3.09: Fallout

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

In this episode we discuss episode 9 of the third season of 9-1-1, titled “Fallout”.

The 118 responds to debris from a meteor shower crashing into an apartment building and a deadly fire caused by a hazardous waste truck crash inside a tunnel; Bobby introduces Eddie to an old friend to help with his anger.

Content warnings for episode 3.09:

car crash, domestic violence, gore, discussions of grief, hazardous and radioactive waste, post-traumatic stress, therapy, reference to gun violence.

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Episode Transcript

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

Ellen: Welcome back to That WeeWoo Show, a podcast where we watch and discuss episodes of the ABC show, 9-1-1. I’m Ellen,

Alice: I’m Alice.

Bex: And I’m Bex.

Ellen: Thanks everyone for listening to all of our episodes so far, or as many of them as you have listened to. We’ve got quite a lot in the bag now.

I think we’re up to, I think this might actually be our 40th episode. Can you believe that?

Alice: Oh my God.

Bex: Woo.

Ellen: I think we’re up to 40 now. That’s pretty amazing. Um, and we really appreciate everyone who’s, um, been leaving comments for us on Spotify and YouTube and different places. Uh, we really appreciate you doing that.

Thank you. We’d love to hear about, um, what you’re doing when you’re listening to the podcast or what you thought of all of these episodes. But this [00:01:00] week we’re gonna be talking about episode nine, which is called “Fallout”. Uh, but Alice, would you like to remind us what happened last week?

Alice: Yeah, so last week on 9-1-1, Eddie’s fight club hobby got out of hand after he almost killed an opponent.

Maddie continued to be suspended after low-key stalking a 9-1-1 caller she thought needed help and Hen was involved in a crash between her ambulance and a car, which resulted in the death of a young driver. Bit of a dark one last week.

Bex: Well, it was, I mean, that part was all really dark, but then you also had, you know, Bobby’s ice skating spectacular.

Alice: True.

Bex: So, you know, that was a little bit of a, a light, a lighter moment in an otherwise dark episode. Mm-hmm.

Alice: The ending was definitely dark.

Bex: Yes. The ending was definitely dark. Um, this week we are going to discuss episode [00:02:00] nine called “Fallout”. The official promo that Fox put out for this episode tells us that the 118 respond to debris from a meteor shower crashing into an apartment building and a deadly fire caused by a hazardous waste truck crash inside a tunnel.

Meanwhile, Hen struggles with guilt over her ambulance accident. Bobby introduces Eddie to an old friend to help with his anger, and Maddie receives an urgent call for help. Once again, I question when they write these summaries ’cause and who writes them, um, because there’s so many things in that summary that are wrong.

But I guess we can talk about that later. Yeah. Um. Triggers for this episode include a car crash, domestic violence, [00:03:00] gore, discussions of grief, hazardous and radioactive waste, post-traumatic stress, uh, therapy in case therapy is a trigger. And there is also, um, reference to, uh, gun violence. So I love that the, the summary is, talks about debris from a meteor shower.

Does one hunk of rock constitute a shower?

Ellen: Yeah, and the other thing with it is that it’s just, it’s like the first, like two minutes of the episode. Like there’s hardly anything. I, I guess it counts as one of the, the one two different emergencies, yeah. But

Bex: it does, but it, it makes it sound like it’s this massive, it’s going to cover two, it’s gonna be an arc that’s gonna cover two whole episodes.

It’s gonna be this massive thing, but it’s just, you know, it’s just Olivia, it’s one hug of Robin and Olivia and that’s, that’s what they have to respond to. [00:04:00]

Ellen: Yeah. And who, who does Bobby introduce Eddie to?

Bex: Yeah, see that’s the other thing. I think they’re referring to Frank.

Alice: Yeah. They’re referring to Frank, but badly because, well, I don’t think Bobby.

Ellen: Yeah. Does Bobby know? Like we, we never find out that Bobby knows him.

Bex: No. See, I mean, I know we were joking in the last episode about it should have been hot priest. ’cause at least that would make sense.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Um, I. But if it is Frank, then why are they making a big deal about Bobby introducing Eddie to Frank when both Maddie and Hen and also Buck have possibly seen Frank?

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: So it’s not like this one off special thing. Everybody sees Frank. Frank is like the, the LAFD’s bicycle. You know, everybody riding, everybody gets a ride.

Ellen: Oh, that’s an unfortunate way.

Alice: Oh, it’s saying something. Considering he’s got wheels too.

Ellen: Oh, oh, no.[00:05:00]

And it also, I also laughed when they all went to see him, because at the end of the last episode, I literally said like, everyone’s gonna go to therapy. Yes. And then he’s gonna come out and go, all right, who’s next? But they all, they actually have been in there one after another.

Bex: Yes. And they kind of did…

but yeah, I wonder whether there was supposed to be a bigger thing about Frank and whether there was actually some kind of scene with Bobby and Eddie and Frank, or whether they wrote this summary well in advance of actually getting to the episode and then they changed it and they just forgot to go back and do the summary.

I don’t know,

Ellen: well, it seems like they do that a bit or they don’t re release…

Bex: it does, doesn’t it?

Ellen: New ones or the people don’t update you know, IMDB or wherever Dunno.

Bex: No, but this isn’t IMDB. This is the promo that’s like given in advance of the episode going out. So it’s what, it’s what went into the TV guide for people to [00:06:00] read before the episode aired, so I don’t know.

Alice: Yeah, like we’re currently in hiatus and we’ve got the summary for the next episode, like we got that a couple weeks ago. So.

Bex: Maybe they like hand over the projected storylines to somebody and they write all of the promos in advance and then hand them over to whoever they give the promo stuff to. Once again, I am begging anybody who knows anybody who is in any way tangentially involved in Hollywood and television and can tell us how this works, please tell us,

Ellen: because we have found quite a few summaries that are incorrect now, a lot of them are.

Bex: Yes.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: Anyway, alright, so where are we beginning? We’re, we’re in a

Bex: quote unquote meteor shower.

Ellen: Yes. We’re in a suburban street. Uh, a woman is raking some leaves on the sidewalk, listening to like [00:07:00] a news report or a, you know, some kind of a weather report on the radio and they say something about. “The, the eggheads over at JPL say there’s a meteor shower coming our way,” and they said it’s supposed to land in the middle of the Pacific, so it’s not gonna be a problem.

Bex: So then they decide to put on “Waiting For a Star To Fall”. Which ironic.

Ellen: Yeah, why not?

Alice: It’s, it’s these people who are in charge of all the needle drops for 9-1-1. We finally found them.

Bex: They’re, um, K-S-X-I-K Sexy radio.

Alice: Yeah, that’s it.

Ellen: It’s like that, the one radio station on, um, GTA, the um, the one that plays all the eighties ballads.

Alice: Oh.

Ellen: Oh, what’s the name of it? Um, I can’t remember.

Alice: The GTA radio stations are so good though. Yeah.

Ellen: Anyway, yes, we’ve got a delivery, someone is [00:08:00] delivering a parcel to this, the house that the lady is raking the leaves out the front of, and he, you know, this box is really heavy, but he puts it on the porch and, rings the bell .

Bex: No, he doesn’t, he just dumps it on the porch and then walks away. And that’s, um, Mrs. Ov, I’ve just been calling her Mrs. U.

Alice: Yeah. Fair.

Bex: Um, goes to the door and knocks to let the occupant Olivia know that she has a delivery. Who is absolutely thrilled that whatever she has ordered has finally arrived.

Alice: Aren’t we all?

Bex: And the boxes, it, it looks, it’s deceptive. Its size, looks rather normal, but everyone is acting like it’s full of rocks when they try to lift it up.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Which I guess is probably an apt comparison because Olivia has bought herself a weighted blanket.

Alice: It was funny ’cause the first time I watched this episode, I was literally watching it [00:09:00] under an, under a weighted blanket.

I was like, yes, Olivia, excellent choice. Um, it’s currently summer and my weighted blankets are still packed away from when I moved. But, um, yeah, keen to get them back out.

Ellen: I always wondered one of those. I haven’t managed to get one yet after. It,

Alice: I have it on my bed in winter ’cause it like keeps me warmer and I’ve got another one on my couch.

So apparently Olivia has been doing some, um, desperate search, desperately searching for dopamine via online shopping, um, because she got fired from her content creation job.

Yeah. Apparently she wasn’t getting the voice of the blog. Um, and she chalks it up to her RBF AKA, resting Bitch Face.

Ellen: Oh, was it a video blog?

Alice: I’m starting to think so.

Ellen: Yes.

Alice: Um, but Mrs. U, who is also [00:10:00] Olivia’s landlord, because she mentions that she’ll, slip her the rent soon. She’s like, “It’s been days, you can’t stay inside forever.” And Olivia’s like, “Yes, I can. My forever just got totally awesome,” and just wraps herself in the weighted blanket.

Ellen: She looks terrible by the way. She got all red eyes and like red around the nose, like she’s been crying all day. Poor thing.

Bex: Yeah. Well, apparently the weighted blanket is going is, is like a perpetual hug, which is precisely what she needs. No, what she deserves in this moment. So she pushes her landlord out, um, and the next time we see her, she is on the couch with headphones on under the weighted blanket listening to, um, a motivational podcast, which is talking about filling her own cup.

Um, because you cannot pour from an empty one. You also can’t get soda from an empty cup, but she tries to anyway. [00:11:00] Well, meanwhile outside, Mrs. U watches as the sort of clouds are getting dark and then all of a sudden something screeches through the sky and crashes into through the roof of Olivia’s house.

And then Olivia starts screaming. So the landlord rushes in and we find Olivia on the couch looking down at herself screaming and there is a massive hole in her abdomen.

Alice: Yeah, through her weighted blanket.

Ellen: Through the, through the blanket. Yeah. There’s blood everywhere. It’s gross.

Bex: And so you can probably guess what the 9-1-1 call Mrs. U makes goes along the lines of, which is she calls Maddie and tells her that the sky is falling.

Ellen: Yeah, it’s one of those ones that is light on details but heavy on the witty, um, lols.

Alice: Yeah. Um, but yeah, the nine one one call was Maddie. So [00:12:00] she is apparently back at work.

Ellen: She’s back.

Bex: Well I’m guessing she must have, you know, had her assessment and we see later she’s been seeing Frank, so she’s ticked all the boxes that Sue put in place for her.

Yeah, I guess she’s allowed back on the floor.

Ellen: All right. So the, the 118 arrive on the scene naturally. Um, Mrs. Mrs. You lets them in the door and tells them it’s a miracle that she, that Olivia is alive because she saw it fall, fall from space. “It fell all the way from heaven and land on top of her.” And in the meantime, I think Buck is crawling underneath the couch.

Bex: Yeah. Yeah. Buck’s gone under the couch. Um, so he’s, I guess they’re, they’re trying to figure out how far everything is penetrated. Um, and they pretty much, they pretty quickly figure out that it’s gone all the way through her when [00:13:00] they’re looking, when Bobby and Chim are looking down at the hole in Olivia’s weighted blanket and abdomen, and they can see Buck waving at them from under the couch.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: And Buck can see them.

Ellen: It’s like a large hole right through the middle of her, and she can still move her toes and everything like that.

Bex: Oh, she’s doing fine. Like she’s talking and she’s complaining. Um, as Chim said, the, the meteor has obviously cauterized everything as it’s gone through.

Ellen: Might have taken out a kidney, but it missed the spine. Buck looks at the actual floor and he sees the meteorite in the hole there and it’s still glowing. So obviously it hasn’t taken them that long to get there. If the rock is still like red hot and steaming, you know,

Bex: I mean, how hot do those things get? I didn’t, I wouldn’t think that there, it would, you know, cool off that [00:14:00] quickly.

Ellen: Well, I mean, it get really hot on its way through the atmosphere, but once it crashed through a house, like it’s just sitting there cooling down?

Bex: If there are any, if there is anybody listening that knows anything about astronomy,

Ellen: Does anyone knows about meteorites?

Bex: Let us know. Um, but despite how hot it looks, Buck still seems to want to reach into the hole and grab it.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Um, when we then get Bobby telling him sternly that it doesn’t belong to him, um, and Chim tries to throw in another pop culture reference, which once again, Buck does not get because he tells

Alice: Yeah. Buck does not understand it at all.

Bex: He tells Buck that it belongs in a museum. And I do love that the closed caption, just in case, um, everyone at home didn’t get it either, says quote “as Harrison Ford”.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: Uh, but one of the, uh, side effects of having the meteor [00:15:00] go through the weighted blanket and her and the couch is that the couch is now fused to Olivia’s body. Um, and they’re going to have to move her on the couch. So Bobby orders them to get the saws so they can turn the couch into a backboard.

