3.18: What’s Next?

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

In this episode we discuss episode 18 of the third season of 9-1-1, titled “What’s Next?”

The 118 rush to save lives in the aftermath of a massive train derailment.

Content warnings for episode 3.18:

Mention of cancer, discussion of rape, flashbacks to assault, train derailment leading to gore, mass injuries and fatalities, children at threat

Listen here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

If you’d like to subscribe to hear more of our podcast, please check out the numerous ways you can do so on our Subscribe page.

Our intro music is “Tensions” by Northern Points.

Episode Transcript

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

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

Alice: I’m Alice.

Ellen: And I’m Ellen.

Bex: As always, thank you to everybody who has listened to our episodes, who shared social media posts and rated us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you can rate us.

And special shout out to everyone who has left comments on any of our social media platforms. This week’s, um, special Caramello Koala award goes to celticwitch on YouTube who left us a [00:01:00] note on our episode of “Eddie Begins”, um, sharing some perspectives that she had found on Tumblr with regards to the infamous juice box scene with Eddie and his mother.

So thank you very much for sharing that perspective. As we said in the comments, that’s not something that we had really considered when we were watching it, and you are correct. It is amazing how different experiences color, how we view different characters and scenes. Everyone’s perception and everyone’s lived experiences bring and different, um, different ideas to the table, different perceptions when watching, uh, consuming media.

Ellen: Thank you.

Alice: Thank you.

Bex: So before we get on to season three finale, um, Alice, could you remind us what happened last week?

Alice: Yeah, big one last week. Uh, so Athena was badly injured in a fight with a serial rapist before Bobby and Michael destroyed the Bathena fireplace. [00:02:00] Uh, Karen accused Hen of cheating, causing Hen to reveal she’s thinking about going to med school. And the episode ended with a huge train derailment, which was reported by a previous 9-1-1 dispatcher, Abby,

Ellen: Abby returns!

Alice: Dun dun dun.

Ellen: So this episode, the finale, episode 18, has the title, “What’s Next?” Um, it first aired on the 11th of May, 2020. Which we’ve actually shifted by a couple of days, I think and we are not actually in tune in line with it this, this week. I dunno what’s happened. Maybe we’re recording earlier than usual.

Alice: Yeah, we’re doing Friday instead of Sunday.

Ellen: Okay. I was like, wait a minute. Don’t we normally line up at the moment, but no. May 11th. Um, and the official summary says the 118 rush to the scene of a train crash. Uh, they rush to save [00:03:00] lives in the aftermath of a massive train derailment. Um, that’s it, that’s all she wrote.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: Um, that’s basically everything that happens in this episode.

Bex: Which makes it seem like a much, much bigger deal than it actually turns out to be in this episode.

Ellen: Yeah, I mean the, there is a, a sum of the, the beginning of the episode, which is dedicated to the actual train derailment, but the, but the rest of it is just rescuing everybody. So I guess that is the bulk of the episode.

Bex: No, but even like the, like “the 118 rushes to rescue,” it makes it seem like the rescue is gonna be a much bigger deal

Alice: than two people? Yeah.

Bex: Then in my opinion that… Yeah. Than two people. In my opinion, it does not live up to the expectations that are set right by the, uh, the teaser that we got at the end of last episode.

Ellen: But it was emotionally

Alice: we’ll get to that.

Ellen: frought by the fact, by who the person is, but

Bex: we’ll get to that

Ellen: anyway. Um,

Bex: oh, I’ve got thoughts about that too. Don’t you worry about that.

Ellen: Okay. So [00:04:00] before we start, we have to mention,

Alice: Meanwhile, I have thoughts about the scent detection dog, but you know,

Ellen: we, we have to, we’ll get there, we’ll get there. Um, we gotta say the triggers first. That’s what we do. Um, we’ve got the mention of cancer. We have a discussion of rape, we have flashbacks to the assault that happened in the previous episode, I assume that’s Athena.

Bex: Yep. Yeah.

Ellen: Mass injury and fatalities, including children at threat and a trail derailment, which causes a lot of destruction and people die.

But we, we don’t start right from the, where we left off in the previous episode. We’ve got a bit of a,

Bex: of course not

Ellen: a bit of a David Wallace…

Bex: We never do

Ellen: to get to know first before the train comes. So we are going, the first scene is on the train before the accident happens. Uh, we have Elvis playing, we have Mystery train from by Elvis.

I don’t know this song from the title and I can’t remember how it goes. [00:05:00] But anyway,

Alice: something about a train.

Ellen: Yeah, I don’t know. Uh, there’s a bunch of like, possibly stereotypical train passengers on this, in this carriage, you have a young person who is making too much noise and we have older people who are annoyed by it.

Which seems like a fixture of every train journey. Yeah. Um, and but the, the, the young person who’s making the noise is like a, a young lady who is drumming on the back of seat, which is just really, I can understand why the guy is really annoyed.

Bex: We do have to mention that the young woman who is doing the drumming is Rumer Willis, who is Bruce Willis and Demi Moore’s daughter.

Ellen: Really?

Alice: I had no idea that that’s who it was until I was just reading the notes then. Wow.

Bex: And she also appeared in, um, doc Odyssey not so long ago, and I was in the chat with Alice when I was watching it going Genetics is so [00:06:00] fucking weird because Rumer Willis is Bruce Willis’ skull shape with Demi Moore’s face.

Ellen: Oh. I’m gonna have to go back and have a look at her now. Oh, that’s so funny.

Bex: Um, but she does not get a name in this entire thing. I’m pretty sure she has a name, ’cause it comes up in the closed captions. But, um, it does not get uttered at all in the episode, so. Oh. She’s either gonna be drummer girl or Rumer Willis, depending on what we wanna call her.

Okay. As we’re discussing this.

Ellen: Fair enough. Abby is also in this carriage for shortly, not for long time, for a little bit, but she gets up and, um. She looks mildly annoyed by the the girl who, by the drummer girl as well. But she walks through the carriages to the dining car where she’s gonna go to the bar and get a drink, apparently

Alice: my notes just said, “I’m sure this train won’t meet a terrible end” with a smiley [00:07:00] face.

Ellen: Well, we’ve already seen the terrible end, so we know it’s coming up.

