a Ripped from the Headlines storyline, um, but the true story is very, very different from what happens in the episode, so I think we might leave discussion of that until after we’ve seen this entire storyline play out.
Ellen: Okay. All right, so we’re going to go to a mall, um, where Maddie and Chim are having a date. It’s date night.
Bex: Did you get that?
Ellen: No, where are we, why are we going to the mall?
Bex: Let’s go to the mall. It’s Robyn Sparkles!
Ellen: Okay.
Bex: Oh no, we’ve lost her.
Alice: So, just, just to be clear, you want everyone to go to the mall today?
Bex: Yes. [00:43:00]
Ellen: No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Bex: Oh no! It’s a How I Met Your Mother reference.
Ellen: Oh, okay, okay.
Bex: Robin was a teenage Canadian pop star.
Alice: Wow, spoilers.
Bex: And her, how old is this show? I swear there is a statute of limitations on spoilers.
Alice: It’s also in season two of the show, so like. It’s old. It was 2006.
Ellen: Oh wow.
Bex: And Robin’s, um, like number one hit was “Let’s Go to the Mall”, where she sings about going to the mall, funnily enough.
Alice: It was also in, um, the, like, what’s it called, like the Just Dance or Let’s Dance games?
Bex: No, no. I have it. I do have that edition. I can do the dance to “Let’s Go to the Mall.”
Alice: You can’t see me, but I’m doing the dance.
Bex: So yes, we’ve gone to the mall. It is date night, [00:44:00] and I think the implication is that Maddie and Chim went to a horror movie because they
Alice: Yeah, they went to see a movie called Halloween. Yeah, they yeah. I don’t know if it’s a real movie. I didn’t actually look that up.
Bex: Please tell me you’re joking.
Ellen: I’m sure there are plenty of movies called Halloween.
Bex: You don’t know the Halloween series? Michael Myers?
Alice: Oh, is that just called Halloween?
Bex: Yeah!
Alice: The Michael Myers movie?
Bex: Yeah, it’s Halloween.
Alice: Oh, there you go. Well, yeah.
Bex: Oh my god. So yeah, so Chim
Alice: Okay, never mind that.
Bex: Chim and Maddie are discussing, um, Halloween and the entire franchise when they run into Tara and Vincent. And it’s the most awkward interaction because Maddie is
Alice: Oh, it’s so uncomfortable.
Bex: Maddie is clearly thrown. that she’s meeting Tara. So she’s like, “Tara, what are you doing here?”
And [00:45:00] Tara’s like, “Oh, what are you guys doing here?” And she’s talking to Tara and she’s, you know, “Nice to see you again, Vincent,” Chim is just standing there waiting for someone to talk to him or introduce him or introduce themselves to him. Um, until he eventually goes, “Oh, and, uh, hi, I’m Howie,” actual person here.
Somebody pay attention to me.
Ellen: And so then Maddie goes, “Oh, yeah, sorry. Um, Tara is my trainer at the gym.” And Chim’s like, “Oh, I didn’t know that you were working with a trainer.”
Bex: And Maddie’s like, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Which thankfully Chim picks up on and he continues the conversation, reveals that he might not be a member of that gym, but he has been there many times before, usually to rescue people who have hurt themselves with the weights. Is this the same gym that [00:46:00] had the guy that cooked himself in the tanning bed, or is this a different franchise?
Ellen: Oh, that was too long ago.
Alice: Surely a different one.
Ellen: There must be heaps of gyms in LA, surely. In their area.
Alice: I mean, yeah, there’s heaps in my area, and I live in the middle of nowhere, so.
Okay, different.
Ellen: I mean, they could have used the same set.
Bex: I wasn’t even looking at it closely. It’s just that the last time that we’ve, the only time we’ve seen them attend a call at the gym was that one. So Tara notes that, um, It’s so great, Chim being a paramedic and Maddie being a nurse. And Chim’s just like, wait, wait, you’re a nurse now?
Alice: Chim’s like, when did you get a new job? When did you, like, how long were we in that movie for?
Bex: What the hell is going on here? Did I walk out into an alternate reality? Um, And Maddie’s, like, realizing that [00:47:00] she needs to retreat, she needs to get herself out of this situation. She’s like, “Yeah, you know what, we actually have to go early because Chim has an early shift, you know, tomorrow, Halloween, big day.”
So they all go their separate ways. And then Chim starts demanding answers.
Ellen: Mm hmm. It’s like, “Who is that and why does she think that you’re a nurse?” And Maddie’s like, “Oh, it’s complicated.” Chim calls her out on it.
Alice: What do you think Chim’s first thought here was though? Because like, Maddie’s literally acting like she’s, like, been cheating.
Ellen: Yeah, I mean, they’ve just had this conversation about not keeping secrets from each other.
Bex: Yeah, and she is keeping a very big secret.
Ellen: Yeah, and so finally she actually confesses that Tara called 9-1-1 five times in two months, which is a pattern. And Chim’s like, “You. [00:48:00] You sought her out?”
Bex: Yeah, Chim realises what has happened and what’s going on.
Um, but he kind of
Ellen: He gets very, sort of, aggressive with her. Like, not aggressive, but like
Bex: It’s, I don’t want to say it’s an overreaction, but he tells her that by lying to her, by inserting herself into her life under false pretenses, she’s no better than Doug. Because that’s exactly what Doug did to him before he stabbed him and left him to bleed out for six months on Maddie’s front doorstep.
Yeah, that’s And that’s, that’s, that’s harsh, Chim.
Alice: That’s not a good comparison.
Ellen: Yeah, Maddie does say, “This is, it’s not like Doug. I’m trying to help her.” But, um, Chim says “You can’t help someone by lying to them. You already know that, otherwise you would have told me about this creepy stalker plan weeks ago.”
It’s like, whoa, Chim, okay.
Bex: Yeah, and any, any headway that he had with trying to help [00:49:00] Maddie, she’s slammed up all her defenses. She’s like, that’s not fair. And she tries to walk away. But Chim stops her, grabs her hand and tells her that, okay, he acknowledges that he’s not being fair, but she’s not being fair to Tara either.
She needs to tell Tara the truth. But, Maddie is not willing. She’s got this plan, she’s not willing to deviate from it. She’s like, “I will tell her, like, eventually.” And so Chim gets pissed. He’s like, “You know what? We probably should go, you know? I have that early shift in the morning, remember? Halloween! Big day!” And then storms off.
Ellen: Yeah, and as he says that, he says it quite loudly, and there’s a guy standing behind him who, like, looks over and kind of looks back at the person he’s there with and goes, what was that all about, you know? I was looking at it going, whoa, [00:50:00] that guy heard it.
Alice: The extra’s really earning his money.
It
Ellen: was a funny reaction, yeah.
Bex: He’s really intense about Halloween.
Ellen: Yeah.. Okay, so we’re going back to the station. This must be the next day when, you know, it is Halloween and they’re having the next shift. Um, Bobby is asking someone if they can handle it. There is a sort of teal colored bucket with lollies in it. Sweets.
Sorry, lollies is the local lingo.
Bex: The Teal Bucket is specifically a project that was set up in the U. S. by the, I think it was a local one that started in Tennessee, but it’s become national through the Food Allergy Resource and Education Program, which they’re supposed to start You’re supposed to use the teal buckets to give out non food treats for trick or treaters, to make trick or treating more inclusive.
Because even though Bobby…
Ellen: For kids with food allergies.
Bex: Yeah, Bobby has loaded up the [00:51:00] teal bucket with what he says is nut free, dairy free, egg free, soy free, and gluten free treats, there is still going to be somebody who can’t eat any of that. So the teal bucket is supposed to be non food treats. So that kids who can’t either eat food at all, so perhaps they’ve got like those, um, they’re fed with like food tubes.
I can’t remember what the medical term is for that. Um, but if they can’t eat food, they can still pick something out of a bucket on when they go trick or treating.
Ellen: Oh, that’s great.
Bex: Um, but Bobby has apparently not done his homework properly because he’s got Like, allergy safe foods, but it’s not as fully inclusive as the Teal Bucket Project is supposed to be.
Um, but I guess the kids who can’t eat anything out of the Teal Bucket could get a smoke alarm, because there are boxes of smoke alarms on [00:52:00] the table as well. And apparently, Buck is the one who is responsible for handing all of that out.
Ellen: He says, “who are these for? Kids who are allergic to fun?”
but they’re for the parents, apparently.
Bex: Along with pamphlets on fire safety.
Ellen: Yeah, yay. Um, but, Buck is like, “So how long are you planning to keep punishing me for?”
Bex: Oh, Buck. He just keeps pushing.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Like, dude, you literally just got back. Give Bobby some time. And that’s pretty much what Bobby says to him, you know, like, “Buck, someday you’re going to figure out when to stop pushing. I hope we’re both alive to see it.