Alice: And Olivia’s very, like relatively calm through all this. Like she’s just chatting, she’s still very conscious, but when Bobby says saws, she’s like, so “Did you say saws? Did he say saws? Did, did you say saws?” Um, yeah, but they’re just to cut up the couch.

Bex: Yeah. I don’t think they quite, I think there was a miscommunication there and she somehow thinks that she’s going to be the one getting cut.

Alice: Yeah. Um, but yeah, so instead of panicking, she’s just sort of like, woe is me, which is like fair. She’s just been fired, she’s having a pity party for herself, and now she has a hole through her. And while they’re cutting up the couch, Olivia’s like, of all the [00:16:00] people on the planet, this thing had to hit me.

And Buck is just peak Buck and goes. “You know what? Only one other person in history has ev ever been hit by a meteorite, and that was in the fifties, which makes you pretty special.”

Bex: Yeah. ’cause while Eddie and Chim are working, Buck is in the corner on his phone googling meteorite hits,

Alice: um, and yeah, Olivia’s like, “I don’t feel special. How do you know that? Why do you know that?” And Eddie just goes, “Buck was on the pier when the tsunami hit. He’s kind of obsessed with natural disasters,” and Buck looks so proud of himself. He’s like, yeah, I am.

Ellen: He’s obviously been chewing like Eddie’s ear off about natural disasters for a while now.

Alice: And Olivia says that if he wants natural disasters, he should look at her life.

And Buck just goes, “Not anymore. Space rocks do not just fall out of the sky onto anybody. You are gonna be famous.” [00:17:00] And then she’s like, oh, oh,

Ellen: she looks really happy about, yeah. Like, oh, Buck, you’re such a ray of sunshine.

Bex: Um, he’s not wrong about the history of meteorites because there really has only been one person to ever be hit by a meteorite.

I googled this in case this was a ripped from the headline storyline, and it’s, it’s not, there has been reports of property damage from meteorites striking, but, uh, a woman named Anne is the only person who’s ever been hit by a meteorite.

Ellen: Okay. Did it go right through her?

Bex: But even then, no. She only got a bruise.

Like, I’m pretty sure it was really gnarly bruise, but for some reason, by the time the meteor went through her roof, it bounced off the radio and hit her leg and she was lying on the couch under a pile of blankets.

Alice: So even then it didn’t like, like it hit her, but it wasn’t a direct hit.

Bex: [00:18:00] Yes.

Alice: Huh. Interesting.

Bex: Yeah. And then apparently, um, she then got, uh, into some disputes about actually who owned or who had ownership of the meteorite because it landed, um, in the house, in her house. But the Anne was renting the house. So did it therefore belong to the landlord and all sorts of things, but

Ellen: oh,

Bex: that’s a different story.

Alice: Interesting.

Bex: Uh, but so back to the, back to 9-1-1. Eddie and Chim have finished cutting up the couch. They’ve created a, an instant backboard and they are able to lift Olivia up and carry her on the backboard out to the ambulance. Is this where you saw the crow? Did Olivia have some

Ellen: I think it might have been, yeah.

Bex: Artwork on her.

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. ’cause he says. What does he say at the end here? Oh yeah. “I can’t believe Hen missed this.” And then as he moves [00:19:00] away, there’s a crow on the wall behind him in, on a, like a picture of a crow.

Oh. And I was like, I was doing that. The, um, you know, the

Bex: Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme?

Ellen: Yeah. I was like, there’s a crow there.

So meanwhile we have a bit of a, a sort of tone shift here because we were quite lighthearted with the, well after she sort of got over the fact that she had a hole in her, the meteor lady was quite upbeat about the whole thing, I guess when she realized that she was gonna be famous out of it. Um, the, and, and the music is quite light and kind of, you know, everything’s gonna be okay.

But then we, after the title card, we go to Hen after Chim says, “I can’t believe Hen missed this.” Hen is talking to Frank. We don’t know what his name is until later, but

Bex: No, I know, but I know it’s Frank, so I’m just gonna call him Frank.

Ellen: Yeah, she’s talking about how she’s [00:20:00] doing after the accident in the last episode, so she’s not sleeping very well. Every time she closes her eyes, she sees the accident replaying.

Bex: So this was a, um, a nice reveal. So when we cut, when we come back from the title part to hen being in therapy, the camera is just on hen we don’t actually see who she’s talking to. And then after she says, every, every time I close my eyes and Frank says, fin the sentence and says, you see her face, the camera pulls back to reveal, uh, a wide shot.

And we see that Hannah is sitting in a very nicely appointed room, which is obviously Frank’s office. Um, and Frank is sitting across from her, and he’s in a wheelchair. So I did a little bit of Googling as I do. Frank is played by Eddie McGee, um, who is an amputee.

Ellen: Oh, right.

Bex: So this is not, um, an able bodied actor being put into a [00:21:00] wheelchair.

This is a disabled actor. Um, he lost his leg to cancer when he was a child.

Ellen: Right.

Bex: Um, and fun fact, he was the first winner of Big Brother in the US

Ellen: Oh, oh really?

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: See what he went on to fame and fortune. After all

I said, I don’t remember who any of the winners of Big Brother were in Australia.

Bex: I found

Alice: Reggie?

Ellen: Yeah. If you said who they were and showed me a picture, I might be able to, like, I watched like the first season maybe, and then I was like, okay,

Alice: so the first one was a guy named Ben. I can’t remember which one Reggie won.

Reggie won one and she’s just got, um, been on I’m A Celebrity, get Me Out Of Here.

Bex: Oh, good Lord.

Ellen: A serial, uh, reality tv.

Alice: Well, she’s, um, vision impaired now, so.

Ellen: Oh, [00:22:00] wow.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: That must have been interesting in the jungle.

Alice: Oh, literally like all the others were helping and like, they’d be like, “oh my god, baboons!”

And she’s like, “where, what?”

Bex: The thing I like about, um, Frank and about Eddie being cast as Frank is that once again you’ve got a, um, a disabled character or a disabled actor and there’s just no mention of their disability. It’s just, this is Frank. He’s in a wheelchair.

Alice: Yeah

Ellen: yeah. They’re just doing their job.

Bex: Yep. Which is being everybody’s therapist.

Ellen: Yeah. Oh, that poor, poor man.

Bex: But they, they, they use the technique that, um, several writers have used throughout the series, which is Frank is the constant in this scene. And we just, every time he asks a question or every time he says something, a different character answers. [00:23:00] So when hen starts talking about, um, her, the dream that she’s having, um, we cut back to Frank and then when we cut to who is sitting across from him, suddenly it’s Eddie.

And he’s talking about, I don’t even know what he’s talking about. It’s something about good moments. And he doesn’t feel happy.

Ellen: Yeah. He’s worried about that he’s not dealing with the trauma very well. And he doesn’t want, he doesn’t want Chris to end up like him, which is Yeah. A hard thing to think about yourself I think.

Bex: Frank says that there’s no right way to deal with trauma. All the first responders are council, so he must be like the LAFD counselor. Poor dude.

Ellen: Yeah. Um,

Bex: all the first responders process it differently and we cut to Maddie going, um, “And yet you all do it the same way and ask the same questions and press the same [00:24:00] buttons.”

Ellen: Yeah. And he says, like she says, this is her third session, so that’s good. She’s been seeing somebody, although maybe not since before she had her stalking episode, but at least she’s doing it now. That’s good.

Bex: Sounds like, um, she went to therapy after, the incident with Doug. Yeah. And then she stopped. Now she’s being forced to see somebody after this incident with Tara. But I guess she wasn’t seeing Frank before.

Ellen: And Frank says to her, “I’m sorry none of it helped you.” And she says, “what makes you think it didn’t?” And I’m like, you just told him that, that what he was doing isn’t helping. But Frank is very calm.

He’s like, “You’re sitting, you’re here, aren’t you?” You know, you’re sitting in the chair. That means it hasn’t been helping you. You’re still here.

Bex: Then Eddie says that he doesn’t wanna be sitting in that chair. He’d rather be at home with Chris. Um, so Frank says, I think generally to [00:25:00] all of them, “Why do you keep coming back?” And like Maddie’s, like Sue told me to,

Ellen: I have to, to to do my job, to get my job back

Bex: Court mandated therapy.

Hen is a little bit more reticent, but she’s like, I know I need help to process this, even though I don’t want to process it almost. And Eddie, God bless him, is like, “I don’t want my kid to be like me.” And that’s when my heart broke a little bit.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Because he tells Frank that Chris used to be this happy, open kid, but then he felt that he had to hide his pain and pretend that he was okay.

Um, and Eddie doesn’t want him to do that.

Ellen: Uh, they sort of get to wrap up this scene by each of them, you know, stating what happened, I guess. So Maddie says that she did violate the department policy, and violated a woman’s trust. And Eddie says he almost killed a guy with his bare hands. And Hen says, I, [00:26:00] I did.

I killed a young girl in the prime of her life. But, um, Maddie says that she survived and Doug didn’t. So they’re collectively, they’re not doing all that great, but at least they’re talking about it. That’s the first step.

Alice: Well, a bit. Yeah.

Ellen: Yes. Kind of talking about it. Yeah.

Bex: So while those two are going through, um, no, it must be the next day because Eddie is now back at the 118 and Buck is pestering Bobby about when they’re going to hear anything about Hen so that she can come back to work.

Mm-hmm. And this is where we find out that it really is just a revolving door at, um, at Frank’s, uh, house of Therapy. Because Eddie says that he walked out as hen was walking in, or No, he was going in while hen was coming out. Either way. They crossed paths.

Alice: They crossed paths. Um, and she, she seemed okay, but sad.[00:27:00]

Ellen: Well, this, this is where we find out that, um, well, at least Buck has seen Frank before.

Bex: Yeah.

Ellen: Because he says, “How’s therapy with Frank? I haven’t seen in, in a, in a while.” Eddie doesn’t think that he and Frank are clicking. I’m not sure why he didn’t think that.

Alice: Then Chim says, “You should try talking to Rosemary. I went to her after the stabbing. She was great,” and Buck just chimes in with, “Is that the one I slept with?”

Bex: And Bobby is so quick to say no.

Alice: So fast,

Bex: but I can’t remember. Did everybody find out that Buck slept with the therapist? Like how does Bobby know? It’s been so long since season one. I can’t exactly remember, but um, but yes, apparently , she doesn’t work for the department anymore and I have a feeling that Bobby had something to do with that

Alice: And Eddie just turns to Buck and goes, “You slept with your therapist?”

[00:28:00] Which Buck chalks up to going through a phase. And then it is like, “Hey, didn’t you just go through one of those?”

Ellen: Yeah. Well, he just punched people. He didn’t randomly just sleep with everybody.

Bex: All right. So yeah,

Ellen: Athena appears Athena. She appears she’s, she’s on duty, apparently. She’s allowed back at work too.

Bex: Well, I guess if Maddie’s allowed her suspension is over, is allowed back at work, then everybody’s allowed back at work. It just Hen’s not,

Ellen: I wonder if Athena has also been at therapy

Alice: with Frank.

Ellen: Well, Frank May only be the, the fire department, uh, shrink.

Bex: But she was, would she need therapy? Would she need therapy?

Alice: No, I don’t think so,

Bex: because she was just, she violated department protocol, policy, whatever. I don’t know that that’s a, a therapy manager. She just got a, a wrist. Yeah. Ride the desk for a little while. Like the desk at home. ’cause she wasn’t even allowed at work.

Ellen: Yeah, [00:29:00] yeah. Ride the couch.

Bex: Oh, hello

Ellen: she, she pops up. Okay. I’ll take that statement back. Um, this must be Athena’s first day back because when Bobby sees her, she, he says, “Look who’s back on the beat.”

Bex: Yeah. Like, dude, you live together. Surely you would’ve noticed you didn’t,

Ellen: You didn’t know?

Bex: That your, your wife was back at work. I mean, this whole thing is just so stupid.

Like, oh, I came to the 118 to find out about Hen. Couldn’t you have asked Bobby? Like,

Alice: I mean, if Bobby’s at the middle of a 48

Ellen: or, you know, call Hen, see how she is?

Bex: Exactly.

Ellen: She’s your bestie.

Bex: But no, they need her at the 118 for plot related purposes.

Ellen: I mean, Chimney actually does say to her, “Did you talk to her?”

And she’s like, “No, I try. But all she wants to talk about. Is the girl.” But isn’t that what you wanna find out? [00:30:00] Like Yeah. Anyway. It’s a weird, it’s a weird conversation. This whole thing is just strange. Yeah.

Bex: It, it’s like we need to get to, we need a certain plot point to come out. So we are just gonna do whatever we can to get to that plot point.