Alice: Exactly.

Bex: We know it makes a terrible end.

Alice: No, I’m sure it’s a different train. This one will be fine.

Ellen: Uh, there’s some rowdy people in the dining car who’ve got their feet up on the, on the di, like the divider between the booths. Like, I don’t know. They’re just being stupid.

Bex: not even just their feet, their bare feet. Oh. Like they’ve taken their shoes off and put their feet up.

Alice: The bartender is so unprofessional here though, like, so she, she asks Abby what she can get Abby. And as Abby’s placing the order, the bartender starts yelling at the guy like, wait till you, she’s done the order.

It’s not gonna destroy the train if they’ve got their feet up. Like, what the fuck guys? Anyway, super unprofessional. But Abby orders a sidecar on a train ’cause she’s a sucker. Apparently.

Ellen: Uhhuh and then Abby just,

Bex: I don’t know what’s in a sidecar.

Alice: I don’t know what a sidecar is either. I didn’t look it up.

Ellen: I think it’s a fairly classic cocktail, but I don’t, I’m not sure either. [00:08:00]

Bex: Cognac based apparently. Mm-hmm. It is cognac, orange lcu and fresh lemon juice. With a sugared rim.

Ellen: That sounds pretty nice.

Alice: It’s very fancy for a train. But yeah, Abby tells the bartender that at a Ukrainian wedding, the bride has to keep her shoes on because otherwise the guests will steal them and drink wine out of them for good luck.

And in Australia, that’s called a shoey.

Bex: That just sounds like a shoey. Although we’re not drinking wine. It’s generally beer. We’re drinking beer. Yeah.

Ellen: Uh, whenever I hear about people doing that, I’m like, torn between like, yay culture and like,

Alice: oh, it’s disgusting.

Ellen: So revolting.

Alice: It’s so gross,

Ellen: so revolting.

Bex: Oh no. So like Australian culture is drinking like fermented [00:09:00] hops out of someone’s used footwear.

Yeah, used footwear. Yeah. Yeah.

Alice: That’s one of my exes when like, we broke up and then like we tried to make it work again after a while and he was telling me how like at he went to something and did a shoey and it gave me immediate ick. And I was just like, yeah, no, we’re done here.

Ellen: That’s fair.

Alice: Like, no, not happening. That’s disgusting. Um,

Bex: my ex, I can’t remember the exact story, but it was either he did a shoey or he watched a guy do a shoey out of his prosthetic limb.

Alice: Oh my god.

Ellen: Well, that’s probably marginally more hygienic than a shoe.

Alice: Oh, I don’t know.

Bex: Because they got like the stump sitting in there and it’s like getting sweaty and hot and

Ellen: Oh, okay.

Alice: There’s usually a sock, but yeah. No, that, no,

Bex: no, no.

Alice: That’s disgusting. No. Um, so getting away from shoeys, um, we get a bit of exposition here [00:10:00] where the bartender asks Abby why she’s on a train. Like why is she taking the train instead of flying, I guess. Um, and she says she spent a lot of time in Europe and fell in love with train travel and the bartender’s like, “Well, this is Phoenix to LA, it isn’t exactly the Orient Express.”

And Abby just says, “Well, Phoenix is home, and LA used to be home.” So it’s like that doesn’t answer the question, but sure. Okay. And when the bartender asks if someone’s waiting for her at LA, she says “No, because he stopped waiting for me a long time ago.”

Ellen: Oh.

Alice: And we cut immediately to Buck who was reading a brochure about Summer Camp of Eddie’s son.

Bex: Yeah, no Buck’s not going on summer camp. Chris,

Ellen: I just love that she’s like,

Bex: Chris wants to go to summer camp.

Ellen: She’s talking to the bartender about, “he stopped waiting for me” and then it cuts immediately to Buck and Eddie talking about summer camp,

Alice: about [00:11:00] their son going to summer camp. About,

Ellen: ah, perfect.

Bex: Yeah. Apparently Eddie brought the brochures to the station house so that the, um, the 118 could talk him into letting Christopher go. However, Buck is immediately on the, “you cannot let him go to summer camp. That’s two weeks away from home. What if something happens? What if he gets home sick?”

Alice: Like, our child is too young for that. What are you doing?

Ellen: Oh, he’s so concerned.

Bex: So while this conversation is going on in the background, Eddie is timing Hen doing a test of some kind and then while everyone else continues talking, he is grading her test for her.

Alice: Mm-hmm. Um, and Chim and Bobby are cooking dinner as well.

Bex: So that’s just, that’s what happening on the background, so Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah. I don’t know if Chim’s helping or if he’s just eating like bits.

Bex: He looks like he’s helping.

Ellen: Okay.

Alice: I mean [00:12:00] that’s pretty much what I was doing tonight. I think that’s, mom was like, can you help come help me with dinner? And I spent the whole time feeding beans to the birds. So,

Bex: but isn’t that the prerogative of being a sous chef? You get to like snack as you’re cooking.

Ellen: Yeah, totally. Or the actual chef.

Bex: Um. Bobby is very firmly on proc camp because he apparently is a seasoned camper. Started going to sleep away camp when he was eight, including slightly probably racist slash cultural appropriation camp name and yodeling?

Ellen: Yeah, he’s doing the thing. He’s getting so excited and I’m like, oh dad, come on.

Alice: Like, what, what did the, um, what did the yodeling sound like? Bex, do you wanna demonstrate?

Ellen: Does anyone wanna try doing the, yodel?

Bex: Fuck no. If you wanna hear what the hell yodeling sounds like the episodes are available on possibly a streamer of your choice. [00:13:00] You can look it up. We will put the timestamp in the, on in the episode notes, so you can go straight to that part of the episode. I’m not even gonna attempt to, uh, to do it.

Ellen: And yeah, he, he looked forward to it every year, but, and Chim’s saying like, “Chris is a city kid,” and Bobby’s like, “St Pauls is a city.” Chim’s like, “If you say so,” it’s like, dude, not every city is as big as LA

Alice: um, but Hen’s just trying to imagine trying to sell Denny on the idea of two weeks without the internet.

Ellen: Yeah, my kids would never survive.