Ellen: And then Chimney hears this and he comes over to tell him, you know, give him a talk about how when he first joined, he wasn’t allowed to see. He goes, “The only time I saw the outside of the building was at the start and end of my shift. Because I wasn’t [00:53:00] allowed to go anywhere.”
Bex: Completely different reasons though. Buck is being kept in the station house for his own safety. Chim was being kept in the station house because the fire captain was a racist arsehole.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: But, same, like, different reasons, same consequence. Um, but, Chim coped with it in a very different way from the way Buck is coping with it. Chim was very productive, as we saw in “Chimney Begins”.
Ellen: Yeah, did all the cleaning and practiced his, getting his gear on and stuff.
Bex: Did all his flashcards.
Ellen: Yeah, yep. And then eventually someone took pity on him and let him go out in the ambulance. And that was the end of that.
Bex: Thank you, Eli.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: But what Buck takes from that is that he should just suck it up and be patient like Bobby said.
And Chim’s like, “Yeah, he’s, he’s not always wrong. Except about the smoke detectors. Nobody’s going to want the smoke detectors.” [00:54:00] But Buck says that he is going to hand them out anyway, Captain’s orders.
Ellen: Chim asks him if he’s talked to Maddie today and Buck’s like, “No, I think she’s working.” And I wonder if Chim’s been trying to get in touch with her and she’s been avoiding him.
Bex: Possibly.
Ellen: But yeah, Buck walks off and then Chim hears a crow and he looks, he turns around and there’s a crow on top of the ambulance again. And he’s like, “Are you a good omen or a bad omen? Because I googled you and the old wives are kind of divided on this.” But um, he’s like sort of looking around going, “Is anyone else seeing this?”
And Eddie’s like, “Seeing what?” Then the crow’s gone again.
Bex: And then so is Eddie, because I swear he showed up just to ransack the snack table. Because I think we see just for a second, him grabbing snacks out of this giant bucket. and shoving them in his [00:55:00] pocket as he walks away.
Alice: Beating the shit out of people every night is hungry work, okay?
Ellen: Buck wasn’t there to, um, to, you know,
Bex: slap his hand out of the way?
Ellen: Alright, we’re back to the lady with the man in the windshield. Um, it’s the morning, she’s leaving for work. She has a huge lump on her forehead. It looks awful.
Bex: She also has two different shoes on her feet.
Ellen: Oh, does she?
Bex: Yeah, she has a black shoe and like an apricot colored shoe. Yeah, I don’t think she’s quite thinking straight. No.
Alice: No, cause like, she forgot “the list”.
Bex: I love this. So she gets in the car, windshield guy is still there, and there’s, she puts her bag down and there’s a moment where she goes like, “Oh my god!” And we think, as the audience, Oh my god, she’s finally realized windshield guy is there.
And she’s like, “The list! You forgot the list!” And then she has to get back out of the car, walk [00:56:00] back to her house, get the list, then she gets back in the car and drives to work. Still has not acknowledged Windshield Guy, who is still alive. And at this point it’s getting almost ridiculous because she literally turns and puts her bag on the passenger seat right in front of his head, and yet still does not acknowledge him.
Ellen: Yeah, I’m not sure if Look, it’d be, like, I know the rest of the story is based in a real thing that happened, but I’m pretty sure that Like, I don’t know if you can hit your head so far, so hard that you can function perfectly normally, but you can’t see
Bex: I don’t know, the brain is, the brain is weird Yeah, the brain can do autopilot things And we do, like, we do find out at the end that she has quite a serious brain bleed So, depending on where that, um, that bleed is happening, which part of her brain is impacted, I, yeah, [00:57:00] maybe she just literally does not see him.
Yeah. Or she sees him but her brain just does not compute.
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah, I mean the windscreen’s all smashed up as well, so you’d think that she would be having trouble driving because she can’t see, but obviously she can see enough.
Bex: Yeah, it’s kind of just spider webbed around him, but the section where she’s looking out from is, is fine.
Maybe she’s just like completely lost vision on that side of her head on like, so the contusion is on above her left eye, so maybe she’s completely lost vision in the right side of her body or something.
Alice: Hmm. Well, my uncle gets, what are they called, they’re like absence seizures, and apparently he’s had them for like years and years, went to the doctor and then forgot that he got them.
Ellen: Oh.
Alice: But he found out again recently because he like got home, got out of the car, and his car was all smashed up [00:58:00] because he’d driven into a parked car on the way home.
Ellen: Oh my god.
Alice: And didn’t notice.
Ellen: Wow.
Alice: Yeah, he had no idea.
Bex: Well, there we go.
Ellen: Does he like, does he just lose time or is…
Alice: well, his body just keeps, like it just feels, the brain just fills in the gaps.
Ellen: That’s terrifying though.
Alice: I know, right? And apparently it just looked like he’d, like, zone, like, he’d be talking to someone and then just zone out for a bit. Huh. And everyone’s like, oh yeah, he’s just always done it. And then it wasn’t until he literally drove into a parked car that, um,
Ellen: They worked out what it was.
Alice: Yeah, he, like, went to the doctor and they put, like, brain monitors and stuff on him and they were just like, ah, yeah, you’re having seizures.
Ellen: Oh my god. Okay, so.
Alice: He doesn’t have to drive anymore, so that’s, um.
Bex: Yeah. So perhaps not as
Alice: But yeah, so brains are weird, is what I’m saying.
Bex: Perhaps this storyline is, this aspect of this storyline is not as far fetched as we would think.
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah, so we go, like, she’s driving, she is driving to work, but we go to a taco [00:59:00] shop where a family is sitting outside a table, sort of near, near the curb, eating, and um, cars are driving past. And the, one of the cars they see has like a pretend arm sticking out of the boot as a Halloween decoration.
And the, and one of the little, one of the little kids is like really excited by that one. That’s so cool. Look at that one. But his big sister is not impressed. She’s like, “It’s sick. It’s perpetuates a culture of socially acceptable violence.” Um, and I’m like, how you don’t look like you’re old enough to be like, so upset about this.
But anyway, uh, she, Like, she, she’s like, “Oh my God.” And, um, they have seen the lady pull up at the intersection with the guy in the windscreen. And the little brother is like, “That level of violence is totally acceptable to me.” [01:00:00]
Bex: And they, I think they are, for a moment, they’re all willing to accept that it is a Halloween decoration, except they then all see the guy’s legs start to move.
And while the kids are still like, “Oh my God, that is awesome,” The parents are like, “Did you just…” “Yeah, I,” “Do you think…” “I don’t know, but I’m calling 9-1-1.”
Ellen: Yeah. They have like a half a conversation that somehow conveys the entire thing. It was great. All right. So Maddie takes the call and the man says… this, this calls a little different because we actually see them.
It’s not just the voice over the little. What do you call that thing? The sound wave thing? Yeah. You actually see them speaking on the phone to each other. So he says, “I, hello, I think there’s a body sticking out of someone’s car windshield.” And Maddie’s like, “I’m sorry? Are you sure it’s not a decoration?”
But yeah, the man explains that they saw it move. So they think he’s alive. So they take all this, all the [01:01:00] details that they can think of.
Bex: There was actually a very productive 9-1-1 call, because they managed to give a, um, a location. They managed to give a description of the car. The wife even got partial plates.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Which
Alice: Yeah, go these people.
Bex: Um, which then Maddie is then able to pass over to police. It’s like, all units be on the lookout for a sedan with partial plate number with a man in the windshield. Of course. And the police dispatch is like, “Is this real?” Maddie’s like, “I don’t know. Find the car and get back to me.”
Um, and because it is Halloween, um, everyone at dispatch has dressed in costume.
Ellen: Oh yeah. When we see Maddie talking, we can see that she’s wearing like little cat ears.
Bex: Hers is the, hers is the, the laziest costume in the world. She’s got a headband with lace cat ears and a jumper that just says, I’m a cat.[01:02:00]
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: But then Josh
Ellen: She’s wearing all black.
Bex: But then Josh shows up, and he is, he looks like Captain Feathersword.
Ellen: Yes! Oh my god, I laughed so hard when he turned up, I’m like what are you wearing?.
Bex: Complete with a little parrot on his shoulder and an eye patch on one eye.
Ellen: Yeah. So he, he tells Maddie that he, today he’s had three suspected hangings, two possible decapitations, and one truly convincing evisceration, all of which were Halloween decorations.
Bex: Which kind of explains why Maddie is so sceptical about the call about a body in a windshield. Yeah. Because if you’ve got, you know, three suspected hangings and decapitations and eviscerations. Um, kudos to the, um, to the people of LA for stepping up their Halloween decorations. Yeah.
Ellen: Yes. I would love to go over there around Halloween time to see what everything’s like.
Sounds amazing.
Bex: It does. [01:03:00] It puts my little Frederick Bobbington skeleton to shame. My one little skeleton.
Ellen: I do enjoy your skeleton.
Alice: Little?
Bex: True, he’s almost as tall as I am.
Ellen: He gives a shit about her costume.