We’re not really concerned if it makes too much sense,

Alice: that’s it. Just don’t think about it. Athena’s there for hand wavy reasons,

Bex: For hand wavy reasons. And also so we can get a conversation about college essays because May has emailed Athena a copy of her college essay, um, which prompts a fun discussion about college and college essays amongst the 118, uh, which culminates in Buck telling everyone that he doesn’t remember what his college essay was about.

And Chim shoots back. “Well, why don’t you ask Maddie what she wrote for you.”

Ellen: Oh.

Bex: But then Athena looks like she is ready to smite everyone and anyone in her path because [00:31:00] May’s essay is not about her experience in the tsunami, it is called “Living with the Enemy”, AKA Athena.

Ellen: I love that May wrote this.

Bex: I honestly, it’s such, it’s a better essay than “my mother forced me into a car, which was then surrounded by electricity. So I couldn’t get out and I had to watch a woman die in my hands.”

Ellen: Yeah. Okay. So Hen, so is Hen at the 118 here in this next scene? Or are they

Bex: Yeah.

Ellen: At Hen’s Place? I’m trying to remember.

Bex: No, no, because you can see the ambulance behind her.

Ellen: Okay. So she has actually come into work to talk to Bobby about the

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: The findings of the investigation basically have found that. She pressed the button and the light was green when she drove through the intersection, but the light in on the other side of the intersection never changed. So there was something [00:32:00] wrong.

Alice: Yes. Yeah. So it was also green,

Ellen: so she did everything right. Um,

Bex: except not slowing down before she entered the intersection. But we, we’ll just ignore that.

Alice: Apparently that’s not protocol for the LAFD.

Bex: Well, not this version,

Ellen: not in this universe. Yeah.

Bex: Um, so yes, hand did everything right, and yet Evelyn is still dead

Ellen: and she feels like it’s still her fault. She can, he can show her a million pieces of paper that say it’s not her fault, but it’s still gonna feel like it is.

Bex: And then we get the most random line. Like, “Did you know she played the cello?” Like Jesus, Hen.

Alice: We all saw the cello music.

Bex: Yeah. We saw the, we, we, yeah,

Alice: we, the camera zoomed in, we’re good.

Bex: We were very aware she played the cello.

Ellen: You have to remind everyone that she was a real human being. But Bobby’s tells her that she can return to work whenever she wants.

So

Alice: yeah, she’s clear. She clear she can return, but she wants more time, which is fine.

Ellen: And [00:33:00] she and Karen are gonna go away for the weekend. Um, Athena. Okay, so we’re go to the Grant. The Grant,

Alice: the, the Grash or the Nant. I love it.

Bex: I got, I got sick of typing out Nash Grant, so I’m going like, what are we gonna call them?

Are they Grash? Or are they Nant? We just call it Bathena? I don’t know.

Alice: Bathena. Yeah, the Bathena house.

Bex: The Bathena household where Athena…

Alice: featuring Michael

With

Bex: special guest Michael. Um, where Athena has printed, like printed out May’s essay. Um, and is reading

Alice: because Athena’s like, fuck the trees.

Bex: Um, she probably can’t see it properly on her phone, so she needs to print it so she can actually read it.

Um. And she’s reading it out to Michael, who is like trying very hard to pretend like he’s never heard any of this before.

Alice: Wow. What a shock. That May chose to write about the police. Didn’t see that one coming.

Bex: Yep. And Athena’s [00:34:00] ranting and raving and Michael’s going like, that’s “The interpretation that you are giving this essay is not what May is saying.” And Athena’s like, “What do you know? You haven’t read it.” And Michael’s like, oop.

Ellen: And then she does like the biggest side eye. She’s like, “You have read it!”

Bex: Well,, we discussed it.

Alice: Yeah. May wanted to write about something that mattered to her, but was worried about Athena’s reaction.

Bex: Uh, quite rightly apparently.

Alice: Um, yeah. Athena’s Mad.

Bex: Athena is so pissed.

Alice: She’s also kind of blowing things up a bit. Like she’s like, “so she just tells the whole world that her mother’s a good-hearted, but misguided cop who has wasted her entire life trying to fix a system that’s broken beyond repair.” She, it’s a college essay.

Like do they, they only go to the college, right?

Ellen: It’s only 600 words long.

Bex: Yes. But I think she’s, she’s seeing this as this is representative of how May [00:35:00] actually feels about her.

Alice: Yeah. Oh. Which I totally get, but like she’s, it’s not like she’s publishing it in the New York Times. Like

Bex: No, but she’s kind of,

Alice: it’s a college essay.

Bex: Yeah. But I, she’s not worried about what she’s saying. I guess she is kind of worried, but it’s just she’s suddenly realizing how May sees her Yeah. And her perception of her mother. And it’s, it’s not one that she particularly likes.

Ellen: Yeah,

Bex: Michael’s trying to talk her down and tell her that, you know, “you should actually be really proud of her because we raised the kids to be strong, smart, and independent. And this is May being strong, smart, and independent. You know, we, we did a great job with these kids and you need to support her and be proud of her.”

Alice: And, and Athena goes, “It’s easy for you to say, ’cause you are not the enemy.”

Bex: And flos off. [00:36:00]

Ellen: Oh, she’s not, not happy. Uh, so Hen goes to visit Chim and they have a drink, a, a coffee.

Bex: I’m gonna assume it’s coffee. Coffee.

Ellen: It’s something in a mug.

Bex: It’s, it seems too early in the day.

Alice: Might be whiskey

Bex: to be drinking

Alice: in a coffee mug. It’s fine.

Bex: It could be.

Ellen: Uh, and she says that. She tells him that, um, since the crash, Karen has been a rock. It’s like the IVF stuff never even happened.

Bex: Yeah. you know…

Ellen: So, you know, she suddenly realized that, oh, I was overreacting and being too emotional, so, and now my wife is having this trauma, so I don’t need mine anymore.

Bex: AKA once again, 9-1-1 traumatizes a character, but then when that trauma becomes inconvenient for the storyline, they drop it like a hot potato.

Yep. Like Karen gets one episode to be traumatized, and now she has to push all of her [00:37:00] trauma aside and be a good wife for her wife.

Ellen: Mm-hmm. I mean, she just does say later that she, you know, she was, it was the hormones talking and this is sometime later.

Alice: Yeah. Literal, just like, oh, it was the hormones. Like, I, it’s fine.

I wasn’t actually sad about any of this. It was just the hormones.

Ellen: You don’t, you don’t get over that quickly.

Bex: No. But the, the actual point of this scene is that currently. The “away” that Hen and Karen are going is a new wellness spa because it will have a healing influence on them.

Ellen: Oh yeah. And Chim says, it sounds very crystally like there’s gonna be crystals there Hen’s gonna try anything to make her feel less awful.

Bex: Short of a colonic. She doesn’t want a colonic.

Ellen: No.

Alice: Um, yeah, she, as long as there’s a comfortable bed and no one trying to talk her into getting a colonic,

Bex: she specifically says that she will try anything [00:38:00] that can make her feel like she can do her job again.

And Chim tells her that someone once told him that the world is full of patience, but what it really needs is more caregivers. And that Hen was the best caregiver that he knows. So she has his blessing to go and do whatever she needs to do to heal because the world needs her back and so does he. And the someone that told him that was Eli back in the episode, “Chimney Begins”

Ellen: Oh, yeah,

Bex: yeah, yeah.

Ellen: He remembered

Alice: I love Chim and Hen’s friendship.

Ellen: Yeah. And Hen looks really touched that he would say that too. Yeah. Uh, okay. So at 9-1-1 Headquarters, the boys are heading out. They’re, they’re finished their shift and they’re gonna go out on the town [00:39:00] karaoke and wings. Um, Josh is trying to talk Maddie into going too, but, um, Maddie has plans with Buck.

And she doesn’t think that that, that Josh wants him to join because you do not wanna hear Buck singing “Eye of the Tiger”.

Alice: And apparently he also does one armed pushups. Like what?

Ellen: But is it on top of a car, Jensen Ackles, “Eye of the Tiger”,

like scratching at your arm because you’ve got ghost sickness kind of.

I, I do kind, I do wanna see Buck doing “Eye of the Tiger”. That’d be great.

Bex: I don’t know. Have we got confirmation that Oliver can sing or is it gonna be like super painful?

Alice: Oliver like refuses to do karaoke and I’m pretty sure there was like just a thing about whether there’d ever be like a singing episode of 9-1-1 and he was like, Nope, not doing it.

I will be in the corner refusing to sing.

Ellen: Okay, that’s good because. [00:40:00] I find those episodes really cringey anyway.

Alice: Not a fan of the, um, Grey’s Anatomy, coma Dream. Sing along.

Ellen: If it’s a dream, it’s fine. Like with the tap dancing,

Bex: what about, what about “Once More With Feeling?” That was amazing.

Ellen: That was amazing. It was just very

Bex: No, but no.

Ellen: Anyway, anyway, whatever. I don’t think we need it.

Bex: Um, but whatever plans Maddie has with Buck are not going to go ahead because, uh, Maddie gets a phone call from Tara and Tara is begging Maddie to come over because she needs her help. And despite the fact Maddie telling Frank that she realized what she was doing was wrong and very sorry, um, she immediately drops everything to go and help Tara.

Alice: Yeah, Maddie trusted [00:41:00] her way too quickly. I would’ve been like, is this a trick? Like, are you trying to get me to lose my job again? Like,

Bex: yeah, like ma’am, this woman came into your workplace, called you a stalker and nearly got you fired.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: What are you doing?

Ellen: And she doesn’t even give her any details. She just says, can you come over? And Maddie’s like, yeah, but I’m, I’m on my way.

Bex: I mean, Maddie knows where she lives ’cause she’s, you know, cased out the joint and sat outside the house.

Alice: No, she went into the house.

Bex: Yeah,

Alice: she got invited in. Well, she kind of invited herself.

Ellen: She stalked their bedroom,

Alice: I guess

Bex: makes it sound like a vampire that she got invited in

Ellen: across the threshold.

Alice: Do, do we have any evidence that Maddie’s not a vampire?

Ellen: Have you ever seen her in a mirror? Yeah. Yeah, we have. I think

Bex: the fact that she lives in LA and yet goes out in the sun a lot,

Alice: um, some vampires can go out in the sun. Haven’t you watched Twilight?

Ellen: Yeah, but she doesn’t sparkle

Bex: I was about to say, and she doesn’t sparkle.

Alice: [00:42:00] Um, it’s LA, everybody sparkles.

Ellen: Oh, I guess so.

Bex: But too much highlighter use, huh?

Ellen: Well, she, she does literally get invited across the threshold when she gets to Tara’s place. But Tara’s got all blood all over her. She’s, um, she’s holding a gun and, and her hands are covered in blood and she’s got like a cut lip and everything. And she’s,

Alice: yeah. She’s not looking good.

Ellen: And, “we fought. He came after me. He was so mad.” And Maddie’s like, “oh my God, what have you done?”

Alice: Tara’s holding a gun

Bex: and Maddie doesn’t do anything to take it away from her.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: Does not try to disarm her

Ellen: Yeah, she’s waving it around.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: But later on in this scene when Tara is getting really, um, agitated, she’s actually pointing the gun at Maddie at one point.

Ellen: Yeah,

Bex: but like it’s, seriously, Maddie, secure the scene. Get that gun away from her. Yes. Don’t worry about the almost dead guy on the rug, because [00:43:00] if Tara squeezes that trigger, um, you could be joining him.

Alice: Mm-hmm. Yeah. The first,

Bex: but no, she does not do that.

Alice: The first step of like first aid slash CPR in Australia at least is “danger”.

Bex: Yeah. Remove all hazards.

Alice: Remove the danger

Bex: like a gun!

Ellen: Or remove yourself from the danger. Yeah. But she runs right into it. Um, she thinks, looks at like the state of Tara and says, “You killed him.” And Tara’s like, “I thought I did. And he, but he is still alive.”

So yeah, she finds Vincent on the rug. He’s like lying on his back. He’s got a hole in his upper shoulder kind of area, I guess. And I’m guessing it’s gone through a lung. I don’t know if we ever find out exactly what happened here, but, um,

Bex: I’m guessing by the fact to the fact that Maddie does.

Ellen: Yeah. She cuts into his lungs.

Bex: The fact [00:44:00] that she does a thoracotomy kind of indicates that the reason he was gasping and struggling to breathe was he has a collapsed lung. So she’s had to like, uh, give the lung room to expand properly. Um, but yeah, that, that seems like a very odd place to be shot that would collapse your lung. But what do I know?

I’m not a doctor. I don’t even play one on tv.

Alice: Um, yeah, Maddie, the point is that Maddie tries to call 9-1-1 and Tara refuses to let her and says “You can’t. That’s why I called you.” And Maddie’s like “to do what? To stand her and watch him die.”