Bex: Eddie gives Hen’s paper back to her and she is disappointed with her results because she only scored a 504 and she wanted a 511 or above. Um, and Eddie’s trying to reassure her that her score was pretty good. Um, and she says that [00:14:00] getting into medical school at this point in her life is gonna be hard enough.

She can’t afford to be average. She needs to be an exceptional applicant, which starts off a ring of everyone praising Hen and telling her that she’s gonna be great and she’s gonna get in and it’s gonna be awesome.

Ellen: Yeah, except like when they get around to Chim, everyone just looks at him and he’s like, “what?”

Except then he goes, he sort of rolls his eyes a bit and goes, “Hen, you’re brilliant. You don’t need to test to prove it.” So he’s obviously still not on board with the idea of her leaving to go and do medicine.

Bex: No. Yeah, he’s still a little salty. No. Um, but Hen gets distracted from her, like average test results by her phone because Athena has texted her to ask if they can hold May’s graduation party at the Karen and Hen household, which she asks Bobby, like, “Bobby, [00:15:00] why is your wife asking if I can host May’s graduation party?”

And Bobby’s like, “Um, our living room is kind of under construction right now.”

Ellen: Since I heard that, I’m like, oh no, they’ve, they’ve trashed the house.

Bex: Oh no.

Alice: Uh, so we cut to the Athena construction site and Athena’s not happy.

Ellen: And as, as predicted, Athena is not pleased. She’s like, “I was in the hospital for four days and you two lost your minds.”

Bex: See, I don’t know whether she’s mad because they destroyed her house or whether they destroyed her house right before she’s expecting 50 people over to her house to host a party.

Alice: Yeah, yeah. Like if they’d done it at a better, like during better timing, she’s like, yeah, okay. Whatever.

Bex: Perhaps maybe, maybe,

Ellen: I mean, it’s probably a bit of both.

Bex: Probably would’ve admitted that she probably would’ve admitted at another time that she too hated that fireplace. But how is she going to put on, you know, [00:16:00] um, keeping up with the Joneses if, you know, she’s got a construction zone in her living room.

Ellen: May’s trying to make her feel better by saying like, “We don’t need to have a party. Like, you just got out the hospital. It’s okay.” And, but Athena is insisting that she has to have a party and cake and photographs with a fireplace that does not look like a pile of rubble.

Bex: I love that Harry immediately comes in and goes like, do you need to like take any more of it down? “Do you need to finish taking it down? ’cause I can help.”

Ellen: Yeah, he’s keen.

Bex: He, he wants to swing that hammer too. And Athena’s like, “no, no, you are not touching it. Your father broke it and he’s gonna fix it.” And Michael’s like, “okay, this is my exit.” He’s like, “yes, I will fix it. I will go home right now. I will do some sketches and I will fix it.” And he starts to like flee the house.

Ellen: And just then Hen has texted back to say that there’s not enough room at her place for parking for [00:17:00] all of her guests.

Bex: So May reiterates at this point, look, we don’t need a party. And Harry’s like, “since when did you not want a party?” And May immediately just throws her father under the bus and going like, “Dad, didn’t you have a doctor’s appointment?”

Like, I’m gonna deflect all the attention to Michael who freezes on the stairs like a deer in headlights.

Alice: Um, yeah. So Michael’s results are in, and Athena offers to go with him. But Michael’s like, “No, no. The doctor’s gonna go over the scans with me and then we will know what’s next.”

Ellen: The words! I don’t have any alcohol with me tonight.

Bex: Um, who wrote this episode Bex?.

Ellen: You mean you can’t guess?

Bex: I did not think that she would. She did that in this episode. It doesn’t until I had to sit down.

Ellen: I don’t think it happens a lot.

Bex: Sit down and go through the… but it happens enough to make it obvious, [00:18:00] especially it happens in pairs.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: Like this is not, it’s like one person will say what’s next? And another person, their line of dialogue will immediately have what’s next in their line of dialogue. Like in case anybody’s wondering, this is a Kristin Reidel co written episode.

Ellen: Yeah. But we’ve got Juan Carlos, I’ve forgotten his name. Sorry, who’s the, what’s the other guy’s name?

Bex: Juan Carlos Coto.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Yeah. But apparently Kristin wrote the dialogue.

Ellen: Yeah. But he’s excellent at writing like the the tense kind of action scenes. Right. I seem to remember that from other episodes of his, so at least we’ve got some good stuff in between the awkward dialogue, maybe

Bex: can be in between the, the blatant episode title shoutouts.

Ellen: So yeah, he tells her that, you know, the doctor’s gonna go over the scans and then we’ll know what’s next. And Athena says, “Good news, that’s what’s next.” It’s like, okay. Okay. She’s, she’s still mad, but she’s determined [00:19:00] at least it’s gonna be good news.

Alice: She’s still mad, but he needs to fix her fireplace.

Bex: He can’t die of cancer before he fixes her fireplace.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: I am sorry too much?

Ellen: Well, I mean, we know what happens in the end, so it’s okay. I guess

Bex: so that’s why I’m happy to joke about it.

Alice: Um, but then we go to dispatch. So Josh is um, has done his victim impact statement and apparently he did a lot of research on the do’s and don’ts of it. And Maddie’s like, “yeah. Like it’s very thorough. And when I read this, I know exactly what Greg did to you. What I don’t understand is how you feel about any of it.”

Ellen: Yeah. Josh can’t understand why that matters. It’s like it’s an impact statement, Josh.

Bex: That’s the whole point. It’s a victim impact statement.

Ellen: Yeah. You have to say how it impacted you.

Alice: They know what he did, but like, what’s it done to you?

Ellen: [00:20:00] Yes. I like how Mady says, “Is this really what you wanna say to him?” And Josh says, “I think the judge will discourage the use of curse words,”

but yeah, she tells him it should come from his heart. So, and then just then Maddie lets out this huge yawn. And, um, Josh is so, he’s like, “I’m trying not to be offended,”

Bex: but his face is so offended. I’m sorry. Am I boring? Is me and my, my tragic struggles boring you. Yeah.

Ellen: Um, and yeah, it didn’t occur to me that this was anything weird. Like at the time it was weird. I was like, why is she tired? But we didn’t get any results.

Bex: ’cause it should,

Ellen: any resolution to that?

Bex: No, I.