Bex: Yeah. and then flounces off. Because Maddie goes back to answering calls rather than talk to him. So while one Buckley sibling is taking calls about possible, um, Halloween decorations, the other Buckley is handing out candy to people who are visiting the 118.
Ellen: And he’s forcing kids only to take two bits of candy.
Alice: Yeah, apparently the theme of this episode is shit kids.
Bex: They’re not the nicest kids in this episode, are they?
Ellen: No, but he tells the kid that it’s the rule, the rules that you can only have two pieces and the kid’s like, “That’s a stupid rule.” It’s like, wow. Okay. It’s like, [01:04:00] “What are you supposed to be anyway?”
And Buck’s like, “I’m a firefighter.”
Bex: The kid like takes a knife and shoves it under Buck’s ribs and twists it and says, “How come you’re not out fighting fires?” And then we hear the 118 are pulled up. They haven’t pulled into the. Cause it’s full of kids, but they’ve just parked out the front and the kid very pointedly goes, “Oh, look, mom, the real firefighters are here,” And turns and gives Buck another look, just shoves that knife up a little bit higher.
Ellen: So Buck decides to, uh, um, you know, hit back basically. And it’s like, The mom’s like, “Oh, is he trying to get more candy out of you?” And Buck says, “No, he’s fine. In fact, here, take a smoke detector. It’ll keep him safe until his parole hearing.” It’s like whoa. Okay.
Alice: Just, well, the kid is dressed as a prisoner.
Bex: The kid is dressed as a prisoner. Um, and as he says this, Bobby has entered. So [01:05:00] all he kind of sees and hears is Buck handing out the smoke detectors as he was ordered to do. So, um, he gets a “Nice work, Buckley” for that. And then Buck tries to get Eddie to help him. Eddie walks past and Buck’s like, very, like, “Oh, Eddie, do you want to give me a hand with all this?”
Um, and Eddie just goes, just sort of stops and turns. Says, “No, you’ve got this. You’re at 100%. The lawsuit proved that, right?” And then just walked off again. And, oh, damn, Edmundo. Oh.
Ellen: He just wants to be his friend again.
Bex: Once again, I never want Eddie Diaz to be mad at me, cause damn.
Alice: Yeah. Poor Buck. Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but poor Buck.
Bex: Uh, I, yeah, I don’t know, I think it’s, yes, he kind [01:06:00] of,
Alice: Their son needed him, okay?
Ellen: I feel like Eddie has a lot of issues at the moment.
Alice: Eddie couldn’t even call him to bail him out of jail, if that was something that happened.
Bex: Eddie is taking this so personally.
Ellen: Yes. He’s got a lot of crap that hasn’t been addressed yet, I think.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: That’s what it feels like.
Bex: Yes. Anyway, elsewhere in LA, um, more trick or treating is going on.
We’re gonna hang out with, um, this one guy and just watch him hand out candy to multiple groups of people. Um, lots of kids with lots of, lots of groups of kids with lots of amazing costumes. This guy seems to be having a really good time. Um, but he opens his door again to find one girl standing on his doorstep.
by herself, um, and she looks terrible.
Ellen: Yeah, she looks awful.
Bex: She could, she could [01:07:00] be from a, like, a costume from a horror movie, in which case kudos to her for, you know, going to the extra length, but it doesn’t look like a costume.
Ellen: Yeah, her wrists are all, like, cut up, like she’s got chains around them.
Bex: Yeah, she’s got a handcuff bracelet on one wrist.
The other wrist is, you can see the ligature marks from where the, another bracelet has been rubbing and bruising her. She’s got blood. Um, she’s wearing this really thin looking sleeveless cotton dress, which I don’t know what the temperature gets to in LA at night in October. Um, but I still think that that’s inappropriate clothing to be out in public in.
Um. And as the guy is racking his brain trying to guess what her costume is, um, she just keels over.
Ellen: Yeah, she collapses into his arms, basically.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: Doesn’t look well at all. She’s very pale. So [01:08:00] he calls out for someone to call 9-1-1, so. But we don’t get to hear that one.
Bex: No, because Maddie’s shifts over.
But she’s around long enough for Josh to give one more dig at her costume. Because she’s taken her headband off, um, and Josh bounces over and says, Oh, I barely recognized you without those glasses, Clark Kent. And Maddie just says, shouldn’t you be off walking a plank somewhere?
Ellen: Yeah, she says he’s gonna go to hit three parties before midnight.
And Josh is like, yeah, you bet I am, girl.
Bex: That sounds exhausting.
Alice: Yeah, no thanks.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Uh, but the reason that Josh had bounced over there was not to brag about his stamina or make fun of Maddie’s costume, but to tell her that Sue was looking for her, um, that she was talking to someone in the conference room.
So Maddie heads towards the conference room, and she doesn’t find Sue, but she finds [01:09:00] Tara.
Ellen: Uh oh.
Bex: Who, in reality, would not be there because Like, I don’t know that if someone, if you believe someone is stalking you that you would, you know, go to their workplace where you have a possibility of running into them in order to lodge a complaint against them.
But for the drama
Alice: Not only that, but like, what clearance did she get to go to
Bex: Yeah, she’s on the dispatch floor. Like, I, I doubt that Chim would have clearance to be there and yet they let a civilian walk in. But for the drama,
Alice: For the drama,
Bex: Tara is there to lodge a complaint against the 9-1-1 dispatcher, i. e. Maddie, who has been stalking her. And she’s got a sheaf of papers in her hand, slaps it down in front of Maddie, and it’s articles about Maddie, including her photo, which clearly identifies her as a 9-1-1 dispatcher. So apparently, Chim’s performance when they ran [01:10:00] into Tara and Vincent the other night I’m going to say Vincent.
Vincent picked up on that something was wrong, and he’s put a seed of doubt in Tara’s mind that not all is right with Maddie, and the two of them have worked out together, or Vincent has worked out, or he’s pushed Tara to find out that Maddie is not who she says she is.
Ellen: She probably remembered that Maddie was like snooping about in their bedroom and stuff then too.
Bex: Yes. Yes.
Ellen: And she, Maddie does try and explain herself. She’s, she’s like, “I, I wanted to be your friend. I’ve been trying to help you, um, because you’re trapped in a marriage with an abusive man.” Tara’s like, “I don’t need help.” She’s, you know, very sure about that.
Bex: Maddie counters with, “You called 9-1-1 five times.”
Tara is [01:11:00] adamant that she is not one of those women. There’s obviously a picture in Tara’s mind of what an abused wife looks like. And that’s not her. But Maddie’s got an answer for that too. She’s like, “Yeah, I used to tell myself that too. I didn’t want to admit what was happening because I felt ashamed.”
Ellen: Yeah, she’s like, she’s like, “Just tell me the truth and I’ll, I swear I’ll leave you alone.” Tara’s like, “There’s nothing to tell. Stay away from me.” Um, Maddie’s still fighting about it, about it, but Tara walks away and Sue is like behind her and she’s dressed all in black. She’s like got this witch hat on and everything.
She looks amazing. But she says, “Maddie, we need to talk.” And she’s extremely serious.
Bex: Yes. But before we can see what Sue has to talk about, we’re gonna go back to the hospital and the [01:12:00] trick or treating girl, who has been admitted to the hospital and the nurse is filling Athena in on her injuries. She is apparently severely malnourished, but they can’t tell any more than that because she’s still unconscious.
There’s cuts on her arms that appear to be from broken glass, there’s significant bruising on her wrists and ankles, most likely from shackles, uh, but there are no bruises or lacerations on her feet, which tends to, which they indicate, which they believe indicates that she didn’t walk very far. She apologizes for not being helpful, but Athena says, no, you’ve given me a place to start.
The, I guess the idea being if she, if her feet weren’t all torn up, she can’t have walked that far from. Where they found her. So they’re back, they go back to that street.
Ellen: Yeah, and the sort of other people in her group, they’re trying to, they’re gonna go and knock on doors and talk to everyone to see if [01:13:00] they can work out where she’s come from.
And then one of the officers is like, what, asks them if they’ve seen anything unusual. Like, it’s Halloween, everything’s unusual.
Bex: It’s Officer Williams! I mean, some other officer. It’s Officer Williams. We’ve seen him before.
Ellen: Yeah, we have. I don’t remember anyone’s name. I’m Bobby in this case. I know no one’s name.
Bex: I like to find out the names of the people that we see regularly. I still have not found red headed policewoman’s name, but she’s next on my list. But I’ve made a note of Officer Williams. But Athena sort of looks around at the street, which is all decked out for Halloween, big lights and inflatable decorations, and says that maybe the idea is not to be seen.
So it’s not look for anything unusual, look for anything that’s not unusual. Let’s find out which of the houses isn’t feeling the holiday spirit. [01:14:00] So, apparently, not decorating your house for Halloween is now suspicious.
Ellen: It’s, it just happens to be the right call.