Ellen: Yeah. Tara doesn’t know what she wants apparently.

Alice: Yeah. She’s like, he can’t die. But should he die?

Bex: She said he can’t die. And I’m going, God, what kind of monster is he? If he can’t die,

Alice: he’s another vampire.

Ellen: A vampire!

Alice: Damn it. Maddie. What are you doing?

Ellen: Uh, is she, she called Maddie to be her [00:45:00] conscience, or

Bex: I don’t think she knew what she was doing

Ellen: to, to tell her that it’s okay for her to kill him? Yeah, but she didn’t know that Maddie killed her, Doug, until Maddie tells her.

Um, and Maddie says that, you know, I have to live with that for the rest of my life. That I killed someone I used to love. You know, everything in your life gets worse if he dies, is what she says.

Bex: Yeah. While she’s doing this, she has raced into the kitchen, grabbed a knife, grab some ammonia from under the sink.

Alice: Oh my God. When Maddie grabbed the knife, I was like, uh, killing Tara’s not the answer.

Ellen: I’m like, what’re you doing wIth that, Maddie?.

Like stab, is she gonna put him him outta his misery by like, you know,

Alice: stabs Tara. It’s like, okay, cleaned up the scene. We’re all good.

Bex: Oh no. She uses it. So to perform a thoracotomy, which funnily enough is the second time that Maddie has performed a field thoracotomy. Although the last time [00:46:00] she just used like Glad wrap to create a a seal, um, which would allow the victim to keep breathing.

This time she literally sticks her finger in the wound to keep the wound open.

Alice: She finds cotton wool in the kitchen, but she can’t find Glad Wrap.

Bex: Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s, I think it’s the, it’s the drama of having, um, eventually Tara calls gives in and calls 9-1-1, and then we get Officer Williams bursting into the house and telling everyone to put their hands up and Maddie just goes, I can put one hand up.

Alice: Yeah,

Bex: the other one needs to stay here. Or that’s gonna bleed out.

Alice: Mentioned last time. Does, does America have Glad Wrap? They call it like cling film, don’t they?

Bex: Yeah,

Alice: but do that, do they have Glad as a brand? No.

Ellen: No idea.

Bex: I think GLAD is an Australian brand.

Alice: It’s like how they call it like tissues, Kleenex and we don’t call them Kleenex.

Like all cling film here is Glad Wrap. Yeah. Aldi brand. It’s Glad Wrap. It’s fine.

Ellen: But we don’t call tissues [00:47:00] Kleenex.

Alice: Kleenex, yeah.

Ellen: We do have Kleenex though.

Alice: Yeah, but they’re tissues.

Ellen: It’s complicated. Yeah.

Alice: Yeah. So Glad Wrap is cling film, just so everyone knows.

Bex: Sorry. Yes. Australianism slipping in. Um, the 9-1-1 call that Maddie makes is interesting because she immediately goes into professional mode and gives her dispatch number and gives all of the pertinent information and says, don’t ask me any questions, don’t route me through to Stephanie Gaskins in the EMD.

Just get police and paramedics here and be advised there is a gun on the scene.

Alice: Yeah. She doesn’t actually say the address either, so I guess they just teleport to Maddie’s location.

Bex: I’m guessing that the next thing she says is possibly the address.

Alice: Yeah, but the address is supposed to be the first thing you say.

Well, apparently her badge number is more important. Way more important. That’s it anyway. Like at, like even Buck I’m pretty sure [00:48:00] gave the location anyway, like when Chimney was stabbed.

Bex: Well, even when he was following, um, the, the woman with the, the dead guy. The not so dead guy. Yeah. It was like, “This is Evan Buckley. I am LAFD, I am following a car on this road and this road.” Yep. So, yeah, apparently Buck is really good at, at making 9-1-1 calls. Maddie’s only good at receiving them.

Ellen: I’m sure the address must have been given at some point. Otherwise they wouldn’t have shown up.

Alice: They have, they all have their skills.

Bex: I have a feeling Abby did the same when she called.

Like way back when she had to do the,

Alice: I’m guessing it’s just because they can’t be bothered making up addresses all the time.

Probably. Yeah. But it just irritates me because like the first thing you’re supposed to give is the address.

Ellen: Well, I mean, when you’re panicking it’s not, you can remember the order of stuff,

Bex: but she’s not panicking, that’s the point. She’s, if she can remember her badge number. Yeah. And she can go very sternly say, don’t ask me [00:49:00] protocol questions.

Surely she would remember, like one of the fucking protocol questions is where are you calling from?

Alice: Yeah. The guy’s just like, “But Maddie,” and she’s like, “I said, don’t ask me any questions.” It’s like, no, but where, where are you calling?

Bex: I just, you’re not calling from a landline, you’re on cell phone. We need your address.

Alice: We can’t be triangulating. Maddie, can you just tell us where you are?

Ellen: Anyway. They take him, they get him all, you know, all good. And then take him in away in the ambulance and Tara’s like holding his hand and looking all concerned. And Maddie’s just like, are you kidding me right now? Like, he’s, he just attacked you.

Bex: You just shot him, him, and he shot him

Ellen: because he was trying and now you like was

Bex: trying to kill you.

Okay.

Alice: And Maddie, who is covered in blood, is just like rolling her eyes.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: But for nav, for a bit of change of pace, we’re going off to the day spa. Mm-hmm. Where [00:50:00] there are no crystals.

Ellen: No, it does look quite nice. It looks quite busy. There’s a lot of people around.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: It doesn’t look very relaxing.

Alice: No. Hen hen’s sounding a bit cynical at first and Karen’s like, “Look, you know, we can go home.”

And Hen’s like, “No. Like, it would be nice to spend nice to, nice for us to spend a few days away from everything. Um, and everyone we know, just me and you.” And then immediately, immediately someone’s calling out “Henrietta Wilson?”

Bex: I watched that bit and was like, it’s just me and you. And then my brain is gone.

And your friend, Steve.

Alice: Do do do do dodo do, Steve.

Bex: Steve, Stacey, um, yes. Your friend Stacey, who was apparently also at the resort and is thrilled to see Hen and wants to, um, buy Hen drinks. No, she upgrades it. She must buy them dinner.

Alice: Yeah. [00:51:00] Dinner.

Bex: Um, Hen looks completely shellshocked. Karen is like, who is this woman that apparently knows my wife that I’ve never met before?

Yeah.

Alice: Karen’s like, you’re a bit more so older and sober than my wife’s normal type, but I’m sure

Ellen: she’s the lady that we met in “Hen Begins” who had a heart attack. Uh, yeah, the life, the life coach. Yeah. Yes. And that’s why Hen became a paramedic, which she

Bex: Allegedly.

Ellen: Explains to Karen. Yeah. That’s one of the reasons she became a paramedic.

Bex: I’m still salty about that.

Ellen: Um, and Karen thinks it’s serendipity that she’s run into someone whose life she’s saved, but he Hen calls bullshit on that.

Bex: I wanna know if this episode was perhaps meant to be called “Serendipity”. The number of times that people say that word.

Alice: Oh my God. Serendip. It just keeps getting said.

Bex: Especially in Hen’s storyline. Yeah.

Alice: I don’t think I’ve [00:52:00] ever used the word serendipity in my life before. And these people are just like, let’s say it every second word. Yes. Like even Hen’s just like it’s a fucking coincidence. Like Jesus Christ. But Karen’s just thrilled ’cause she offered to buy them dinner and they should take her up on it, which, fair

Bex: Free food. Yep. I’m, I’m on Karen’s side. Yeah. I mean, those meals are probably really expensive and I doubt that they’re inclusive in the spa.

Alice: Whenever, like anyone at work asks if I want, wanna do a stock take, I’m like, absolutely. Because they always give you free food. Yeah. It’s the only reason to do it. I’m happy to count for three hours if it means that I get pizza.

Bex: Uh, Hen does not wanna go to dinner because she does not want to have a conversation where she and Stacey catch up and she’s like, “oh, what are you doing?” “Oh, yes, I’m a paramedic. Oh yeah. Life is great, by the way. I just killed someone.”

Alice: Yeah. I just killed a girl.

Bex: Which Karen is like, oh shit, not this again.

Look, we’ve talked about this. You did not kill anyone. It was an accident. And Dan’s like, [00:53:00] yeah, it was an accident. Or maybe that was serendipity too.

Alice: And yeah, I’d love if it was, if someone could just give me a reason why that poor girl is dead and why I just walked away without a scratch and I’m just like, ah.

It’s ’cause the girl’s car was a lot smaller than the ambulance. Like that’s how it works.

Bex: Yeah. It was like a, a little plastic Japanese car versus the giant metal box that you drive around in that has every single safety feature known to mankind.

Alice: Yeah. Like ambulances are supposed to be able to withstand a car crash because like you’re going through intersection, but Sure.

Yeah. Can’t work out why. Um, yeah.

Bex: And they have a bit of, they have a discussion about, um, hen’s memory. She’s like, I know that the report says that I pressed the button, but I don’t remember doing it. And I feel like we could show you the footage hand. ’cause we quite clearly saw that you did press the button.

I feel like this conversation would’ve a lot more weight if we as the audience had not seen her physically press the button. Um, but we did. So we’re on [00:54:00] Karen’s side, like, yeah, you fucking pressed the button. Get over it. Um. So Karen tries to counter with, do you remember putting on your seatbelt? I don’t remember brushing my teeth this morning.

Sometimes we just do a million little tasks on autopilot and we don’t remember doing them.

Alice: Yeah, like hen’s, like I should remember that was an important moment. And Karen’s like, only in retrospect when you push that button, it was just another day because Yeah, like when she pushed the button, she had no idea that the lights weren’t gonna change on the other side.

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: She needs to be able to trust herself and it every day. Yeah. Probably multiple times a day.

Bex: Yeah. I don’t, I don’t feel like the, I have to trust myself and my instinct line really matches with, I don’t remember pressing the button. Yeah. Because it wasn’t her instinct that failed her. It wasn’t her, her instinct was fine.

She pressed the button, the technology failed her. There was no way that she had any control over that.

Alice: You know, I get why it still feels like her fault. [00:55:00]

Bex: Oh yeah, 100%. We are going to leave the day spa and we are going back to the hospital where Buck is getting a cup of like truly terrible ho hospital coffee.

Um, because the, he’s doing the, the good little brother thing and he’s sitting in the waiting room with Maddie while she waits to hear about Tara and Vincent.

Ellen: Well, they had plans for tonight anyway, so he may as well.

Bex: Yeah, he had nothing better to do, go and gone I guess. My don’t think he, he particularly thought he’d be hanging out in a hospital waiting room again.

Ellen: No, no. But he’s going to pick her up.

Bex: That’s probably it. She needs,

Ellen: He, he thinks doing a, a finger thoracostomy is kind of badass and she, he’s trying to buck her up by saying, you know,

Bex: He’s trying to buck her up?

Ellen: You say so.

Alice: Well, she is a Buck.

Ellen: I a hundred percent meant to say that. No, um, you know, you saved you guys’ life.

You know, one who did not deserve it and. Matt Zago. No one deserves to [00:56:00] die.

Bex: Officer Williams comes back at this point and tells her that she’s free to go, that she doesn’t need to give a statement because, um, he spoke to Vincent before they wheeled him into surgery and apparently he shot himself with his gun.

Alice: Yeah. Somehow in the shoulder.

Bex: Yeah. And I’m sure that if they checked his hands, he would’ve no gun residue powder on his hands. But they can’t kind of, they have to take him at his word, even though, even though Officer Williams does not believe a single word out of his mouth. But he tells Maddie that she’s free to go.

And then Tara comes out.

Ellen: Oh yeah, she’s really happy to see Maddie. She wanted to thank her, but, um, and, and she says that he Vincent’s gonna forgive her if she would forgive him, and we can make things work. And Maddie’s like, what are you talking about? No,

Bex: Tara’s still like, it can be different. We can be different.

He promised. He promised things can be different and Maddie’s just like, oh [00:57:00] fuck. Fuck’s sake. Nope.

Ellen: No, Maddie can’t believe what she’s hearing. And Buck asks her if she wants to. Like Tara leaves. She’s really happy and Buck asks her if she wants to hang, if Maddie wants to hang around in case she need to.

But Maddie just says, “No, I can’t help her anymore.”

Bex: I feel like this episode needs to end with one of those, you know, when you watch a, uh, based on real life kind of movie or TV show and that the, just before you get to the end credits, it gives you the, what happened after the movie finished in real life?

Ellen: Oh, yeah.

Bex: Yeah. I feel like there needs to be, at the end of this episode, they go like six months later, Tara was found dead at her own house. Mm.

Alice: Oof.

Bex: Um, and Vincent has disappeared.