Ellen: Immediately,

Bex: I’m gonna put a pin in this ’cause I have thoughts on this too, and many thoughts on this episode. Oh my God.

Ellen: Okay.

Alice: Uh, so meanwhile, back at the train, um, Abby’s still at the bar [00:21:00] and the drummer girl is still drumming,

Bex: except the old guy in front of her has finally cracked the shits and has basically told her that she needs to stop.

Alice: But she’s got a huge show at the Roxy. Right?

Bex: So she, he doesn’t care though. She needs to just to stop. The other guy who was up in the carriage with them, who we later find out is, is Sam. And he’s very… why the hell did I put Greg there?

Alice: I’m like, who is Greg?

Bex: Oh my God.

Alice: Um, I call him Subway throughout the entire episode because he plays Subway in Community.

Bex: Oh,

Alice: okay. And he plays Keith in Scrubs.

Bex: Oh. So he’s a, I about to say he gets around, but, so he is a working actor. Yeah.

Ellen: I think I recognize him from Scrubs actually.

Alice: Like considering in both of those he, yeah, like he, he gets around is a good way to put it. Um, but yeah, Community, he [00:22:00] literally plays Subway, like the, the restaurant chain, like the fast food chain. Yeah. Like he plays Subway. His name is Subway.

Ellen: Right.

Bex: Okay. Um, but no, we later find out that this is Sam. Um. He kind of tries to talk the older man off his ledge, um, tries to calm him down. Just

Ellen: in, in the driver’s, um, compartment of the train, the engine, I’m guessing, the driver, um, is, you know, trying to stop the train, but there’s sparks in the wheels and the, the, the brakes aren’t working, working,

Alice: basically, yes. The signal, the signal box is sparking and like, instead of being like, the part that switches the, where the track is gonna go is just like rocking back and forth.

Bex: The points, yeah, the points are electronically controlled, but the signal box that’s controlling the points is just out of control. So the points are moving backwards and forwards, which means that the train is not going to [00:23:00] go down one track or down the other.

It’s just, it’s, it’s not gonna be good as the driver says.

Ellen: Mm-hmm.

Bex: So, yeah, he slams on the brakes. Um, but, you know, a train going that fast, it’s gonna take it a while to slow down and, uh, it does not slow down before it hits the, the points. And so chaos ensues, there’s lots of flashing lights with a train whistle, brakes screeching, people get thrown around the, the camera spins.

Um, it’s all very dramatic.

Ellen: Yeah. And we see the, the train derailed, but then we, we are going to jump back in time for the second time because this is like the, the second time we saw the train crash and now we’re gonna go for a third time.

Alice: It’s been way too long since we had a weird 9-1-1 time jump time.

Ellen: This episode is very timey wimey, so we’re going back 10 minutes before

Bex: I swear [00:24:00] it’s a model train set because I cannot see when they do those big, um, overhead shots of the crash site. There is no like tunnel, bricked up tunnel with little trees around. I swear I watched this and went, oh, so we’re doing like a closeup of a train set and it’s gonna be someone like playing with a model train set and that’s gonna be, you know, something to do with the big train coming through.

But either they lost that footage, it got cut or someone went, shit, we need some establishing footage of like this RV park. We forgot to get some. I know! Tim just ran down to his basement where he is, got a giant model train set, set up and just took footage of that and chucked it in the episode. I dunno, because at this point Tim Minear is editing these episodes in his house so they can’t go out and do it anymore [00:25:00] shooting.

Ellen: Oh yeah, ’cause Covid.

Bex: So Covid hit it this like, he, they stopped filming. They stopped filming around January, February. And then Tim has said in an interview that he just stayed at home to edit the last four episodes.

Ellen: Oh my God. Really? Well that explains a few things.

Bex: It really does, doesn’t it? Like why there is a shot of a model train set in this episode.

Ellen: Well, I, he did great. He did a great job. If he was doing it at home, his own, don’t they employ like editors to do stuff? Like why was he doing it?

Bex: I don’t know, but that’s what he said. Although, I don’t know how much you can believe what Tim says, but that’s what he said. Okay. That he was editing it at home or maybe he was like doing the final edits of it or something.

But somebody, I swear somebody took their camera or went down to a model train set to get the [00:26:00] establishing footage for the RV park and they just hoped that nobody would notice.

Ellen: Yeah. Unfortunately they did not count on you. Yeah, I was gonna say, they didn’t count on you Eagle-eyes Bex. Um, so there’s a, a man and a kid who are working on a car in the RV park.

So they, they’re working on a car and they managed to get it to turn over and everything. Then all of a sudden Donatello appears. So this is a guy who, who was in Supernatural as the, the Prophet Donatello. Um, and he’s not a ninja title as

Bex: his name is Keith. Insert something Polish that I cannot pronounce.

Ellen: Okay.

Bex: Um, but yeah,

Alice: is Donatello the prophet who’s actually an atheist?

Ellen: I don’t think Donatello was an atheist. I can’t remember. He was a Donatello was the guy who liked, liked the fried chicken.

Bex: Yes. I’m pulling up the Wiki.

Ellen: He was the guy who lost his soul. And then,

Alice: yeah. No, [00:27:00] Donatello, he’s an atheist and then he becomes a prophet and they’re just like, yeah, not anymore.

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: And then, yeah, I knew he lost his soul.

Bex: So yes. Donatello the prophet, not the Ninja Turtle. Um,

Ellen: yeah, but that’s not his name in this.

Bex: No, I mean, I think his name is Rory, but, um, I’ve just called him Donatello throughout this entire thing.

Ellen: Yeah, me too.

Bex: He is the manager of the RV park.

Ellen: Yep. Or caretaker or

Alice: angry guy of the RV park.

Bex: Yeah, he’s, he’s not, he’s not pleasant. Um, I think the engine that the, the dad and the kid were fixing was the engine of their RV and Donatello wants to know now that they’ve got the RV up and running, are they just going to sneak out of the park without paying because they’ve been there for three nights, which they have not paid, and he wants them gone.

Ellen: And he [00:28:00] tells ’em if they, they they need to leave or he’ll have them towed.

Alice: I like how, he’s like, I want my money, but just leave without my money. Like what?