Alice: Like, the whole of Australia.
Ellen: But.
Bex: Everyone, that would not, that would not float in Australia because, you know, it’s, obviously in this street, it’s just that one house that has not decorated.
In Australia, it would be that one house that has decorated and everyone else looks normal.
Ellen: Yeah. She does find one house that is completely dark.
Bex: Yeah,
Ellen: like it looks like no one’s home.
Bex: Yeah, because it’s not only are there no decorations at the front, but there are no lights on in the house at all.
Ellen: And, and when she knocks on the door, there’s no answer, but she does go around the back of the house and goes up to the back door and it has a hole smashed in it.
Um, so
Bex: that gives her probable cause to enter the house.
Ellen: Yeah, so she does sneak around the house. It’s a bit of a mess. Like, it’s a big mess. [01:15:00]
Alice: Yeah, it’s disgusting.
Ellen: And there’s stuff everywhere. But she hears a noise and goes down into the basement and kind of screws up her nose at a bad smell. And, she finds kids down there that are chained up.
Bex: Yep, the basement, there’s no light on down there and the kids in fact, uh, look like they haven’t seen light for a while because they are extremely sensitive just to the light of Athena’s flashlight.
But there are beds down there and there are kids in shackles and chains being chained to the bed.
We go to commercial, when we come back, they’ve called for reinforcements in the form of the 118 and they’ve got all the kids out of the basement and Chim and Hen are checking them out and Chim comes to Bobby and Athena and reports that they’re, all the kids are in various stages of dehydration, malnutrition, infections and diseases that we probably [01:16:00] invented the cure for hundreds of years ago.
And, uh, Eddie has been doing a sweep of the house. I don’t know why Eddie was doing a sweep of the house, I would have thought LAPD would have been doing that, but he comes back and reports that there is no gas, there is no running water, um, all he found in the house was canned food, bibles, and textbooks from the 1950s.
Alice: Um, so Hen managed to get one of the kids to talk and the kids weren’t abducted, they live there and they’re siblings. Their parents did it to them.
Bex: Yeah, so this is another one of those, um, ripped from the headline cases.
Ellen: Oh, that’s so sad. Do you want to talk about it now, or will we just finish the scene first?
Bex: There’s not much left in this scene, so I guess we’ll finish this scene up, and then we can talk about the case. So an Oldsmobile comes screeching up, dodges past all of the emergency vehicles, and pulls into the driveway. Um, there’s two, there’s two, the parents, I guess, of [01:17:00] the kids come out and they’re frantic.
They’ve been out looking for Bethany, who is the girl in the hospital, and demands to know what the police and the paramedics are doing with their other children.
Ellen: Yeah, they said they’ve been looking for her, they’ve been looking for Bethany for hours. She’s lost and alone, and Bobby says, “Alone, just like that you left the rest of your children?”
And the dad says, “They were secure. They were safe.” It’s like, oh no.
Bex: I mean, yes, but no.
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. Your daughter is in the hospital. And then Athena does say, “We’re taking the others there, um, until the child, the family services people get here and you two are going to jail. Read ’em their rights.”
It’s like, well, Are they going to jail? Probably. But I’m not sure if you’re supposed to say that before you arrest [01:18:00] somebody? But anyway.
Bex: This is Athena.
Ellen: It sounded, it sounded good for the drama.
Bex: Yes. It’s fine.
Alice: For the drama.
Bex: Uh, I mean, the parents in real life who did this to their children, yeah, they went to jail.
Ellen: As they deserve.
Bex: I think they’re still in jail.
Alice: They are indeed.
Bex: They were sentenced to life imprisonment in 2019. And they were, according to the Wikipedia, there was a possibility of parole after 25 years. So, yeah, they’re not getting out anytime soon. Yeah. So this is the Turpin case in California.
Ellen: And how many children did they have locked up down there?
Bex: Thirteen.
Ellen: Thirteen children?
Bex: Yep, the youngest was two, the eldest was twenty nine.
Ellen: Oh, wow.
Bex: And the, um, Bethany, the child that Bethany is based on was seventeen year old Jordan, who managed to break out [01:19:00] and, um, raise the alarm with the neighbours.
Ellen: Oh, how awful.
Bex: Yeah. Yeah. Of course, they’re Evangelical Christians.
Ellen: Right. And they were just keeping them there to keep them safe? Or was there something worse at play? I almost don’t want to ask about it.
Bex: I don’t know that there was I haven’t really looked into it beyond what Wikipedia case. It’s a horrible case, but I believe that it was just horrible cases of neglect.
I don’t think that there were any other, I don’t think the children were abused in any other way. Okay. But, oh no, but they were beaten as well. There we go.
Ellen: Okay. But to be locked up for 29 [01:20:00] years or whatever is just awful.
Bex: And what was worse was that the, like, the kids got out. So Jordan raised the alarm, police came, they got the kids out.
They put the, the younger ones into a foster home. And then the foster families abused them.
Ellen: Oh, God.
Bex: So they got taken from one horrible situation and put into another horrible situation. Um, But the older ones who didn’t have to go into the system, they didn’t end up much better. Um, Jordan did an interview where she was saying that, so she was 17 when she was found.
So the older ones were released, but they had never been to school. They had very limited education, they had no knowledge [01:21:00] of the outside world, no life skills, um, no place to stay, and they were just let out into the world. There was money that got raised for them by the general public that they were not given access to.
Ellen: Okay, so they just got screwed in every way.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: Oh, how awful.
Alice: Yeah, these poor kids.
Bex: So hopefully the, um, the kids in the, in the, in the 9-1-1 episode have a happier ending than these kids. Cause this is,
and it’s still kind of ongoing. So the Wikipedia says that they were in court in September of last year, suing the former foster families.
Alice: Nice. Yeah. Like this is recent. This isn’t even like ages ago where the system wasn’t. set up to support this?
Ellen: Well it can’t have been, like, it couldn’t have been too long before this episode was written. [01:22:00] Like, did you say they were discovered in 2017 or something?
Bex: January 2018, Jordan got out.
Ellen: Yeah, and this was, well, October 2019. So yeah, very recent.
Bex: So they, they got, their court, the court case with the parents was February of 2019. So this would have been very, very much present in the, in the news, I would think, when the writers were working on this season.
Ellen: Uh, shall we go back to Dispatch and see what
Bex: Let’s go see what Sue has to say.
Ellen: The writing, the writing is on the wall for Maddie. Hmm. Uh, so, the five calls that Tara, um, called the first four times she called, she said that it was a wrong number. And the fifth one that Maddie answered, it was a little more unclear.
And that was when Maddie thought that she, she knew that something was [01:23:00] up.
Bex: She tries to, to jump in because she, she kind of thinks that Sue is on her side at this point. She’s like, yeah, I knew that there was something wrong with that fifth call. And Sue’s just like, “I’m just going to stop you there. This conversation is not going the direction you think it’s going. This is not me supporting you, this is me telling you that as far as I can prove, um, Dispatch received several calls from Tara. You took one of them and then you started stalking her.”
So she’s willing to call that a coincidence, but there aren’t going to be any more coincidences. And she pretty much orders Maddie into therapy. She says she has to get a psychological assessment, which I think is a regular thing for dispatchers, which is probably a good thing. The amount of trauma that they must go through on a daily basis.
It’s a good idea to continually check in on them and make sure they’re doing okay. Maddie’s wasn’t due for another assessment until next year. That’s getting moved up because she’s clearly [01:24:00] not doing okay. Um, And then she orders her to go see the, the department therapist. And that she’s not allowed back on dispatch floor until she’s passed her psychological assessment, and seen her therapist.
Ellen: Okay, so back in the station house, uh, Hen is watching a news report about the children that they helped to rescue. And this is like the least transparent, like, segue into, like, telling Bobby off that I have seen so far on the show.
Bex: And I do, I do love that Bobby calls it out. Just like, you know.
Alice: And Hen doesn’t, Hen’s like, yeah, it’s really late and I’m very tired. Yeah.
Ellen: Cause yeah, she says that they, they, that Karen and her make jokes about locking Denny up for his protection. But. If “protecting him like that, it wouldn’t be for him, it’d be for us. So we’d [01:25:00] be robbing him to give ourselves peace of mind.” And then she just looks at Bobby and he’s like, “That’s not very subtle.”
Because, yeah, she’s talking about Buck.
Bex: Yeah, they’re locking Buck up not for Buck’s own protection, but for Bobby’s peace of mind.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: I do like this bit. Bobby asks if she thinks that he’s being too hard on Buck. And, Hen says, “I think Buck makes everything too hard on Buck. The boy has two settings, zero and shut up before I smack you.”
Alice: I relate to Buck so much. And Bobby says that, He, he can see that Buck’s trying, it just still seems like he doesn’t get it. Like this is all a game to him. And Hen then answers the question that we had last episode.
Bex: I guess so?
Ellen: Um, because But they don’t explicitly confirm it, [01:26:00] but it does sound like he took the job instead of the money.