Ellen: Yeah. I think unfortunately this is based on many real life stories where this actually does happen. Like even. If, if a victim of domestic abuse gets really seriously injured, they will [00:58:00] still say that it wasn’t, it wasn’t their fault and you know, everything’s gonna be fine.

We’re gonna be together again. And it’s hard, it’s hard to leave, I’m sure.

Alice: And it’s hard to support people when they don’t wanna leave as well. Um, yeah, especially in Maddie’s case. ’cause like, they’re not friends. Like she knows this woman just because she did a like 9-1-1 call.

Ellen: Yeah. Well, I mean, there’s nothing that she can do at this point.

It’s just like you are not gonna be able to talk her into it.

Bex: Let’s talk about something a little bit more pleasant.

Alice: Yeah. We go from the hospital and, you know, some sadness to the gayest scene in the history of the show.

Bex: Ellen, you finally got to see the kitchen scene

Ellen: actually when, when it first came on and I saw them, the two of them standing there and I turned to, my sister-in-law went, is this the kitchen scene?

She’s like, yeah, yeah, this kitchen scene. I’m like, oh.

Alice: It’s like I recognize the clothes. As soon as it comes on, I’m like, oh, well it’s that hoodie, let’s go.

Ellen: I’m like, [00:59:00] oh, I’ve seen this on Tumblr, I’m sure.

Alice: Um, so we’re at Buck’s loft. Eddie and Chris have both come over for dinner. Like, let’s keep in mind through this whole scene that Chris is sitting on the couch in the living area.

Bex: Yeah, we know that because we see him sitting on the couch and as Eddie is clearing the plates and bringing them from the living area into the kitchen. So yes, Ellen, Chris is here,

Alice: but yeah, they’re having a lovely conversation about how Tara shot Vincent and then took him back and, you know, Chris is just like, yep, cool.

It’s fine. I’m. Totally not deaf, but just act like I am.

Bex: I feel like Chris has just perfected the, I’m just going to block out anything I can see and hear from these two. For my own, like self-preservation,

Ellen: he, he’s probably watching something on tv.

Bex: He probably is

Alice: just turns the volume up and just like stares at the tv.

Just like, yep. Don’t wanna know.

Bex: Yeah, like the loft is [01:00:00] open plan, so there’s nothing between where Chris is and the kitchen and where Eddie ends up standing with his back to the sink. He’s very, he can just look to the side and he can see Chris, which means that if Chris looks to the side, he could see Eddie and then Buck when Buck gets really close

Alice: And Buck’s loft’s not that big, like I’m sure then they’re not talking super quietly.

Bex: No. And it’s very like hardwood floors and, and brick exposed brick walls. So I’m guessing the sound absorption is like, it’s probably pretty echoy in there too. So yes, this poor child has been put through the ringer yet again with these two idiots.

Ellen: And they haven’t said anything particularly nasty. So like inappropriate.

Alice: I mean, they’re talking about a shooting to start off with, um, which Eddie compares to his marriage. Yeah.

Bex: Buck segues from discussions about his sister and Tara [01:01:00] to him and Eddie.

He says that, um, it’s hard to save someone from their selves. Not if they don’t wanna be saved, especially if you aren’t around to see that they need saving. And he gives a very pointed look at Eddie and then proceeds to apologize for probably like the 15 millionth time.

Alice: Yeah, “sorry I wasn’t there. You and Chris needed me and I had, and I had my head so far up my own behind with that stupid lawsuit.”

So like, is he censoring himself? ’cause Chris is there now, like,

Bex: I don’t know, maybe they used up their quota of swear words, but that should have been ass.

Alice: That should have been ass,

Bex: should have been “I had my head so far up my own ass.”

Alice: And Eddie says that they’re way past that, but Buck says he’s not. He should have been there and maybe he could have talked some sense into Eddie And Eddie’s, just like you talk sense into me, that had been interesting

Bex: back tries to say, well, I could have talked you out of buying that truck.

And Eddie’s like, yeah, you would’ve talked me into buying [01:02:00] something a lot more expensive. And he, he tells Buck, just don’t beat yourself up about it. It got out of hand. Um, which Buck counters with why? ’cause you’d rather do it. And this is where the conversation, the, the acting choices of these two once again comes into question.

Because why all of a sudden is this conversation that could have been like about two bros, about to square up and fight, sound like they’re about to have sex?

Alice: Who directed this? Like, who wrote this and who directed this because like, what, what, what?

Bex: It’s not, it’s not Andrew Meyer. This one was written by Juan Carlos Coto, um, and directed by, I gotta go back up to the beginning of my document, but I did look it up.

Marcus Stokes. So it’s not the usual suspects when it comes to the homoeroticism between Buck and Eddie. It’s just Ryan and Oliver. [01:03:00]

Alice: Yeah. Fair.

Bex: And I really wanna see like, did they, did they try and get them to go in another direction and they just couldn’t get them away from this flirtatious acting choices and they just gave up and went, okay, fine.

Apparently that’s what we’re gonna get. Was this the intention behind the scene the entire time? Like a fly on a wall, please. I would love to have been a fly on the wall. So let’s, let’s keep going.

Ellen: Where are we? “If you’re not gonna be honest with Frank, at least be honest with me.”

Alice: And Eddie goes, “who says, I wasn’t being honest with Frank.”

Bex: If the, they eventually get to the point where Buck tells him that, uh, “You don’t think that when you were going through your phase, just maybe you were throwing your punches at the wrong guy?”

Ellen: And he thought he was gonna punch him in the supermarket. And he was like, yeah, we all thought you were gonna punch him in the supermarket.

Yeah,

Bex: Eddie counters like, “I wouldn’t do that to you. [01:04:00] You’re on blood thinners.” And then Buck says, “Well I’d still take you.”

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: And then he,

Alice: you think so?

Bex: He swag, he swaggers. There is no other, it’s like a cowboy swagger over, ’cause at this point Eddie is still like leaning against the sink, whereas Buck had been getting beers outta the fridge.

So he was behind the like island counter. So he kind of swaggers his way around the counter. He’s literally got like one hand tucked into the top of his, his belt loops or his jeans or something and looks at Eddie and looks at Eddie and says, “You wanna go for the title?” And once again, there is a hundred ways you could say that line.

And if they had meant it to be some kind of, you know. Astic we’re about to get in a fist fight way. They could have gone like [01:05:00] that. But instead, Oliver says it like this, which just makes it sound like somebody’s about to get naked.

Alice: And like Eddie’s reaction is to smirk, have a drink from his beer with like, while wiggling his eyebrow.

And then they cut to the two of them on Buck’s couch with Chris in the middle while they’re playing some kind of Street Fighter rip off.

Ellen: They had to put Chris in between them to break up the kind of tension.

Alice: And this poor child has just been in this apartment the entire time. Just like, oh, not again.

Bex: La la la la.

Alice: It’s happening again. Can’t see this. I can’t hear this. It’s, it’s, it’s not even in a hospital this time. I can’t even go find a comatose patient to sit by the bed of.

Bex: It’s just, I feel like this is one of these scenes where if you showed it to somebody out of context. Tell me what is happening in this scene.

The only interpretation that they could bring out of this scene is that these guys are [01:06:00] flirting.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: And I mean, I know I’m watching this series through a Buddie lens that I came into this show looking for, Buddie. So anytime these two are in proximity, I am looking for signs that there is something going on.

But I swear, even if you did not believe Buddy was a thing, this, the chemistry here, the whatever the fuck is going on between them is kind of undeniable in this scene. At least.

Alice: It’s ridiculous. Um, like my notes from the first time I watched this scene was just, this shit is so gay. That was all I had to say about this scene.

Ellen: Well, even stepping away from the, the last few seconds that are, that do take it to the next level, um, the beginning of the scene, I was like, so Buck is, is apologizing for not being there. Because they needed him and he wasn’t there and like had not having seen anything after this [01:07:00] point. Like we haven’t really seen, like I know they work together and they’ve been, obviously, we know that they have done things together and with Chris quite a lot, the

Alice: things together, what,

Ellen: you know what I’m talking like outside, I’m not talking about that, those things at the moment, but we haven’t really seen the building of their, any kind of relationship between them.

Uh, like we, they’ve been friends over time, but the, like, the way that Buck is apologizing for not being there seems like, um, you know, it’s, it’s like to a level that I, I wouldn’t have expected so soon, I guess. Um, it, but then I remembered that Chris and Eddie have just lost Shannon. They’ve been through a lot and.

And, you know, Buck’s been off doing this other stuff, so yeah. Okay. I can see why he’d be wanting to apologize and feeling bad for not being there. But yeah, when the first time I was watching it going, why, why are you so upset about not being there for them? Like, you’re not, they’re not family. [01:08:00] Like,

Alice: He feels bad for being an absent father.

Okay.

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah, that’s the thing. Like, they don’t live together. They’re not like, you know, he doesn’t No, but this is the guy have any obligation to be there for him?

Bex: No, but this is the guy that, the first time he saw Eddie struggling, which was like, within a week of meeting him, he had already threw himself 100% into helping Eddie and like got Carla and, you know, called the chief and arranged for, uh, bring your son to work day.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: So he’s very much, if he sees Eddie struggling, he’s gonna go all out to try and help him. So yeah, he missed, he missed it this time, this whole thing after Shannon died, after this tsunami, after everyone was struggling. Um, if Buck’s previous patterns of behavior applied Buck would have been there 110% trying to help him out.

But he was, you know, he’s had his head so far up his own ass that he didn’t see it and so he missed it. So yeah, the apology is completely understandable.

Alice: Have we seen him do the same [01:09:00] for Chim and Hen when they’re struggling?

Ellen: Not so much for Buck. I mean, he does, he he’ll ask about them. He certainly talks to them about them, to other people, but, uh, and he does, you know, try and speak to them, but we don’t see that on screen as much.

But yeah. Anyway, I, I was just thinking that at the start of the scene going, why is this like this? And then it, yeah, afterwards I realized that, but then I got distracted by the ending of this scene and I was like, wow. But it didn’t go, it didn’t go for as long as I thought it would have. Like, the way everyone talks about this scene, I was like, oh, that was short.

Bex: I think unfortunately, you’re coming into this with like. Everything has just been built up so much.

And your expectations are like through the roof. Um, although I am pleased to, I think if I’m reading this correctly, that you’re not walking away going like, oh, that’s what you guys were talking [01:10:00] about?

Ellen: Oh no, you’re still I definitely watched it and went, whoa,

Bex: you’re seeing what we’re seeing.

Ellen: Why, why is he getting so close? Why you wanna go for the title? Oh, oh yeah. But it was, it was pretty cute that they then went, played like Street Fighter.

Bex: Yeah. Which then, um, Eddie won.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: And then demanded that they go for another round.

Ellen: That’s his kind of therapy.

Bex: Yeah. Which, I mean, it’s kind of Yes. Beating up Buck is, is therapy.

Alice: Fair.

Bex: Alright, speaking of Hen we’re gonna go back to the, the spa restaurant where, uh, Hen and Karen are having dinner with Stacey, who’s also talking about serendipity. I’m just gonna start calling this episode Serendipity.[01:11:00]

Ellen: She had a, a near death experience and Karen asked her if she saw anything and she says, oh, nothing supernatural. Like, oh, that’s a shame. You should try it. It’s great.

Alice: Yeah, Sam and Dean were not there. Um, but she has seen no sign of Castiel

Ellen: Damnit. Um, but she’s definitely seen things. She, she saw her daughter walk down the aisle and she’s seen some grandchildren.

She’s seen the world, so, you know, she’s grateful for her second chance and she thanks Hen for saving her life. And Hen looks really touched once again.

Bex: Yeah, I don’t buy this scene.

Ellen: No?

Bex: And I know that, I know that I’m the cynical one of all of us, and emotion does not touch me apparently. Um, I just,

Ellen: it seemed a bit, possibly a bit heavy handed maybe with the, um, oh, here’s someone that whose life you saved who’s going to convince you that you are [01:12:00] actually a paramedic for a reason.

Bex: Yeah. It felt, it felt like they were trying to do that scene with Maddie. Remember where Josh and Sue violated privacy protocols and, and stalked all of Maddie’s previous 9-1-1 calls and tried

Alice: and they didn’t get suspended.

Bex: Yeah, exactly. Apparently it’s different if you do it for someone else, not for your own.

Um,

Ellen: yeah, Maddie was okay with it. It wasn’t like against her wishes

Bex: Yeah. Um, but they, you know, they brought all the people in to sort of explain to Maddie like how much she had changed their lives to convince her to keep becoming a team, working as a dispatcher. I feel like it’s, they’re trying to do the same thing here with Hen they’ve like brought Stacey back to say, look, you, you changed my life by saving my life and I’m forever grateful.

I just don’t know if it has the same impact.