Bex: Yeah, but we, I don’t think that they have the money to pay anyway, because we get the next little snippet of dialogue is the, um, the kid who has been trying really hard not to be caught listening to this conversation, uh, shows his dad an empty jar of peanut butter and says that they’re, they’re all out.

And the dad says, “Okay, cool. Um, there’s a food bank not too far. We’ll go there in the morning to get more food.”

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: Apparently there’s a bit more to it than that because he goes out, he follows Donatello to his place and he says, “You can’t, you can’t, you can’t do this to us. You told me I had a week to find a job.”

Bex: Well, he said that he never said that he had a week.

Ellen: Yeah, “I never said that to you. You pay, you stay. Those are the rules.” Like, I’m, I’m [00:29:00] confused. Um,

Alice: anyway, Donatello seems like a bit of a dick

Bex: we’re all confused,

Alice: he’s laughing at the man not being able to find a job. Um, the man says that he followed him in because his, because his son like shouldn’t have to see his father beg.

“But I’m always telling him, just keep your head up. Uh, keep your head up. ’cause if you don’t, you won’t see all the good things that are coming.”

Bex: All through this conversation. We can hear the train, which I’m guessing is supposed to be just like normal background noise because the RV park is right on the train line, but the train whistle is getting louder and louder and louder as this conversation continues.

Ellen: Mm. Yeah. Then we get more. What’s next-ing. The man says, “I don’t know what’s next.” And Donatello starts shouting at him. Um, “What’s next is reality!” It’s like this, this doesn’t even make any sense way.

Alice: It’s a really weird conversation.

Bex: It doesn’t matter,

Ellen: but it doesn’t matter because [00:30:00] immediately the train puts an end to the stupid conversation by crashing right through the middle of the cabin. So bye.

Bex: And taking Donatello out.

Alice: Yeah. Yeah. Immediately through Donatello.

Ellen: Uh, the dad survives it. He’s fine. It’s just one half of the cabin got taken out, I guess. And, um,

Bex: yes. So he just, it’s just Donatello. Everyone else is fine.

Ellen: He is like running out, run outside to look for his son, but the, his like, their RV is not there anymore because the train carriages have wiped it out.

Bex: And once again, we get a very, very long shot of the devastation of the train derailment.

Ellen: Does this one look like the model train set?

Bex: I’m questioning. No, I had, I don’t know, but at this point I’m going, what went wrong with this episode that we are getting so much shots of this. Because this is starting to get a little bit [00:31:00] ridiculous now.

So the train has crashed through the rv. We’ve got Donatello taken out. There’s absolute devastation. We go to commercial and when we come back we are nowhere near the trains.

Ellen: Yeah. So we do have like two actual parallel storylines in this episode. Right. Which are unrelated in any way.

Bex: And as you mentioned when you were first watching this episode, it’s a real like disconnect.

Ellen: Yeah. ’cause they’re not like, there’s no, there’s no excellent segues. I don’t think like we’ve had in other episodes where things have been tangentially related. This is just Athena with all of her case files working on her case. And then, and the, the 118 are at the train thing and they, they, they chop sort of back and forth without really being related at all.

Bex: Yeah. And it um, it disrupts the flow of the episode. ’cause you get the high tension of the 118 and then you’re back with Athena just sitting in the kitchen.

Ellen: Yeah. [00:32:00]

Alice: Yeah. Like it’s important to see Athena’s recovery. I just wish we’d got it earlier in the season.

Bex: It’s an important storyline. I just, I don’t know that it should have been cut into this episode.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: Either A at all or b, the way that they have done it.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: But anyway, so, um, Athena is having a meeting with a victim’s advocate, which is apparently somebody who helps victims of crime go to trial and testify in court. She’s come to Athena because Athena is like not supposed to be working ’cause she’s still on leave.

Ellen: Yeah. She’s got her the files spread out all over the table and May comes in and says, “Are those all your realtor rapist files?” And Athena’s like, “Please don’t call him that.” Weren’t we saying that last week, like, don’t name the guy, he doesn’t need a nickname.

Alice: Yeah, ’cause that’s what the [00:33:00] media were calling him, yeah.

Ellen: So, yeah. She says that Dr. Sanford is coming, who’s gonna help all of them get through it.

Bex: Yeah. And the emphasis of “it’s gonna help all of them.” The, the very specific emphasis there.

Ellen: Yeah. As in she’s not one of them yet.

Alice: Yeah. Like, not us, them.

Bex: Like, yes. Dr. Sanford is played by Brooke Shields in this episode, which is just the most random thing because they don’t use her at all in this episode.

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: Yeah. It’s weird. I feel like when they, um, like opened the door, there should have been like the sitcom, like applause when it shows Brooke Shields. Maybe I’ve just seen her in Friends too much.

Bex: There’s so much waste in this episode that brought, there’s so many casting [00:34:00] choices and characters brought in that just get wasted in this episode. And Brooke Shields is one of those.

Ellen: Yeah, well, she fully just sits there and talks to Athena the whole time. That and, yeah, yeah. So she welcomes her into the house and she says, “Oh, pardon our dust. While I was out my home turned into a remodeling show and it’s not done.” That’s a nice way of saying like, my husband lost his mind along with my ex.

Bex: My, no, it’s not even

Alice: “my husbands,”

Bex: my husbands, like my husband and my ex-husband.

Yeah. Which would’ve just been a whole nother conversation. Um, so they go into the kitchen and Cara, Dr. Sanford looks surprised to see all of the files on the table, and asks and says to Athena, “Oh, you have the case files for the other victims.” Athena is like, “Yeah. Just, you know, so I can, if you’ve got any specific questions, I can help you talk through all of the different victims.”

[00:35:00] And Dr. Sanford’s face is just like, oh shit. Sure. All right, let’s, let’s do this.

Ellen: It’s like she’s still working

Bex: like, this is not what I’m here for, but okay, we’re gonna have to go slow. Fine. Let’s do this. We then get the literal teaser from the last episode repeated. Being the 9-1-1 call, and it’s almost exactly shot for shot.

It’s like Tim’s just cut the teaser from last week and dropped it into this episode. The only difference is that when Abby is talking, because we now know that it’s Abby, we get a front shot. We don’t just see her from the back to get the, the big dramatic reveal.