Bex: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the implication.
Alice: Hen says the city offered him a huge settlement. He could be jumping out of planes or swimming somewhere with sharks if he were looking for a game, but he made his choice and he chose this job.
Bex: Okay, I’m going to take that as confirmation that he didn’t take the money.
Alice: Yeah, like I really doubt that they would have given him the money and the job.
Bex: Yeah. There might have been a small settlement. very much. But it wouldn’t have been the millions of dollars that was the initial offer.
Alice: I’m sure he got a small settlement when he, like, originally got crushed by the fire truck. Oh yeah, yeah. Because obviously he was injured.
Bex: But I’m still thinking that there would have been a small settlement here, if only because Chase would have wanted his cut, and he can’t really get a cut of Buck getting his job back.
So I’m sure he would have pushed for, you know, a little bit of money as well, just so that he would have something to take back to his partners [01:27:00] and go, Look, I got this out of this case. But it’s not the millions that I think some people in fandom have written Buck to suddenly have come into.
Ellen: Yeah. Unless you want to write a rich Buck story, in which case go right ahead.
Bex: Yeah. I mean, if that’s your headcanon, go for it. I’m going to stick with canon in which apparently he’s not rich off the department.
Ellen: It seems that way.
Bex: Yeah. But the topic of that conversation is downstairs, packing up. They’re the snack table and Eddie is also downstairs and sees Buck and it’s not quite turn and walk in the opposite direction, but it’s almost turn and walk in the opposite direction as soon as he sees Buck. And
Ellen: I love this scene.
Bex: It’s so good. Buck very pointedly. calls him, calls Eddie out and says, um, “Are you just going to keep on ghosting me? Cause Halloween is over. Just, [01:28:00] you know,” and then the most insane framing of a shot I’ve ever seen on this show. Um,
Ellen: It’s perfect.
Alice: Speaking of not being subtle.
Bex: So if you have not seen this episode for a while, um, and you’re unfamiliar with this particular shot, Most of this scene plays out with Buck on the left hand side of the screen. Eddie on the right hand side of the screen with the camera, I don’t know what it’s behind, maybe it’s a wing mirror from one of the rigs, but there is a physical barrier between Eddie and Buck, physically separating them on the screen.
Ellen: Yes.
Bex: And even the background, there is a differentiation.
Ellen: Thank you, Director Tina Mabry.
Bex: So Buck has, Buck has got very cool background. Eddie has got a very, warm, hot sort of background because he’s by the roller door with the, the night lighting behind him. [01:29:00] Buck’s on the side with the table, tennis table, but they are physically separated
Ellen: and it’s amazing. And then Eddie almost turns and walks away.
But Buck’s like, “I just want you to talk to me, even if it’s to say that you’re still mad.” And then they, so they actually have a conversation finally.
Bex: And what’s great is as they have this conversation, The barrier, as they start to open up to each other again, and then the barrier disappears. Like, not subtle at all.
Ellen: No, it’s very overt. This made me laugh so hard. He goes, when, “I’m not mad, when you decided to sue the department and make Cap the bad guy, did you ever stop for a moment to think what that could do to us?” And I’m like, to us? I mean
Bex: He met the 118, but did he really? But yes. [01:30:00]
Ellen: Sorry. But anyway, he he missed, Buck said he missed being part of the team.
And he never meant for anyone to get hurt. But, Eddie says, “Your actions, your choices, they impact the rest of us, and that’s what it means to be part of a team.”
Bex: What’s really interesting is Eddie sort of starts out by going, Yeah, there’s a lot of I statements there, and Buck’s next sent next line of dialogue is all I statements again.
Yeah. He’s like, but he I think he starts to express himself in a way that Eddie can relate to, because he says, “I was mad. I was mad at Bobby for not letting me back. I was mad at you guys for moving on without me. I was mad that there was nothing that I could do about it, and I just wanted to…” and Eddie’s like, Oh, shit, this is sounding familiar.
Right. “You just wanted to punch somebody?” And Eddie’s like, Oh, yeah. Yeah, I get that.
Ellen: Buck’s like, “I’m really, I’m sorry. Whatever it takes for you to forgive me.” [01:31:00] And Eddie says, “I forgive you.”
Bex: Yeah, Eddie forgives him just like that,
Ellen: which is just like what it means to be part of the team.
Alice: He just wants Buck to shut up at this point.
Bex: Just don’t do it again. Don’t sue us again.
Ellen: Yeah, they have like a, a little bit of a hug. back slapping kind of a, hey, kind of hug. It
Bex: starts off as one of those like weird dude bro hugs, you know, where they like, you grab hands and they pull each other in and they kind of do the one back slap and then they step back.
Except it’s,
Ellen: except Buck just grabs him.
Bex: Yeah. It’s one hand and then Buck just wraps him in a hug. And then
Ellen: He’s got a huge smile on his face.
Bex: Eddie kind of just melts into the hug for a second, and then it’s so very much, like, literally pushes Buck away and runs in case anybody saw them hugging.
Alice: I re watched this. I’m pretty sure the [01:32:00] implication is supposed to be that because Eddie’s injured.
Ellen: Oh.
Alice: Because Eddie sort of winces.
Ellen: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought that too, actually. Yes, you’re right. I remember.
Alice: Um. See, I watched this episode like a million times. Um, but yeah, he winces, and Buck kind of looks at him funny, and then Bobby interrupts.
Bex: See, I thought it was that we’ve had the everybody’s following Bobby’s lead, and at this point Eddie still thinks Bobby is pissed at Buck, so he doesn’t want anybody seeing him fraternizing with the enemy. Right. Right. So it’s like, I’m going to give him a quick hug and then I’m going to disappear before Bobby sees us.
But, you know, I think Bobby has a radar and as soon as these two get within a certain distance of each other, he’s immediately summoned to that scene. So he, he, he saw that hug. 100 percent he saw that hug. But that’s interesting. I did not pick up on that.
Alice: Like, cause yeah, Eddie sort of flinches and Buck looks at him funny and then he just bolts.
But it very [01:33:00] much looks like he’s bolting because Bobby, like, catches them hugging. Um, it’s definitely, like, I’m pretty sure the implication is supposed to be because Eddie’s injured.
Bex: Interesting. But yes, Bobby is immediately on the scene of the crime, and
Ellen: As usual.
Bex: Yeah. And he tells Buck that he can go home.
Alice: Yep. Like, Buck, because Bobby starts it with, listen, Buck, I’ve been thinking, and Buck’s like, oh my god, yes, like, here we go. I can go out. And Bobby just sends him home. Yep.
Bex: And it’s, it’s such, it’s such classic misinformation because Bobby is trying to do something nice. He’s recognized that Buck has been working hard.
Um, he recognized that he’s been hard on Buck and he wants to do something nice for him to let him go home because depending on what shift the 118 are doing at the moment, Buck either has [01:34:00] another 12 hours or potentially another 36 hours to go. So this is like a super nice gesture to let Buck go home.
Um, whereas Buck just sees it as once again, he’s being dismissed and he’s being kicked out.
Alice: Yeah, like I think it’s definitely like, Bobby’s not quite ready for Buck to jump back in the rest of tonight, but he is framing it as like, Cause he goes, I don’t want to overtax you first week back.
Bex: And I’m pretty sure that it’s, he’s going to let him go home and get some rest.
And then when he comes back for the next shift, he’ll be back in the rig with the rest of the team. But he hasn’t communicated that to Buck at all.
Ellen: He doesn’t, he doesn’t say that, yeah.
Bex: He’s just like, I know you’ve only been at work for 12 hours, but, um, yeah.
Alice: Get the fuck out of here.
Bex: Go home, I’m done with you.
Alice: Yeah, I do, I do love that, um, Bobby’s like, I don’t want to overtax you first week back. And Buck’s just like, “I stood [01:35:00] behind a table and got bullied by children.”
Bex: Yeah. Bobby’s like, “So, you earned a few hours off. Good work today.” Yeah. Doesn’t really quite understand him.
Ellen: No, he’s, he’s a bit upset but he leaves, um, stops to get petrol on the way home.
Bex: Funnily enough, it is an, it is a, it’s a branded petrol station this time. It’s not the gas station. I think it’s actually a Shell station. And I’m wondering if it’s because nothing actually bad happens at the petrol station?
Ellen: So they’re allowed to put a name on it?
Bex: So they’re allowed to put a name on it?
Yeah.
Ellen: He’s heading in. So, I don’t know if it’s all, like, gas stations over there where you have to pay first, and then pump the gas.
Bex: But he doesn’t even pull up to the pump. He pulls up in the, the, the parking spots in front of the store. Okay. So maybe he’s just going in
Ellen: Grabbing a slushie or something.
Yeah.