Alice: My problem with scenes like this is always that I am so face blind. Um, like this is coming from someone who didn’t recognize Bobby for the first like [01:13:00] six seasons. Um, but I’m so face blind that like I would not have, like if I was, Stacey would not have recognized Hen, if I was Hen would not have recognized Stacey.

Like not a chance. Um, it’s been like over six years now since they saw each other last, like not a chance. Yeah.

Bex: It’s not even that. I feel like if Hen was, is so far deep in her depression that with um, and her obsession with this accident to the fact that no matter what you’re talking about, she’s bringing up, “Hey, do you know Evelyn played the cello?”

Yeah. I feel like that if this woman is sitting in front of her going, “You know, thanks to you, I got to see my daughter get married, I got to see grandchildren.” Hen would be going, “You know who’s never gonna get married? Evelyn.”

Ellen: That’s where I thought this was going.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: When I was watching this, I was like, oh no, she’s gonna get even worse now because

Bex: It’s gonna make Hen spiral even, even further!

Ellen: Evelyn’s not gonna get all these things.

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: But no, she was, she was okay after it. Like she,

Bex: yeah, [01:14:00] because once again, you cannot have trauma that interferes with storylines in this show, so they need Hen to snap out of it. So they’ve done this like intervention from Temu, um, sort of thing, which apparently works enough that they can then like spoiler alert Hen ends up back, coming back to work.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: But yeah, I, I don’t. I don’t think this scene should work. And it never has worked. No matter how many times I’ve watched it, I’ve watched this scene and gone, I don’t get this scene.

Ellen: Well, it works for Hen because she’s feeling a bit better after it

Bex: apparently. ’cause she doesn’t have a choice. She has to. She has to, has to. It has to work for her.

Ellen: It’s what the writers,

Bex: They need her back at work.

Ellen: It’s what the writers wrote. Yes. Um, so, okay, so we’ll go to the second emergency of this episode. Um, this episode’s very, it, it’s, yeah. I guess third. Yeah. If you include [01:15:00] Vincent. Um, it’s a lot of hard cuts, like between scenes, like the, the scenes don’t sort of flow into each other very well

Bex: They don’t segue naturally. Yeah.

Ellen: We’re just like, okay, that’s the end of that bit. Now we’re gonna go to a truck.

Bex: Uh, which is the writer that does the really, like, almost cringey, but they work segues. ’cause we need to have them back ’cause I liked them.

Ellen: The, the one, the last couple of episodes, whoever wrote those ones have had some really good segues.

Bex: Yeah. But

Ellen: yeah, this one, so it doesn’t really, it’s not as smooth, I don’t think.

Bex: No. It’s also interesting that this is kind of where the “fallout” part of the episode kicks in and we’re almost nearly at the end of the episode.

Ellen: Well, I mean, the medial fell out of the sky. It’s fallout I guess.

Bex: But like this, normally with episodes, you know, someone [01:16:00] says the episode title, which is why I kept thinking that the episode title should have been serendipity because everyone kept saying the word serendipity. So we don’t actually get the word fallout until like this, this emergency right at the end.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Uh, so this emergency, we have Ernest and Ankush who are truck drivers. They are driving a, I think a recycling truck?

Alice: It’s a, yeah,

Ellen: it’s like industrial waste kind of thing.

Alice: It’s a container truck. Like it’s a truck that’s carrying a container. Yes. Which is like a shipping container.

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: It’s a small one though.

Anyway, keep going.

Bex: Yeah. Uh, we are introduced to them when they pull off into a truck stop in order to filler up with gas. Um, it looks like they’ve set it up that Ankush looks like to be a newer member of the [01:17:00] team compared to Ernest’s um, more experienced driver because Ankush has a like clipboard and he’s looking through things and ticking things off as they’re doing.

And so while he’s getting ready to pump the gas, he says, um, protocol says we have to inspect the cargo. And Ernest is like, yeah, yeah, okay. I’ll go and inspect the cargo. So we see as he goes to the back of the, the trailer on the truck, there is a giant red sticker on the side that says ” Combustible 3″, which oh, basically is,

Ellen: oh yeah.

They, they stay on it for ages. I’m like, oh

Bex: yes, it’s combustible. It’s combust. Well, did you get that this is combustible? Because this is combustible.

Alice: Hang on. It is something in the truck combustible?

Bex: I think it might be.

Ellen: Apparently.

Alice: Oh, shit.

Bex: Um, so “Combustible 3” basically means that it’s flammable liquids that either have, um, a specific flashpoint, which is the minimum temperature [01:18:00] at which the liquid will turn to vapor and can ignite.

Um, so either the flashpoint is a certain temperature or the liquids have been heated and are being transported above or close to their flashpoint. Oh. But unfortunately, Ernest discovers that it’s not just combustible items in the back of the container truck because there are large steel drums hidden up the back of the container with radiation stickers on them that says that they are transporting CO 60, which is Cobalt 60, which is nuclear waste, pretty much

Ellen: Radioactive.

Bex: Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah. So the company is cutting corners and they’re not supposed to take radioactive waste through the middle of the city.

Bex: And I’m pretty sure that if they had radioactive waste, legally they should be marking the outside of the truck to indicate that there’s radioactive waste in there.

Not just combustible

Ellen: Ankush is trying to look at [01:19:00] the manifest of like what they’re carrying basically. And he, he can’t see anything unusual on it. And Ernest, who’s the other truck driver, says, “Do you see any steel drums on the list?” And he’s like, looking over at him.

Bex: Yeah. He literally turns 45 degrees, 90 degrees.

Ellen: Yeah. He’s not paying attention at all.

Bex: And, and he is staring at Ankush while he’s supposed to be driving. And he does not, I don’t know what has happened, whether he’s missed a turnoff, but they’re headed for a tunnel, which appears to be under construction. And I have a feeling that traffic has been rerouted because there’s a lot of cars heading towards him.

Ellen: Other cars? Yeah. Uh, maybe this one lane has been blocked off or something in there.

Bex: Yeah, it might, I feel like maybe the, the in the in lane has been cut off and the outline is only working. Yeah, basically he’s not supposed to be going that way. And there is a, a traffic guy who’s trying to [01:20:00] catch their attention like, wait, wait, wait.

You gotta stop. Um, Ankush notices first, gets Ernest’s attention. Ernest sort of slams on the brakes, which just causes the trailer to jackknife. So they start careening around inside the tunnel trying to avoid cars, um, and eventually end up sort of at the side of the tunnel up on some like concrete pylons, which would be fine, except then another car comes and slams into the back of them and explodes and everything catches fire.

And there is a guy in the tunnel who was watching this happen. And we see from his perspective that the, the truck that’s hit Ernest’s truck is, has caught fire and is burning. Um, but it’s uh, the normal red orange flame, whereas the container on the back of the truck is also on fire. But [01:21:00] that’s blueish white.

Ellen: Yeah, it’s weird. It’s weird. Actually two flames next to each other and different colors. It looks really, it’s a cool effect.

Bex: It is. So he calls 9-1-1 and he gets Maddie and tells her that two trucks just collided. They’re on fire. The whole place is filling up with smoke . And as Maddie is taking this call, Josh’s Spidey sense starts start tingling and sort of scoots his way across over to Maddie’s station.

And as Maddie is getting more information, he realizes that there are other people around the other stations who are answering calls about the accident in the tunnel. So he takes control. And he tells everybody to reroute traffic around the tunnel until they know what’s burning in there. They’re not letting anyone in.

They’re not going to take any chances.

Ellen: Yeah. Maddie confirms that the fire is [01:22:00] white.

Alice: Yeah, that’s when Maddie says, did you say the fire is white?

Ellen: Yeah. So we don’t get anyone saying what it is until later when you know, they, the 118 arrive and they take a look at it and then Eddie says, I’ve put my money on magnesium.

Bex: ’cause apparently Eddie knows all about hazardous waste.

Alice: Yeah. I mean he has been in the fire department…

He’s

Ellen: been, he’s been to fire school.

Alice: A long time. Yeah, that too,

Ellen: he knows about stuff.

So they can’t put, if it’s a magnesium fire, they can’t put water on it ’cause magnesium reacts with water. So they need liquid nitrogen fire.

Yeah, they need liquid nitrogen instead. So they get that on the way.

Bex: Yeah, Ankush has managed to get himself out of the truck at this point and is on the ground. So he’s easy enough. They scoop him up, put him on a gurney, get him out of the tunnel, but the cab of the truck is kind of crumpled in on itself, and the owner is trapped behind the steering wheel.

Alice: Um, yeah. So they like wedged the jaws in and try and [01:23:00] move the front of the truck, but they’re not able to. And this is where Bobby goes, “Okay, we’ve got alpha level radiation in this smoke. We’ve gotta get him out of here soon.” And this is where I was like, how are they not playing radiation? I mean, “Radioactive”, because like we’re so used to the needle drops in this TV show.

Bex: Maybe that’s just a little bit too on the nose.

Ellen: Yeah, it’s not, it’s not dramatic enough

Alice: too on the nose for 9-1-1?

Bex: I know. I know.

Alice: Yeah. So Ernest like, becomes conscious again.

Ellen: He wakes up and starts screaming basically.

Alice: And he becomes calm very quickly.

Ellen: No, Bobby tells him to be calm and he does.

Alice: Yeah. He’s like, ah! And Bobby’s like, “Be calm.”

Ellen: Be calm.

Alice: He’s like, okay, my bad. Okay,

Ellen: what’s going on?

Alice: Um, and then he is just like, “Oh yeah, there’s magnesium in the back that’s burning, but you need to get out because there’s Cobalt 60.”

Ellen: And Bobby’s eyes just [01:24:00] get wider and wider. And he is like, oh fuck. And he is like, “You were transporting radioactive waste through the middle of LA?” And, and Ernest is like “Company’s cutting corners.”

What are you gonna do anyway, so he does say on the radio, “the truck contains Cobalt 60, get everyone the fuck out of here.”

Alice: Yeah, that’s exactly what he says on the radio.

Bex: Yeah. And then he kicks Buck and Eddie out of the tunnel says that he’ll stay here, he’ll get Ernest out, but everybody else has to leave.

Ellen: And, but, and like Buck doesn’t wanna go. He’s like, “What do you mean?”

Bex: of course he doesn’t

Ellen: probably’s like, get out.

Bex: I wanna stay with you Daddy!

Alice: Buck’s like “Dad, no!”

Ellen: Dad. You can’t stay here. But eventually he’s like, okay, let’s go, let’s go.

Bex: And we see that the fire, um, the magnesium fire has spread and is starting to burn the, the exterior of the, the cobalt tanks. It’s burning the, the [01:25:00] stickers.

Ellen: Oh yeah. I mean, the tension in this scene’s great. This is quite scary by this point.

Bex: Yeah. You’ve got the, like the, the ticking time bomb of when is everything gonna explode?

Can they?

Ellen: Yeah. And they’re trying to get, get the CO2 through, like the liquid nitrogen through so they can get on top of the fire. And

Alice: I do remember this being like super tense the first time I watched it, but the second, like when I watched it again tonight, I was just like, oh yeah, whatever. Because I’d already seen it.

Some of them really like lack the, like, the tension the second time. Like some of them hold up really, really well. Yes. And some of them it’s just like, eh, yeah. Um, like Maddie

You knew what’s gonna happen

in Yeah. Like Maddie and Doug’s is still super tense. Yeah. But this one I was just like, eh. Yeah. Yeah. Gee, I hope Bobby doesn’t die.

Ellen: Yeah. No one, no one gets, like, no one actually dies at the end of this song, I don’t think. Unless the, I mean, I’m assuming the driver of [01:26:00] the car that hit the back of the truck probably died ’cause his car exploded.

Bex: I don’t think anybody cared about him. No. I don’t think anybody checked on him.

Ellen: No. No one mentioned anything.

Alice: He didn’t play the cello. Um, but yeah, hazmat’s not there yet. Nitros not there yet. Um, because there are too many cars trying to evacuate downtown. So they’ve been delayed and so Buck’s like, “Okay, they’re not here, we’re coming back to you.” And Bobby’s like, “Ah, no.”

Bex: No,

Alice: “The cobalt has ignited. We’re at gamma radiation level,” and I was like, oh shit. Bobby’s gonna turn into the Hulk.

Bex: That would be cool.

Ellen: That’d be so cool. But no,

Bex: wouldn’t it be cool though if like the gamma radiation did the, like the next couple of seasons was just Bobby having superpowers?

Alice: Yeah.

And Bobby just hulking out whenever he gets mad,

Ellen: he just pick up the fire truck when it falls on top of Buck.

Alice: And then they’d like, they wouldn’t even, they wouldn’t [01:27:00] even find a cure. They’d just forget that he had those powers.