Ellen: Yeah. It’s, yeah. And we can cut him some slack, because obviously if he’s doing it in his basement or whatever in his home office,

Bex: I just feel like he’s, you know, flaked out on the couch with an oodie on, [00:36:00]

Ellen: uh, those Covid days

Bex: or a slanket as Chimney would’ve wanted us to call it.

Ellen: A slanket. Yeah,

Bex: I don’t know. It’s just so, yeah. So that he’s used up time by inserting the 9-1-1 call from the last episode so that, you know, we remember that there was a 9-1-1 call that went in and it was a very good 9-1-1 call. And then that leads into Maddie, of course, dispatching the 118 to the scene.

Ellen: Yeah. So they’ve got a sort of incident sent, like, you know, camp set up. They’ve got a commander who’s in charge of sending people to different bits of the, of the disaster. More houses are on route, search dogs, folks are trapped in the passenger cars. So Bobby sends Buck and Eddie to go have a look.

Bex: Yeah, they’ve got one of the train carriages is literally [00:37:00] vertical and the incident commander says that they’ve got reports of people being trapped up there, but they can’t get to them. So the Bobsy twins get sent to check that out while everybody else works on the ground.

Alice: What’s USAR?

Bex: Uh, Urban Search and Rescue. Oh, okay. As opposed to like, so search and rescue in the city sort of area as opposed to like out in the, the forest’s search and rescue.

Alice: Oh, cool.

Bex: But I only know that because of the earthquake episode where they were talking about USAR and I had no idea what it meant.

Alice: Oh, there we go.

Bex: So there we go. So here’s where things start to get fun, because as Buck and Eddie are heading toward the train carriage, they walk past two firefighters from, I’m gonna say two from the 1 53, but we don’t actually know where the other one is from restraining a woman who is trying to get into the train carriage that is vertical and [00:38:00] begging them to let her get into that car.

Um, and Eddie, for dramatic reasons decides that even though these two men clearly have it under control, he’s gonna step in and he’s going to try and talk this woman down.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: And he’s like, “I’m sorry ma’am, we can’t let you get inside. It’s dangerous.” And the woman she is, Abby is like, “I know it’s dangerous, but I need to get in there.”

Um, and Buck either summoned because Eddie has gone too far away from him, so he needs to come back within range or because he heard Abby’s voice just freezes in the background.

Alice: Um, and Abby kind of realizes at the same time, because she looks at Eddie’s helmet and goes, “wait, are you from the 118?” And that’s where Buck looks over and goes, “Abby?” Just as Abby says, “Buck?”

Eddie’s in the middle of it going, who the fuck are you [00:39:00] dickheads?

Bex: It’s like, I’m Eddie. Like we’re doing introductions. Hi.

Ellen: Yeah, but he, he knows who Abby is. ’cause like guaranteed that Buck’s told him all about,

Bex: but he’s probably, he might never have seen a photo. Um, yeah,

Ellen: but like, as soon as Buck said Abby, he’s probably like, oh God, here we go.

Bex: That’s probably like the, “the ab Wait, the, the Abby, like the Abby, Abby?”

Alice: Abby, Abby?

Ellen: Thee Abby?

Bex: Abby, Abby? Um, Buck immediately tries to drag Abby off to get checked out is like, “Wait, you were on the train. You gotta get checked out.”

And she’s, it’s this, it’s this weird like pulling backwards and forwards. He’s literally trying to yank her in one direction. She’s pulling out of his grip and trying to push past Eddie to get back to that train carriage, Buck’s circling back around in front of her to get back in her way to stop her. Eddie’s just standing there going like, what [00:40:00] the hell is going on here?

Alice: Eddie’s literally just like the man standing emoji.

Ellen: He’s not helping at all.

Bex: And we, and we finally get an explanation for why Abby is so desperate to get up into that train carriage because, uh, Greg, Sam Subway, Keith dude is her fiance. It’s, she needs to get back to him. And

Alice: oh Buck’s face!

Bex: Buck’s reaction when she says fiance, he looks absolutely devastated. He looks like he’s been pistol whipped.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: So Eddie steps in, takes over like, “Okay, we need a description.” Abby pulls out her phone, pulls up a photo of her and the dude to confirm for the audience that yes, that dude up there was indeed her fiance.

And so they run off [00:41:00] to go find him. Well, Eddie runs off to go find him. Buck very stupidly makes a promise to Abby that they will find him and bring him back. Yeah. And as we’ve learned from every single medical police, first responder, procedural, you never make a promise.

Ellen: Yeah. But he does. He does get Sam’s name out of her before he promises to save him and then disappears.

Alice: What’s his name? Subway.

Ellen: So at this point they’re climbing up the vertical carriage and I’m just looking at it going, should you not wait until the carriage is slightly more secure before you go climbing in it and like adding your weight to the top of the carriage? But

Bex: you would think wouldn’t you.

Ellen: But no, they just go right in there.

Bex: It’s either that or Bobby’s like you two or the expendable ones. So [00:42:00] I’m gonna send you in

Alice: you two are sharing the brain cell today. Get up there.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: If you happen to rescue anybody while you’re in there, that’s great. If nothing bad, hap if something bad happens, eh,at least you’re both in the same position. So I’m not gonna have one of you trying to do something, some stupid heroic shit trying to save the other one.

Alice: We don’t need two cut lines.

Ellen: Exactly. Oh, I wouldn’t put it past them. One of them’s gonna… anyway. Uh, they, as they climb up, they find some more people who are black tags, um, as Eddie calls ’em.

So, you know, there’s plenty of casualties in this crash already, but they have found, once they get right up the top of it, they find Sam Sam’s kind of conscious. He said, you can speak, but he says it hurts when he breathes. And, um, he asks [00:43:00] Buck, he says, like “my fiance, she’s on the train” and Buck and Eddie kind of share a look.

It’s like, oh fuck. Um, she’s okay.

Bex: Yeah. We know your fiance’s here. Trust us.

Alice: Yeah. Why do you think we’re here?

Ellen: But he’s pinned behind the chair, like one of the seats. ’cause there’s like a, a beam that’s come through the floor and is like pushing the seat into him. Squishing him.

Bex: Yep. So they need the jaws. So on the ground we cut to Bobby, telling Chim that back and Eddie need the jaws and he throws in the hydraulic ram just for shits and giggles.