Alice: Yeah. Well, he was expecting to get dinner with [01:36:00] the rest of the team, and now he’s just like, well, I guess I’ll just get
Ellen: I’ll pick up some noodles on the way home.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Zap a burrito or something. But, um The, the lady with the guy in her windshield, is at, coincidentally enough, is at the same petrol station.
Ellen: Yeah, so this dude’s been stuck in the windscreen for the entire day and night.
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: And, um, he is, like, Buck sees him, and he sees, he thinks it’s a Halloween decoration at first, but then he sees the guy move. So the guy’s still alive, and he goes to run after the car.
Alice: Yeah, the guy’s straight up kicking the… like he’s kicking the bonnet of the car at this point. Like the poor guy. Yeah,
Bex: So Buck tries to get the woman to stop. She drives off. He chases after her, um, and then manages to twist his limbs back in the opposite direction.
Alice: He does the Buck run that I love so much where all four [01:37:00] limbs go in like different directions, but somehow propel him forward. And then reverse.
Bex: He runs back to his jeep and just chases after her. I’m saying jeep. I don’t even know if it is an actual jeep. It’s some kind of four wheel drive sports utility vehicle.
Alice: I’m pretty sure it’s a jeep.
Ellen: It does look like a jeep.
Bex: Okay.
Alice: Yeah, it’s, it’s a like specific part of his character is that he has a jeep.
Bex: I know somebody on, somebody on some social media platform has actually tracked all of the different vehicles that Buck’s driven. It’s, it’s, it’s a big, it’s a big trucky kind of thing. And as he’s driving, he calls 9-1-1. to report that there is a man in a windshield, in the windshield of a gold four door sedan.
And the dispatcher’s like, “Wait, we heard about that yesterday. That’s, that’s a thing? That’s actually real?” Buck’s like, “Yeah, it’s, it’s definitely real. And I think he’s still alive.”
Alice: Yeah. So if, if they had the [01:38:00] report about it yesterday, that means this guy’s been in the car for two days.
Ellen: I’m shocked that the guy’s still alive, honestly.
Alice: I mean, it’s a TV show, but yeah, like, it, it, yeah.
Ellen: Or at least hasn’t come to enough to, like, tell the lady off for not, like, I don’t know. It’s like, can you help me?
Alice: Like, bitch pull over,
Ellen: what are you doing here? I’m stuck in this, like, anyway. Yeah, he pulls, Buck pulls over, like he yells at the lady to pull over out the window, and then he kind of pulls in front of her, so she’s forced to stop.
Bex: It’s the most controlled, gentle, uh, cutting off car scene that I’ve ever seen. Which is probably because they’ve got the actors actually driving the cars, or something’s going on, they didn’t want to risk them by actually having all of it slam on the brakes in front of her and have her slam on the brakes as well.
Alice: But just the fact that, [01:39:00] so the driver, who’s still got this massive like lump on her head, gets out and just starts berating him for his driving. Yep. “You’re horrible driver, you’re right in my way.” Um, and Buck’s like, “Ma’am, I’m a firefighter.” And she goes, “well, your costume sucks.”
Bex: Yeah, because he’s in civvies, like he’s off duty at this point.
Alice: But yeah, he grabs a torch because clearly he’s just got one of those in his car. Um, cause it looks like the proper, like, pupil torch as well.
Bex: Yeah, it looks, it does look like that.
Alice: But her pupils don’t respond.
Bex: But see, I don’t know, maybe I’ve been trained by Grey’s Anatomy too much. I was expecting if she had a massive brain bleed that one of the pupils should have been blown wide open.
Um, yeah. But they seem to react normally to the lights?
Alice: They, because I checked, they just stay the same.
Bex: I was waiting for you to watch this so you could tell me if I was wrong or not.
Alice: Um, yeah, so [01:40:00] generally if you shine a bright light into someone’s eyes,
Bex: they should narrow.
Alice: The pupil will, like, pin prick, like, um, but they just stay the same.
So there’s clearly something.
Bex: Something’s wrong, but it’s not as Something’s wrong, yeah. Grey’s Anatomy did me dirty there.
Alice: And he asks if she hurt herself, and she’s like, what do you mean? But then windshield guy But the poor windshield guys, yeah.
Bex: He wakes up at this point, and Buck’s like, okay, this woman, there’s something going on with her, but he is the big, the windshield guy is the bigger priority.
So he tells
Alice: Yeah, like he’s in a windshield. Yeah!
Bex: He tells the driver just to stay where she is, and he gets into the car. And I’m not entirely sure what happens here, but it’s like he reaches for the guy or puts his hand on the windshield, but then he cuts himself on the windshield before he tells the windshield guy.
These guys never get names, by the way. I know we’re calling [01:41:00] it like Driver Lady and Windshield Guy for this entire episode, that’s because we never get names for them.
Alice: Yeah, they’re just windshield guy and driver lady.
Bex: So he tells the windshield guy that he is LAFD and that help is on the way. Um, and the 121 are dispatched to this scene and we see them, that they’ve got windshield guy, they have managed to extract him from the windshield.
They’ve got him on a stretcher. They’re taking him off to hospital. Uh, but one of the paramedics looks at Buck and says, “Do you want us to check you out?”
Ellen: Yeah, and Buck’s like, “No, I’m alright.”
Bex: Yeah, but I love that you, when we were talking about this, Ellen left, Ellen sent me a message going, sorry, did Buck like blue screen from the cute paramedic asking, Um.
Ellen: He’s like, can I check you out? And he’s just like, what? Sure.
Bex: That clown makeup’s getting pretty thick there, Ellen.
Ellen: Like, I think I was clowning, but I [01:42:00] think the idea was that he was like, “Oh no, I’m okay. Like, you don’t…”
Bex: Like he’s in shock.
Ellen: “Why do you want to check me out?”
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: But it turns out he is, his hand is all covered in blood because he got cut.
And then he goes, “Oh yeah, I’m on blood thinners.”
Bex: Yeah, because he’s, the paramedic has seen that Buck’s arm is just drenched in blood and Buck’s like, “Oh no, no, it’s not my blood.” Um, but he starts to like roll up his sleeve as if to prove to the paramedic that it’s not his, but then we see that there is a massive cut on his forearm.
His entire forearm and hand is just drenched in blood.
Alice: So the thing is, it’s not actually a massive cut, which is why Buck didn’t notice.
Bex: It looked pretty. It was like pretty long.
Alice: Like, it was long, but like,
Bex: it wasn’t gaping, isn’t, yeah,
Alice: yeah, like, it wasn’t like a massive wound. It’s not like he got down to the arteries or anything.
Bex: I mean, it must have been pretty, like, wide and deep enough because they had to glue it back together.
Alice: Yeah, this is another one of those things that, [01:43:00] that is what happens when they’re on blood thinners. Like, they’ve done a really good job with the makeup. It just coats like water.
Bex: So, which is when Buck does the correct thing and goes, uh, “Oh, um, yeah, I’m on blood thinners. Maybe you should take me to the hospital, get checked out.”
And at which point I’m screaming at the TV like, This is what Bobby has been talking about for the last couple of episodes, you idiot. This is why you are not allowed out on calls. Because you didn’t do anything dangerous, and yet it looks like you’re about to faint from blood loss.
Ellen: Alright, so the next day, um, Chim’s about to leave the station house, but Maddie shows up at the station, and Chim’s like, “oh, I was just going to call you.” And he thought he was a little harsh the other night. So, maybe he’s not saying that he has been trying to call her, but she’s not been answering. Maybe.
But, Maddie’s like, “Yeah, you were [01:44:00] right. So, She found out who I am and she came to the call centre, and I almost lost my job, and maybe I’m losing my mind.” Chim’s,
Bex: he’s definitely, um, backpedalling and, like, retracting all of his former statements about her, uh, being anything like Doug.
Um, he’s, when she says that, She’s losing her mind, Doug. Um, Chim reassures her that she’s not losing her mind. She’s just still healing, but it doesn’t happen overnight.
But Maddie has had some time to think about it and she asks Chim, said, “what Doug did to me, what he did to you. He was a monster.” Everyone take a drink.
And when I think about what she was doing to Tara, she wonders what that makes her. Does that make her a monster? Um, and Chim says, “No, you’re not a monster. You’re someone who cares. I mean, you probably care too much and you’re definitely caring in the wrong way. But you were just, you saw someone in trouble [01:45:00] and you tried to help her.”
Ellen: Yeah. And she thought she could get her, she could convince her to get herself out before she’d have to save herself. The one that Maddie did.
Bex: I think Maddie is very much thinking that she doesn’t want Tara to go through what she did. And she’s thinking she doesn’t want Tara to be in a position where Vincent kidnaps her and stabs her and kills everybody that she loves. And Tara then has to, um, kill Vincent in a horrendous kill or be killed sort of situation.
Um, whereas Chim trying to put a more positive spin on it. And saying that,
Alice: 12 hour road trip.