Ellen: Yeah. And every now and again, he’d just be like,

Alice: and then all of a sudden at the end of season seven, they’d come back and he’d be cured for some reason by the cartel in Mexico.

Um. Anyway, so

Bex: spoilers!

Ellen: I don’t even know what you’re talking about, but okay.

Alice: Bobby grabs a fire extinguisher, which is apparently there, um,

Bex: just so happens to be like at his feet, oh, look, here’s a fire extinguisher that someone prepared earlier.

Alice: I haven’t used that the entire time, but should probably use it now.

Um, so yeah, it does nothing pretty much,

Bex: I think it makes things worse because as he’s spraying the, the CO2 on the fire, it just creates more, like more smoke starts billowing. Um, and for this particular emergency, Bobby’s wearing a, like gas detector, a port portable gas detector on his uniform, which [01:28:00] was at green.

But as soon as he hits the flames with the CO2, that thing goes red. Yeah. So I think in trying to save, trying to buy himself some more time, he’s just made things like three times worse.

Ellen: Oh.

Alice: Um, but thank goodness when he, like he was out of, um, the fire extinguisher stuff, um, what do they call, it’s, I’m sure there’s a scientific name that’s not “stuff”. Um,

Ellen: the contents of the fire extinguisher?

Alice: Yeah. Once he gets through the contents of the fire extinguisher, he radios that he’s out and wears the liquid nitrogen and Eddie’s like, oh, it’s here. It’s fine.

Bex: Yeah. They, they don’t really string the tension out very long. Yeah. The Nitro has shown up as well as the hazmat team, um, which, if the closed captions are to be believed, this is the same hazmat team that showed up in “Ocean’s 9-1-1”.

Alice: Oh, that’s cool.

Bex: And when you look at the [01:29:00] Wiki. Which lists all of the like guest stars and like the people who were accredited for this episode.

Uh, it was also Captain Bowman and it’s the same actor that was in “Ocean’s 9-1-1”, which I guess makes sense. I mean, how many hazmat teams would you have in la?

Alice: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that’s why they took so long. It’s just the one, but the only one. It’s just the one. Um, he asks where the captain is and Buck says “Inside.” Bowman goes, “How long has he been in there?”

And Buck just goes “Too long.” Like that doesn’t help anyone. Like give a rough timeframe. You’re a firefighter, not a civilian. Like you. Jesus Christ.

Bex: Just like too long could be like, is it two minutes too long or 15 minutes too long? Because

Alice: Right. Exactly.

Bex: That’s a vast difference when it comes to like gamma radiation exposure.

Like all gamma radiation exposure is bad, but two minutes exposure is going to be much better than 15 minutes exposure.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: It’s not as pithy and dramatic. [01:30:00]

Alice: Jesus. It just reminded me of, um, it reminded me of in it’s the start of “Tombstone” in Supernatural where like Cas comes back, spoilers, and goes, “How long have I been gone?” and Dean just goes, “Too damn long.”

And then poor Cas like gets back to the bunker and Jack is a fully grown adult and he’s just like, holy fuck, have I really been gone 20 years? Yeah. Like Sam and Dean aged real well for 20 years, but like, Jack’s an entire adult. Like Jesus Christ.

Ellen: That’s right.

Alice: Um, and then I’m sure later that day Sam’s just like, “oh yeah, it was a real shit like two weeks.” And Cas is like, “What?”

Ellen: Dean’s been inconsolable,

Alice: but like use timeframes, people timeframes, but yeah, hazmat get in, um, tap out Bobby and they get Ernest out as well.

Bex: Yeah. ’cause once the, um. Hazmat [01:31:00] go in to get Bobby, the 118 get in with the Nitro, which means that they’re able to extinguish the flames so that the other members of the 118 can come in with the big circular saw.

’cause they can use that now that the fire has been contained and they don’t have to worry about sparks potentially igniting the, the gas cloud

Alice: or turning into the Hulk ’cause of the gamma radiation. Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah. I was a bit surprised they, they made, when Bobby came out, they made him go in the decontamination, you know, hazmat tent then to be, you know, washed off and decontaminated basically.

But they didn’t do the same thing to Ernest. They just loaded him into the ambulance and off he went.

Alice: Yeah. They’re just like, bye.

Ellen: Yeah, he’s had plenty of radiation too.

Bex: Yeah. And I, I guess maybe he was in the cab for a lot of it, so he would’ve been protected.

Ellen: Yeah, but the door was open.

Alice: No, the door was open.

Bex: He was, I know, but, but he wasn’t like standing right in the, [01:32:00] and extinguishing and getting the smoke washing over him the way Bobby was.

Alice: I don’t think it ma… like the people of Chernobyl weren’t protected just ’cause they were inside the house. Like

Bex: I, I guess also they’re taking, like, they’re not putting Ernest into a normal ambulance.

He’s going with the hazmat team into like a hazmat special ambulance.

Alice: Oh, is he? Okay, cool.

Ellen: Yeah, that probably makes more sense.

Bex: Yeah, because they’re walking, they, they push him past, um, Chim and the 118 ambulance.

Alice: Oh, I just figured that they push him past the 118 ambulance because Ankush is going in there.

Bex: No, I’m assuming that considering it was the full hazmat team, he would’ve been continuing to go with the hazmat team, which would take him to a special part of the hospital where they could contain the, the, like, the radiation. I mean, while they,

Ellen: I mean, it does make sense because he, you know, requires immediate, you know, emergency assistance.

So they need to get, get him on the way to the hospital. But. Yeah. Rather than wait for a while for him to have a shower.

Bex: But then it’s also like [01:33:00] raising him off the, the drama of having, you know, these two guys in hazmats, strip Bobby of all of his equipment and put that into radioactive like hazardous waste bags and then build the shower and put him in it and hose him down and

Ellen: yeah. Poor Bobby, he just looks a bit shocked by the whole thing.

Alice: And they do take Bobby to hospital. Yep.

Ellen: Yep.

Alice: Um, ’cause we cut to Bobby in a hospital bed with Athena and she’s hovering.

Ellen: Bless her,

Alice: “Dr. Alternative world Michael”, we’re full of the Supernatural, this episode.

Ellen: We are very supernaturally this episode. But I did actually say the same thing when he, when he walked in, I’m like, oh, that’s Michael again.

Bex: It’s Michael!

Ellen: I don’t know what his real name is. What his name is in, in this show.

Alice: There’s only one, there’s only one doctor in this hospital.

There’s only one hazmat team in this city. It’s fine.

Bex: Calloway. His name is Dr. Calloway.

Ellen: Michael Calloway?

Alice: Uh, Dr. [01:34:00] Alternative world. Michael Callaway?

Bex: Yeah. Just, just Dr. Callaway is all we’re given. Um, yes. Who is giving Bobby the results of all of the, the battery of tests that they’ve run on him, which for the most part is pretty good.

Um, except for his urine test, which unsurprisingly, considering that the body processes and excretes cobalt through the urine has traces of cobalt in it,

Alice: liver enzymes are also not where he’d like them to be. But he’s not about to sound any alarms yet.

Bex: Could that just be because Bobby’s an alcoholic?

Alice: I mean, he hasn’t been an alcoholic in a while and livers regenerate, so, but he’s also not ready to sound any alarms yet. However, he is cautious by nature

Ellen: and they’re gonna, they, they’re gonna send him home, but he is gotta have a bunch of tests to make sure that

Alice: there’s no…

Yeah. Once a week for the next six weeks

Ellen: long term effects.

And Athena tells him that she’s not ready to be a [01:35:00] widow and basically tells him off for putting himself in dangerous situation, which I don’t know if you checked Athena, that that’s his job.

Alice: It’s

Ellen: also her job does that every day. Yeah.

Alice: Like she’s been kidnapped by crazy people. She’s been like, what, Athena?

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: Just like three weeks ago you hunted down a killer who could have still been a killer on your own.

Ellen: Yeah. Yes. I don’t think you get to get across with him for that.

Bex: No.

Ellen: But they do have very sweet moment where they, you know share a smooch. We gotta I love you. I love you too.

Alice: Yeah. “You will not get sick on me.”

Bex: Oh, the the, you will not get sick on me line. I’ve gone Uhoh

Alice: don’t cross Athena. Bobby, that’s gotta be healthy.

Ellen: Foreshadowing?

Bex: Yeah. The foreshadowing.

Alice: Dunno what you’re talking about. Bobby agreed. It’s fine. He’s not gonna get sick on her deal.

Bex: Yeah, Bobby agreed. [01:36:00]

Alice: Um, anyway,

Bex: Ellen’s seen the next episode. She knows what happens.

Alice: The audience haven’t.

Bex: Yes they have. I don’t think there is anybody who was listening to this who has not seen 9-1-1 before. Actually, sound off in the comments. If you are watching 9-1-1 for the first time,

Ellen: please tell us, um, so we can make sure we don’t accidentally spoil you.

Bex: Okay.

So we go from one loved up, married couple to another, loved up, married couple, which.

Ellen: They’ve been in traffic for three hours.

Bex: It’s a filler scene. Yeah. Like yeah, they’re back from the spa. They love each other. Everything’s back to normal. Um, the end,

Alice: they did just spend three hours in traffic, which undid the three days of rest and relaxation.

I wonder what they did for the rest of the, like they went to dinner night one. I guess they really did just rest and re relax the other tree.

Ellen: Yeah. It was a spa. So maybe they had massage

Bex: colonics?

Ellen: Yeah. Well, no, Hen didn’t want that. [01:37:00] And Danny did the usual kid thing of emptying his bag onto his bed rather than actually unpacking.

He just wants the dog

Alice: pretty close. Yeah. Fair. Same.

Bex: I mean, in Denny’s defense Hen did just say Unpack. He unpacked.

Alice: Yeah. Yeah. Um, Karen’s magically healed. From her,

Ellen: her trauma,

Bex: from her depression?

Alice: Like her, her grief. Yeah.

Bex: Yes.

Alice: And that’s just where, um, and blames the hormones. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

Because, you know, women only have feelings when it’s hormones.

Um, hence says that she never cared how many kids they had, just that they had them together. And oh, apparently Denny was with his uncle. I missed that.

Bex: Well, I mean, they were there for three days. I don’t think they would’ve, I know that Karen. Oh, I figured that he would’ve

Alice: been with someone, but I wondered if it was like Karen’s parents or something.

Bex: I don’t think Karen was leaving him on the couch with, you know, a [01:38:00] box of cereal for three days. Although,

Alice: again,

Bex: again, apparently that’s what she’d been doing before. But three days might be pushing it.

Alice: No, I just wondered if like he was with…,

Ellen: she’s not, not John Winchester,

Alice: Karen’s parents or something, but No. Oh, but cereal and SpaghettiOs.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: But yeah. Filler episode, apparently everyone in the Wilson household is fine or back to normal. Great.

Ellen: And go get the dog

Bex: and we gotta go get Paisley.

Ellen: Yep. So they do still have the dog, which they acquired in like the first season.

Bex: Second season it was from the earthquake.

Ellen: Oh yeah, that’s right. Good continuity.

Alice: They stole the dog from the dead person.

Ellen: Yeah. Um, so Bobby and Athena walk in the door and they’re obviously having a conversation on the way in, but we only hear like the end of it. And Athe as they walk in, Athena says something like, [01:39:00] “It is indeed.” And that’s all we get of that conversation. And I’m like, yeah, what did he say something like, “it’s good to be home” or something first? And then she said like,

Alice: they cut it for time. It was just a, just like, no. Gotta have Denny complaining about his dog. We’ve gotta cut the first half of

Ellen: Yeah,

Alice: that sentence.

Ellen: But anyway, every, everyone’s there. Uh, well, everyone, including Michael and the kids.

So they came over to make them dinner.

Bex: Yeah. Michael figured that he would drop the kids off and let himself in and use their kitchen. I don’t know how I would feel if I came home from a long day and my ex-husband was in my kitchen cooking.

Ellen: Yeah, yeah. He’s, yeah. Very much still part of their little family, isn’t he?

He’s like,

Alice: I designed this damn house. I designed this damn kitchen I’m using it.

His

Bex: name is probably still on the, like the lease or the deed or whatever. Yeah.

Ellen: Maybe Bless him. But anyway, I would be [01:40:00] happy to get someone to cook me dinner after a, that would be fine.

Bex: Oh yeah. Yeah. I’d be very happy to come home and have a home cooked meal after the day I’ve just had, I don’t know if I’d want my ex to be the one doing it though.

Alice: Uh, to be fair, he’s not Bobby’s ex. He is Bobby’s friend. So. Bobby’s like, fuck yeah. Dinner.

Ellen: Do you mean he’s not there for Athena? He’s there for Bobby.

Alice: Yes. They’re besties now.

Ellen: Right.