Um, but before Chim can deliver, said um, jaws and ram, the incident commander comes up and says that the search dog detailer has just landed and she’d like a couple of medics to accompany the search dogs. Um, and so he sends Chim and Hen [00:44:00] off to accompany the search dog and he personally delivers the, the, the jaws and saw and the ram up to Buck and Eddie.

Alice: Yeah. They wanna keep all the paramedics. Well, Bobby wants to keep all the paramedics on the ground because the vertical carriage is shifting. Like it keeps falling down. Like the angle keeps getting narrower. And Bobby climbs up the train.

Bex: And it is literally, I was counting, it was 20 seconds watching Peter Krause climb, which makes me think

Ellen: it’s in real time.

Bex: Like either

Alice: they’re getting his money worth, they’re getting their money out worth out of Peter.

Bex: Well that was the thing, was it like, Peter, we need you to climb this thing.

And he’s like, I look, if I have to climb this thing, I need to be seen to be climbing this. You have to actually use this footage ’cause I’m not doing this if you’re just gonna cut everything. So it’s either they put all this footage in because it was the only re the only way they could get [00:45:00] Peter to do this very physical stunt, or once again, something went wrong with this episode in the editing suite and they just needed so much filler footage that they went, you know, we don’t actually need 20 whole seconds of Peter climbing, but I don’t have anything else to put in this episode, so I’m putting this in.

Ellen: Oh, I wonder. Like I was, I can say I wonder if they cut a storyline out of it or something and

Bex: I think they cut so much shit, or they just didn’t film enough shit. I dunno. We can talk about it at the end.

Alice: Yeah. Maybe they didn’t film enough before.

Bex: 20 seconds of Peter Krause doing exactly the same thing we just saw Ryan and Oliver do like, not even a minute ago.

Alice: Um, but yeah, so Buck has the, the Jaws sores on the Ram Eddie gives Bobby the status report. So he’s got a collapsed lung from the blunt force. His O2 levels are dropping, and in order to relieve the pressure, they’ve gotta move the beam off him, but it’s too heavy and it’s not budging.

Ellen: Yeah. So they get [00:46:00] the, the machinery into position, but as they start to move the beam, they hear someone screaming and it’s the drummer girl. And she’s pinned underneath, underneath this like, you know, in their seating positions, I guess just a few seats in front of him, in front of Sam.

Bex: Yeah. I’ve, if anybody has watched this episode, it can tell me the act actual like layout of where everybody is ’cause I’ve no idea whether she’s above, below the side.

Ellen: She’s below, but in space, like, because the train is still like, so Sam is like right at the top of the, where the train is and she’s, a few seats below, but I don’t know how

Bex: below and to the left below or to the right?

Ellen: Or in my head it’s to the right, but I don’t know if that’s the truth.

Alice: Okay. But it’s like the beam’s sort of going like diagonally and so it’s pinning both of them. And if they move it towards her to free Sam, it hurts Sam. And if they move [00:47:00] it towards it,

Bex: to lift to it, to lift it, to get Sam out compresses her even more. Yeah. Um, but I guess if they lifted it to get her out, it’s gonna compress Sam.

Yeah. So it’s, it’s Sophie’s, it’s Sophie’s choice here.

Alice: Literally. Yeah. Anyway, so drummer girl says that her side really hurts, so Eddie takes a look, and there’s a massive long bone sticking like up into and then out of her side.

Ellen: Oh, it’s so disgusting.

Alice: And I’m trying to work out what I’m looking at while Eddie goes, “The force of the crash pushed her leg up into her torso.”

Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah. I’m like, is is this a thing that actually happens to people? ’cause

Bex: I don’t know,

Alice: have you not seen…?

Ellen: I don’t wanna know.

Bex: And I’m not gonna Google to see.

Alice: No, I, so this is actually what can happen if, um, if you are like in a car accident with your feet up on the dashboard and the airbag can [00:48:00] push your legs like through your pelvis.

Ellen: Urgh. Oh.

Alice: So do not put your feet up on the dashboard ever in a car. Ever. Um, and I’m assuming this, it’s happened because she was sitting like sideways.

Bex: Sideways.

Alice: And so when it’s happened and the things like the beam things hit her, it’s pushed it wrong.

Bex: So she’s got an open fracture on her leg, which has perforated her torso. Yeah. Great. And that disgusted noise that you heard Alice made, that’s pretty much the same noise Eddie makes when he sees what’s happened. I’m like, dude,

Alice: very professional there

Bex: a little bit more professionalism there please.

Ellen: Eddie checks her foot, he takes her boot off. And

Bex: which can we just, anybody who has ever worn a Doc Marten ever, can we just recognize that Doc Martens don’t come off like that?

Ellen: Yeah. You have [00:49:00] to loosen quite a lot of laces for you to get the boot off like that.

Bex: It’s like that, it’s like that thing of, there was that episode in Supernatural where they, the boys had to take their boots off to come inside and for some reason, Dean is just able to toe out of his boots and everyone’s universally gone.

There’s no fucking way that he can toe out of a boot.

Alice: Not if he wants to run with it still on

Ellen: unless the laces are so loose, they’re barely hanging on to his feet.

Bex: Yes. Um, but yes, despite having an open, um, massively open fracture, Rumer Willis still has a pulse in her foot.

Ellen: Yeah. Like, ugh. Okay. I don’t wanna think too hard about what is,

Bex: which is, which is…

Ellen: How it’s working, but yes.

Bex: So, um, so Bobby summons Buck and Eddie away from, uh, the crash victims to have a little…

Alice: Uh, sorry, hang on. I’m just distracted because you said that there’s a growl to Oliver’s voice and now I’ve just gotta check it for [00:50:00] science.

Bex: It’s, it’s just a very, I don’t know, it’s just very rough. Um, and you know, I have a voice kink and that just once again, I’m going to hell, I’m like down another one on, on

Alice: On main, Bex. Jesus.

Bex: Yes. Well, apparently Buzzfeed don’t listen to podcasts, so I’m fine.

Um, Ellen for your

Alice: Yeah. Ellen

Bex: explanation, um, they’re, Ryan and Oliver are doing a Buzzfeed interview, but they’re not doing the puppies interview. They’re doing the reading thirst tweets.