Bex: Um, Chim’s putting a more positive spin on it and going, “You didn’t want Tara to have to try and save herself.” Um, Maddie admits like, uh, says again, “Maybe I’m a little bit crazy,” and Chim changes the subject and goes, “No, you want to hear something really crazy? I see crows.”
And [01:46:00] Maddie’s laughing and she’s like, “Oh, like the one on the ambulance?” And Chim’s like, “No, no, no, I’m serious. I keep seeing these birds.” And Maddie’s like, “No, there’s one on the ambulance right now.” And Chim is thrilled that somebody else is seeing. So either Maddie is joining in his delusion.
Or, um, there is actually a crow on the ambulance.
Ellen: Are you saying the evil spirit revealed itself to Maddie as well?
Bex: Yes. But it’s maybe not such an evil spirit because it has brought Chim a gift. It has something in its mouth, it drops it on the ground and then flies away and Chim goes to pick it up. And it’s the name badge that he dropped back at the Harvest Festival.
Ellen: Yeah. I mean, this is, this is This is a real thing that crows do, like, if you feed them some, well, if you, I think if you feed them enough and they recognize you and they trust you, they will bring you payment for the feeding. I think it was, [01:47:00] was it Kim Rhodes? Like, someone recently
Bex: Kim is obsessed with crows.
Ellen: She loves crows and she was trying to get in, like, in with the local murder, basically.
Bex: Yes. I don’t know if she succeeded before she turned her attention to goats, but yeah, there was very definite she was trying, she was trying to get in with the local, with the local crows.
Ellen: So they would bring her things.
Bex: I don’t know, so they would bring her things, but she definitely wanted to, to be friendly.
Ellen: So they would talk to her and like, be friendly, yeah.
Alice: Crows are so cool, and they’re so smart, but Like, I don’t know if either of you have heard a crow when they learn to talk.
Bex: Actually, um, they’re not crows, but this guy has been showing up on my TikTok who has some ravens who can talk.
Alice: It’s probably the same sort of voice.
Bex: It’s the deepest, most evil voice I’ve ever heard. [01:48:00] It’s pretty much like, Hello! And it’s like, Jesus Christ, I’m sorry! One of these ravens, I don’t know how it learned it, but it says tickle. But it’s like, “Tickle, tickle”. like the world’s most evil Tickle Me Elmo.
Alice: It’s so scary, like, oh my God, it’s terrifying.
Ellen: We were at a, um, a campsite one time out in the middle of nowhere. I think it was somewhere near Mount Warning or somewhere away from civilization, but this camp ground had a, like a cockatoo in a aviary and it could talk. but all it said was hello and like a few other things. But in the middle of the night, if you were anywhere outside of the thing and you hear this, “hello,” but yeah, it was weird.
Alice: Um, yeah, we’ve got two birds that can both talk. One of them doesn’t talk much. Like he just says, um, [01:49:00] his name and like, hello, cocky. But the other one, like, he chats a lot, but he does, like, most of it’s nonsense. Like, he’ll say, um, what you’re doing, but then he’ll be like, ah, like, he’s real interested in whatever you’re doing.
Ellen: But he has a conversation with you.
Alice: Yeah. So like, you can like fully like chat to him. He says more to my mum than he does to me. Um, but I’ve been feeding him toast every morning. And so now when I go over to the cage, he actually like comes up to me. So I think we’re becoming friends.
Ellen: I used to live with the girl who had an Indian ring neck parrot.
Alice: Yeah, same sort of bird.
Ellen: Yeah, and he could talk and he would, he would hop over to you and go and, because if we would be eating and we’d offer him some and say, “want some?” So he would then come over and say, “want some? Want some?”
Alice: Oh, that’s so cute.
Ellen: It was really cute until he like bit my finger really hard and now I still have a scar from it.
Alice: Oh, oh, yeah, you can’t. I [01:50:00] was putting a um, because I get him like seed blocks from work. Cause again, I’ve been trying to win him over, but now he, isn’t so scared of me anymore. So when I try and open the cage to put the seed block in, he just like sit, like stands in the middle and watches me.
And I’m like, can you please move? Cause I don’t want you to bite me. And I know he just wants the seed block, but I’m just like, no, I don’t want to put my hand in.
Ellen: Yeah, they’re vicious if they actually get you.
Alice: Yeah. Like your beak is big. Whereas the cockatoo, who’s actually a bigger bird with a bigger beak, I will literally just pat his head, no problem, and hand him food and don’t have an issue.
Cause I know that he trusts me. Whereas the other one’s still a bit flighty with me. So I’m like, Hmm. Yeah, nah. Don’t trust you. But yeah, he also laughs when he drinks. It’s so weird. Okay. So, whenever we sit down to eat dinner, he will go over and have a drink and laugh. So we’ll be eating dinner and you just hear, Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
It’s like, oh Jesus Christ, he’s having a drink again. [01:51:00]
Ellen: Bizarre.
Alice: Birds are creepy, but I love them so much. But yeah, literally trying to win him over with, um, toast at the moment, and it’s working so far.
Bex: Have you tried a muesli bar?
Alice: Oh, I should probably get a muesli bar. I mean, that’s pretty much what the seed bells are.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: Anyway, yes. Long tangent. But, um.
Alice: Yeah, be nice to birds.
Ellen: Yes. Chim’s a bit frustrated.
Bex: I love Chim’s response. He’s a bit concerned. But he starts off, he’s so, he’s thrilled. He’s like, I’ll be damned, he brought me back my name badge. And then his face just drops. And he’s super serious and like, except now he knows my name.
Because apparently the bird can read. As well.
Ellen: Yeah. Okay, so concerned dad Bobby is going to the hospital to find out if Buck’s okay.
Bex: But, why?
Ellen: And he asks that
Bex: Why is concerned dad Bobby at the hospital looking for Buck? Because when Bobby [01:52:00] walks in and asks for Buck, Buck’s head pops out from the waiting room and he looks very confused.
So he hasn’t called Bobby.
Ellen: Yeah, how did Bobby find out?
Bex: So how did Bobby find out? Did someone
Ellen: Unless one of the, like the paramedic who treated Buck earlier might have…
Bex: That’s the only thing I can think. It’s like, cause when Chim got in his accident, the crew that Um, was dispatched to that scene called Bobby and went, “Hey, we’ve got one of your guys in a car.”
So I’m wondering whether someone at the 121 recognized Buck when they started doing the paperwork. When they picked him up and went, Shit, that’s the kid from the 118 that tried to sue everybody. We should probably let his know, let his captain know what’s been going on. And so that’s why, um, yeah. Bobby is suddenly down at the hospital, because I don’t think they admitted Buck.
So the flag in the system that Bobby’s got on everybody being admitted to the hospital hasn’t been triggered. Because yes, I 100 percent believe that Bobby has paid somebody off in the [01:53:00] hospitals, that if any of the 118 get admitted for any reason he is immediately notified.
Ellen: Mm hmm.
Bex: That’s my headcanon.
So yeah, the only thing I can think is that the 121 called him and went, hey, we’ve got Buck, we just took Buckley into the hospital.
Ellen: Yeah, that makes sense.
Bex: So he’s finished his shift and he’s just bolted for the hospital. Much to Buck’s confusion.
Ellen: Yeah, he’s like, “are you okay? They said you were injured.” But he just got some shallow cuts and they sealed the wounds up. But they thought that he should get a checkup, that’s why he’s in the emergency room.
Alice: Yeah, the only reason that he’s still there is because he was giving the police his statement.
Ellen: Mm hmm. So Buck explains what actually happened with the guy on the windscreen now. And the lady hit this guy two days ago, so there you go.
And she must have hit her head pretty bad because they found a brain bleed, which is why she was so confused. And the guy in the windshield is in surgery and [01:54:00] is probably going to be fine.
Bex: Bobby says that he’s going to be fine because Buck jumped in and saved him. And sort of throws in a slightly accusatory, like, “You probably didn’t, it didn’t even occur to you to worry about yourself.”
And Buck’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I know, I didn’t think, I just rushed in like I always do.” He talks about, it’s, it’s really interesting that, um, throughout this episode, people have been sort of questioning what Buck is wearing, or why he’s wearing what he’s wearing. So, like, the kid
Ellen: Yeah, his costume, saying his costume’s bad or whatever.
Bex: Yeah, there’s been a theme about costumes with Buck. So, you know, he’s wearing the costume but he’s not a real firefighter because he’s not going out and fighting fires. But then, um, when he claims that he’s a firefighter to the driver lady, she’s like, well, your costume sucks because he’s not actually wearing his uniform.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: So that’s kind of all twisted around in Buck’s mind. And he has put two and two [01:55:00] together and got 31. Yeah. And just tells Bobby that the uniform is his costume, and when he puts it on, he’s brave and he’s strong and he makes a difference. But he doesn’t know what he is without that on. And Bobby reminds him that everything that he just did, he did it and he wasn’t wearing a uniform.