Alice: Um, but anyway, the kids are quite worried about Bobby because the truck driver was on the news and they said that he has lung damage and that he could get cancer from being in the tunnel.

And Bobby sort of brushes ’em off and goes, oh, he wasn’t wearing the protective gear that firefighters wear, and he was in the tunnel a lot longer. And I feel fine.

Bex: They start talking about, um, the implications of the, um, the truck crash and the discovery that the truck had cobalt 60 on board. It’s going to spark, forgive the pun, um, massive investigations and.

Bobby hopes that Ernest is [01:41:00] ready for what’s coming, um, and may pipes up. Of course she does and says that she thinks that they’re just gonna, they’re gonna like get this segue in. She’s like, “I think he’s brave for telling the truth and standing up for what’s right.” And you can just see her like very pointedly staring at her mother as she says this.

If more people stood up for what’s right, the world would be a better place, mum. Mm-hmm. Yes. Do you hear me?

Alice: You hear that mum. Um, and then the oven timer, like, ha, serendipity, um, the oven timer is

Bex: saved by the bell?

Alice: Yep. And, um, Michael’s like, oh, that’s dinner. I’m just gonna go deal with that for 15 minutes.

Bex: Bobby’s like, “Great, I’m gonna go take a shower. You know, an actual shower, not a hazmat shower,” which just leaves Athena and May staring down at each other.

Alice: Dunno where Harry got went, but away.

Bex: I’m assuming Michael scruffed him and dragged him into the kitchen. Yeah,

Alice: she like grabbed him by the back of his t-shirt and was just like, Nope, [01:42:00] you’re a camera with me.

Ellen: I need help with the dinner. So Athena, she does have a very, you know, I guess mature reaction to, um, to the, the essay thing, um, in that she doesn’t get cross with May for any of it. She just says, she tells May that she read it. Um, she’s a police sergeant, not an officer, and it maybe, it seems like it shouldn’t mean much, but she worked very hard for that title and you know, she may says she, she can fix that and Athena’s like, “Good. Then it’s all set to go out and the admissions officers are going to be very impressed with you.” And May’s just like, “you’re not mad?”

Bex: May’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Ellen: Yeah. She’s like, what do you mean it’s good to go? But, um, Athena does say that she’s, you know, “You and I might not always agree on the choices that we make, but I’m proud of what I do and I hope [01:43:00] that one day when you are my age, you’ll be able to look at your daughter and say the same thing. That’s what I want for you.”

Bex: She gives me a hug, they say, tells her that she loves her. May’s like, “I love you too.” Um, Athena disappears. I don’t know where she’s going. Maybe to get changed, maybe to help Bobby shower, who knows? Um, and Michael comes up behind May, he’s obviously realized that it’s safe to come out of the kitchen, um, and May turns around and says, “I kind of wish that she was just mad at me.”

Like, I don’t know how to handle mum being nice to me like this.

Ellen: Yeah. And Michael tells her, “Welcome to being a grownup,” when no one says what they mean and everyone, uh, yeah. Oh, so we’re at the end, we’re at the end montage time,

Bex: The end montage, where we try desperately to tie all of the storylines together to the theme of the episode, which [01:44:00] apparently is fallout and not serendipity.

Ellen: Mm-hmm.

Bex: Yeah. And we get hen doing the voiceover for this one, and she tells us, uh, as I think it must be the next day as Athena is getting the kids ready for school, that life hits you head on sometimes and there is always going to be pain and a fallout that comes with it.

Ellen: Yeah. She said it, she said the thing,

Alice: she said the thing you guys,

Bex: She said it and Eddie said it earlier.

And then Ernest, Ernest is about to say it because, um, we do get a cut of him doing some kind of little press conference. That Channel Lake News, um, is broadcasting with the, uh the chiron, um, “truck driver whistleblower sheds light on dangerous and illegal nuclear waste transport”.

And he says that, um, “Thanks to a lot of brave souls, this city dodged a bullet, but [01:45:00] it ain’t over. People need to know what happened. And today the real fallout begins.” That’s what I mean, like the entire episode. We really only get the episode title and the, the theme of fallout shoved down our throats in like the last 10 minutes of the episode.

Ellen: Yeah. And only really relating to the, like, textually only relating to the truck crash.

Alice: Mm. I mean, I guess it’s like the fallout of what happened to everyone.

Bex: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we, yeah,

Ellen: it is, it definitely is. But no one says the words,

Bex: Thematically yes, but it’s, you know, sometimes we get really subtle themes, um, that just happened to, well, the storylines subtly reflect the theme. Sometimes we get it shoved down our throats.

This time it was like, uh, really sort of subtle. Really just thematic and, oh, no, no. Wait, we’re just gonna shove it down your throat now right at the end.

Alice: Yeah. Oh, shit. We forgot to shove it down your throat. Yeah,

Bex: [01:46:00] we get a Olivia, um, we get cut to Olivia’s live stream. She’s gone back to content creation where she says that,

Ellen: oh, she’s the, the most corny line ever.

Bex: I used to have this hole inside me, but now after having an actual hole, I feel whole,

Ellen: oh, it’s dreadful.

Bex: I’m sorry. Did that meteor go through the, like, the part of your brain that constructs sentences because that was terrible.

Ellen: I was hoping that they would show like, like that we would find out what happened to her. Like does she still have a hole through her? The middle of her stomach?

Alice: There’s like comments popping up on like her livestream too, and there’s like people being like, show us the scar.

Bex: Like what would they do in that instance? Would they like take, would they like cut flesh and like her legs and other parts of her body to like rebuild her abdomen?

Ellen: I have no idea. Like it depends which bits of her are missing inside her [01:47:00] abdomen, I guess.

Like is she missing part of her gut? Like did… What did they have to sew together to make her function again?

Alice: Like it’s just like she probably lost a kidney. ’cause they thought that it went through one of her kidneys.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Which one do you have two of? Your kidneys or your liver?

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. Kidney. Yeah.

Alice: Kidney. Yeah.

Bex: Okay. So she’s probably so,

Alice: but your liver, but your liver can re regrow. So like, okay. Yeah,

Ellen: I don’t know. It’s, I feel like it would be quite a while until she was out of hospital for a start,

Bex: but it can’t be that far because it doesn’t seem that it’s that long since it happened that she’s back on the live stream.

Ellen: Yeah. Well, I mean, the events of that episode only take place over a few days, right? Like it’s not, yeah, I don’t know

Bex: timing. Why me? Let’s, we just stick before that.

Ellen: I mean, if Chim can heal from a, a rebar through the brain after like four weeks or whatever it was, was, yeah.

Bex: It okay. Yeah. Let’s not [01:48:00] get caught up on the time.

Um, speaking of time, we did get a little bit of a timestamp because after Olivia’s live livestream, we cut back to Frank’s office, um, where Maddie has shown up for another appointment, even though she’s not meant to be there for another week. And she tells Frank that she just really needed to talk to him about how she really felt about killing her husband.

Ellen: Yeah, but we don’t get to find out what that was yet.

Bex: No, we don’t get to hear that. Uh, we’re gonna go back to the Bathena household, where as Hen tells us that we can spend our days trying to understand pain and we should. That’s how we heal. Um, Athena is frantically Googling radiation poisoning. Don’t do it.

Don’t, don’t do it.

Ellen: Oh, no, no. Dr. Google is never good.

Bex: No. And we see Hen is back at work at the [01:49:00] 118. Oh, it’s really cute.

Ellen: Everyone hugs her. Yeah.

Bex: She walks out of the locker room and she gets like a group hug with Eddie and Buck and Chim, and then Bobby walks over and gives her a hug and then the others just like stacks on them.

Ellen: Yeah, they glom on.

Alice: That’s great.

Bex: And Hen finishes her voiceover by saying that we must always remember that it is not trauma that defines us. It’s how we choose to react, how we choose to move on.

Alice: And then as Chim and hen head for the ambulance, because the alarm’s going off, um, Chim goes to like get in the driver’s seat and Hen goes, “Chim, I’ll drive.”

Ellen: Yeah. Her trauma is over.

Bex: Yeah. ’cause it was inconvenient for it to go any longer. So she needed to get over it quicker. And that’s the end of the episode.

Ellen: So the, at least this one’s ending on a, on a upbeat note, yes. We’ve had a few, we’ve had a few downers the last few episodes, haven’t we? [01:50:00]

Bex: We’ve got, it’s positive.

It’s uplifting the, the bands all back together.

Ellen: Mm. Yay

Bex: for now.

Ellen: Yeah. Like I said, this episode didn’t, like, it wasn’t, it didn’t flow as well. Nah. As other ones have like. Each, each, each of the scenes didn’t really relate to each other, so it just, it was just like a shoved together bunch of different things that happened.

Bex: Yeah.

Ellen: Like in other episodes we have got those cool segues and like things of joined together in different ways, but

Bex: the, the clever, the clever writing where they’ve linked each scene to the next one. Yeah. That it was lacking that. And as we, as we said before, the, the theme was kind of there and kind of not, and then just got rammed down our throats really hard at the end of the episode just to make sure we really got what the episode was supposed to be about.

Even though I’m not sure the episode knew what it was supposed to be about.

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: This [01:51:00] one was very much a like, let’s wrap it all up.

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: In a neat little package.

Bex: We’ve had enough of trauma. We need to move on. Let’s just end this part so that we can move on and get onto other parts of the story. I think it’s also because they, they go on, they do next week’s episode, which is the Christmas episode, and then they go on like their, their winter hiatus.

So they needed to get everything resolved so it wasn’t dangling over the next couple of months.

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. I forgot we were coming up to another Christmas episode.

Bex: Yes.

Ellen: Yeah. So tell us about next week.

Bex: Next week the holidays are more naughty than nice for the first responders.

Ellen: Ooh, that sounds exciting.

Bex: The 118 responds to holiday themed incidents, including a shopper pushed over the edge, a woman who is literally having a blue Christmas and a luggage handler accident on a tarmac. Meanwhile, Maddie [01:52:00] revisits her past to embrace her future, and Bobby receives some shocking news.

Alice: I have zero memory of this episode at all.

Bex: It’s also missing possibly two other major storylines in that summary. Because the triggers for this episode includes discussion of a brain tumor slash cancer, discussions of domestic violence and abuse and therapy, including flashbacks, um, a parent threat, um, a child having to do CPR and PTSD.

Wow. Any of that ringing a bell?

Alice: Like I remember some parts of this episode, but I don’t remember the emergencies of this episode.

Bex: I think I’m getting this episode confused with like the next Christmas episode as well. But that’s okay. I’ll watch the episode and I will be refreshed.

Alice: That’s it. It’s kind of nice sometimes when I watch episodes I don’t remember ’cause I’m just like, oh, it’s like a new episode.

Ellen: Anything else we wanna say about this one though?

Alice: No, I don’t think so. It was very much [01:53:00] a like wrap everything in a nice little package episode.

Bex: Um, you will be interested to know this perhaps Ellen, that, Frank is like the the fan fiction therapist. Every Buddie Fanfic that I’ve read, if somebody is going to therapy, it’s Frank. It’s always Frank. Okay. It’s always Frank.

Ellen: That makes sense. Is Frank gonna come back and be like a regular therapist for them or is this just this episode?

Bex: He does come back.

Ellen: Okay, good.

Bex: Probably not as often as Fanfic would like to have you believe, I feel like Buck and Eddie have way more therapy in Fanfic than they do in the show.

Alice: Oh, absolutely. I feel like it’s like at the end of a Marvel movie when it just like blank black screen and then white writing and it’s just “Frank will return”

Bex: in like 2027.

Alice: Yeah. [01:54:00]

Ellen: Um, well, if anyone else out there has any stories or tidbits to tell us, let us know and tell us what you thought about this episode, um, by leaving us a comment in all of the places where you can leave comments for us, um, Spotify, YouTube, on our blog, all that stuff. Uh, it’s all at thatweewooshow.com or you can, um, tell us on social media as well.

So thank you very much for listening this week, and we are gonna see you next time to talk about episode 10, “Christmas Spirit.” 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 are 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 [01:55:00] preferred listening app, and by sharing our social media posts, find out more at thatweewooshow.com.

[Outtake 1]

Alice: Um, fuck what happened in this episode.

Bex: Bobby Hulks out.

Ellen: Oh, I really wish. Okay. Someone write a fan fiction about that?

Alice: About what?

Ellen: Bobby hulking out.

Alice: Oh, Bobby hulking… Yeah. Right?

Ellen: Oh, that would be so good.

[Outtake 2]

Alice: Oh my God. I just took a drink of my water and as I was putting the lid on, the batch number is 1 9 118.

Ellen: Oh!

Bex: Oh, it’s a sign. I dunno what it means, but it’s a sign.

Alice: Serendipity, guys.