It’s not the costume that’s brave and strong and makes a difference. It’s Buck himself. And Buck starts to get his hopes up. It’s like, “Does this, all of these nice things that you’re saying about me, does this mean you’re ready to let me back for real?” Bobby says it doesn’t matter if Bobby is ready, Buck is quite clearly ready, and it’s time for Bobby to get out of his way.
Alice: And Bobby turns to go.
Bex: Yeah, which is like, which made me question, like, why did he come down to the hospital? If he’s just like, he’s come down, he’s seen Buck’s fine, and now he’s gonna leave again.
Alice: Yeah, like, ah, phew, okay, bye.
Bex: I’m out.
Alice: But Buck stops him and goes, “Are you hungry? Cause maybe I could buy you breakfast. It’d [01:56:00] be nice to catch up.”
Bex: Which I think, I think that’s uh, the last time Bobby was at a hospital with Buck, didn’t he take Buck for breakfast? So it’s like a flipping of the roles in this relationship, so now Buck’s taking Bobby for breakfast.
I could be wrong, but I seem to remember Buck, people taking people for breakfast is a thing, coming out of the emergency room.
Ellen: It was, um, it wasn’t, um, that paramedic guy taking Chim to the hospital.
Bex: No, I do remember that scene because it was Eli was telling Chim, like, you’re buying breakfast and Chim’s like, “I don’t have any money,” and Eli’s like, “Yeah, you do.” But no, I’m pretty sure, um, please feel free, anybody, to correct me, but I’m pretty sure The last time that Bobby and Buck were in the emergency room, Bobby took him for breakfast.
Alice: I’m trying to remember the last time they were in the emergency room.
Bex: Um, it was “Kids Today”. [01:57:00] And Buck had the compression leggings on when he was walking down the hospital.
Alice: Oh, after, yeah.
Ellen: Oh, that wasn’t that long ago.
Alice: No.
Bex: That was last year.
Alice: I mean,
Ellen: Yeah, I guess so, but in terms of the show, it wasn’t that long ago.
All right, so tell me about what really happened with this windscreen case.
Bex: The windscreen case was horrible. So it
Alice: Yeah, see, I didn’t, after the kids, I didn’t look this one up because I was like, I’m miserable enough. Jesus.
Bex: So there really was an incident of a woman hitting a man with her car and him getting lodged in a windshield.
Unfortunately, the real case did not turn out so well. It was in 2001. A nursing assistant hit a homeless man with her car. Um, it, the force of the hit lodged him in her windshield. Um, there’s nothing, again, I’m just reading off the Wikipedia, but there is nothing in that [01:58:00] report that indicates that she suffered any kind of head injury.
But she did drive home with the gentleman whose name was Gregory Biggs, still lodged in her windshield. And she left him in the windshield in her garage for three days. And it’s alleged that she was very much aware that he was in the windshield because she kept coming back to the to the garage to check on him to see if he was dead yet.
Ellen: Oh my god.
Alice: Oh my god.
Bex: It was alleged that she was, it was, she was driving while intoxicated, um, and when he died a few days later she called some friends and they took the body to a park and burned it to try and destroy the evidence.
Ellen: Holy hell.
Alice: Holy shit.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: That’s horrible.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: So what? It wasn’t just that she didn’t realize that he was there. Like, she totally knew he was there.
Bex: She totally knew he was there. Yeah, no wonder they [01:59:00] changed him. She totally knew that he was in trouble. She waited until he died. And I think it’s the, um, it’s even worse in this instance because she was a nursing assistant, so she had medical training. So even if she didn’t want to call 9-1-1, she perhaps could have done something to him to help him.
But she chose to just wait until he died and then try to dispose of his body.
Ellen: Oh my god,
Alice: that’s so twisted.
Ellen: Really messed up, yeah.
Bex: Yeah. So yeah, that’s, I think that’s very strongly why they gave the driver in the episode a, a massive head injury. Because then you can explain the, everything that happened on the fact that she was just not thinking correctly.
Because like, she was completely, um, unable to comprehend what was going on because of the brain injury. rather than have her being callously going home and leaving him in the windshield or driving around with him in the windshield, knowing that he was there, knowing that he was dying [02:00:00] and choosing not to do anything about it.
Alice: Yeah, that would have been dark for
Ellen: Yeah, I was going to say it also allowed them to have a much happier ending to this episode as well, because they left on a, on a note where everyone was going to live.
Bex: Yes, well, in the, uh, in the woman’s trial it was. put into evidence that if he had received medical attention, he would have survived.
She is currently in prison and she is going to be eligible in parole, for parole in about two years.
Ellen: Okay, I guess murder’s not that serious?
Bex: Well, this was in 2003, so she would have served 24 years by the time she’s up for parole, of a
Ellen: Okay, okay, it was much longer ago, yeah.
Bex: Sixty year sentence, so. Yeah.
Ellen: Well, I’m glad, I’m glad they changed it because it’s really dark. Well, overall, I really, I really liked the way this episode, like how it played [02:01:00] out in the end. It was great.
Bex: Yeah. It just, like I said, this is my favorite of the Halloween episodes that 9-1-1 does. And watching it again, sort of more critically, I really like that it’s kind of one of those episodes where.
Once again, you would think they could have made the theme of the episode be very explicit and very overt and everyone’s a monster, but it’s really quite subtle because it’s Halloween, like it’s the Halloween episode. So you’ve got the Halloween monsters, you’ve got, but then you’ve also got Maddie talking about being a monster and then you’ve got the, like the actual monsters being the horrible parents and
Ellen: Yeah,
Bex: possibly the driver. Although I think she may be get a pass and she was injured as well And all the kids the kids were all monsters.
Ellen: Oh, yeah,
Alice: except the ones with the terrible parents.
Ellen: Oh, yeah [02:02:00] They just look like monsters when they came to the door.
Bex: They just look like monsters. Yes So here endeth the the lawsuit era the lawsuit arc.
We’ve now got a full resolution of that. Um,
Ellen: Okay, I expected it to be longer the way you were talking about the, the era, you know, like, wow, how long is this going to go for?
Bex: No, I mean, it, it’s probably about the same length of like Dean Winchester’s Widower era. That was only a couple of episodes as well, but that had a massive impact.
Ellen: They don’t tend to drag things out.
Alice: It’s very iconic, but it’s quite short.
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Bex: Um, so I mentioned, I think in “Triggers”, um, and I remembered it the other day and I will link to, I will put the link to it, I’ll give you the link, Ellen, so you can put it in the show notes, and I’ll link it in our social media posts, that there was a law firm out of California that did a, [02:03:00] what would actually happen in real lift if a LAFD firefighter tried to sue the city under these circumstances.
They did like a hypothetical case study, um, which I have not reread since I first read it, but basically it would not go down in real life the way that it goes down on the show, but it’s a fascinating read. So if you’ve got some free time between when you finally get to your destination, if you are listening to us on your commute, um, or you remember to do it when you get there, um, check out the article if that’s the kind of thing that interests you.
Ellen: So what have, what are we getting into next week?
Bex: Um, next week we get “Athena Begins.”
Ellen: Oh, more flashbacks.
Bex: So yes, we get “Athena Begins”, we get Athena reflecting on how she became the police officer she is today. And the official summary, um, Tells us when a murder weapon from a [02:04:00] case close to Athena resurfaces.
Uh, we flash back to 1989 to show how Athena joined the LAPD and became the police officer she is today.
Ellen: So I assume there’s some more cop stuff triggers in this one, right?
Bex: Yeah, the triggers for this episode, we’ve got the generic, um, warning for cops and abuse of power. Uh, we’ve also got racism, misogyny, and some drunk use and gun violence, just to make it even more fun.
Ellen: So is it a particularly heavy episode?
Bex: This one?
Alice: Ish?
Bex: Yes.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: Okay.
Bex: She’s, it, it’s not a fun time.
Alice: Yeah, it’s not.
Bex: I mean, you can look at Athena and see like, the police officer that she is today, and you can imagine that she did not have an easy path to get there. So we’re only seeing a small part of her [02:05:00] path.
Ellen: All right, well, um, that’s a wrap on episode six. So let us know what you thought about this episode. Did you enjoy it as much as we did? Are you going to go and make friends with crows now? Like Please, like, let us know how that goes. I, I don’t know how Chim’s going to cope with like this crow knowing his name, but you know, don’t let the fae know what your real name is, you know?
But anyway, we’ll find out, uh, you can get in touch with us in loads of different ways and you can find all the information about how to do that. Other than leaving comments on your listening, app of choice. All of our contact details are on the website, which is thatweewooshow. com and you can, um, follow and subscribe.
No, I’m going into YouTube territory again.
Bex: I mean, please don’t forget to hit like, and please hit like, and subscribe on YouTube if YouTube is your platform of choice.
Ellen: Yeah. [02:06:00] Uh, all the different ways you can subscribe to the podcast also on the website. So check all that out there. Thank you so much for listening this week, and we will see you next week to talk about episode seven, “Athena Begins”.
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 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
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