Ellen: Oh no.

Bex: Yes. And so a lot of 9-1-1 are like on Twitter and on TikTok are freaking out because like Buzzfeed has perceived them and now Ryan and Oliver are going to perceive them.

Ellen: Oh dear.

Bex: Um, right, so back to this. So Bobby has pulled Buck and Eddie away because they need to [00:51:00] have a talk about which person they are going to prioritize trying to save because they’re both trapped by the same beam. They take the pressure off Sam, they’re squeezing Rumer Willis, vice versa. I, Bobby wants pretty sure that profess opinion on which one,

Alice: I’m pretty sure it’s Eddie that has the growl. Just letting you know.

Bex: Hmm?

Alice: I’m pretty sure that’s Ryan that has the growl. Not Oliver.

Bex: No, it’s. It’s Buck ’cause it’s like on the camera is on him as he says that line.

Alice: Nah, I’m pretty sure that’s Eddie.

Bex: That’s better. I guess for me, I’m not quite going to hell as badly.

Alice: Yeah, that’s definitely Eddie.

Bex: Okay, good. Um, my soul is still tarnished, but not as badly tarnished.

Alice: Anyway, Buzzfeed just slid into Bex’s dms as we are recording. We haven’t even uploaded it yet. They’re just like, what was [00:52:00] that?

 Anyway, what are we up to?

Bex: Okay. Um,

Ellen: anyway, yes, they have to pick who they’re gonna save.

Bex: Bobby is asking. Yeah. Bobby is asking Eddie’s professional opinion, which of the two victims has a better shot? And Eddie is like, “Eh, the injuries are different, but the risk is the same.” And Buck is like, “Wait, what are we saying? We have to pick who we’re going to save?”

And Bobby’s just like, “I’m just saying, I don’t think we can save ’em both.” And so we go from that really high emotional tense, what the hell are you talking about? Scene to a commercial. And when we come back it’s Athena.

Ellen: Yeah. And they’re discussing, well, she’s sitting at the table with Brooke Shields and they’re discussing how like the different victims and how they’re gonna feel about, um, discussing the crimes basically. And that’s this whole scene, I guess. [00:53:00]

Alice: Yeah. So they go through a couple of the different victims, and then they get to one of them. And Athena says that she’d be great on the stand, but she’s the one that Athena worries about most because all her statements are peppered with, I should have known. I should have realized. And Brooke Shields goes, “So she blames herself, um, thinks if she had done something different, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. And I can’t help but notice that there’s a file missing from this table.” And just

Bex: like there’s a second a when Athena’s going like, “Wait, I missed one? Did Lou forget to, uh, shh. Yeah, right. Me, you’re talking about my file. And she’s like, no, but I, I, like, I don’t count in this like my, the Jeffrey’s attack on me was nothing like the attack on the other women. Your focus should be on them.”

Ellen: Yeah. And Brooke Shields is telling her that it’s not fair to compare traumas and the attack on her was pretty brutal as well. [00:54:00] And apparently Athena is compartmentalizing her attack because she says she doesn’t remember most of it and people say that she’s lucky that she doesn’t remember it.

Bex: Dr. Sanford says that they are wrong, everyone is wrong because yes, sometimes the brain’s way of protecting us is to block out painful memories. But she has never met somebody who feels better because they don’t know what has happened to them. And at this point Athena realized that Dr. Sanford was never here to talk about all the other victims.

She was here specifically to talk to Athena, but she’s tells her that she’s not ready to talk about what happened. She’s quite happy with her little compartment

Ellen: and, um, Cara doesn’t push. She just says, “I will leave this here for when you are ready.” And she sort of hands over a file and then she leaves

Bex: [00:55:00] and that’s it. Yeah. Why did you bring Brooke Shields in for that?

Alice: Yeah,

Ellen: she comes back later, but that’s basically the tone of the whole, of her involvement. So it’s, it’s very nice and caring and you know, it’s important that Athena faces these things, but when it’s got the emotional whip whiplash of the, uh, the, the train crash,

Bex: we have to pick someone like who lives, who dies, and then Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah, yeah. It’s a, it’s a weird choice.

Bex: But we are gonna go back to the RV Park of Doom. Yes. With more long lingering overhead shots of the, uh, location of the train crash. ’cause, you know, fill, we gotta fill, stretch, stretch everything out. And then we get the dog squad.

Alice: It’s the dog squad. So it’s this beagle,

Bex: um, it’s it a beagle or is it a Jack Russell?

Alice: A hundred percent a beagle.

Bex: It’s a beagle.

Alice: It’s a beagle.

Bex: Okay. I don’t know [00:56:00] dogs. I defer to your professional opinion.

Alice: Um, beagles are amazing scent dogs. Anyway um, it’s a hundred percent a beagle.

I just, I was laughing so much because they get the dog squad in and the dog runs over to this like, dead body that’s literally just like behind a fire truck. It’s out in the open. Yeah. Behind a firetruck. Yes. Like, did they not even check when they parked the fire? Like did they run this guy over when they parked?

Like, it’s literally just out in the open behind the firetruck and I’m watching it like,

Ellen: oh no.

Alice: Huh. Um. I

Bex: was more laughing at the fact that like, you bring in a dog to find out, find a body that’s in the middle of the Yeah. So like, good dog. You found the one that everyone walked right past.

Ellen: Yeah, we already found that one.

Alice: Yeah. So the whole, the whole point is that, um, that like, they find things that are like, find people that are trapped, that are unconscious and can’t like yell out, but No, no. Like let’s find the one that’s behind the fire truck out in the open, anyway. They’re like, look, the dog can sniff someone with [00:57:00] treats.

Isn’t it a good little dog? Yes, it is. Um, so he checks the pulse and is just like, yep, no black tag. So they’ve black tagged it. Uh, the guy that’s been run over by the firetruck. Um, and then they come across the dad from earlier, um, who’s yelling for his son. He’s not hurt, but he’s still looking for, his son still hasn’t found him. Um, son’s named Milo. I can’t remember if we mentioned that.

Ellen: Yeah. I dunno why, how long he’s been yelling for his son for like, it feels like we’ve been here forever.

Alice: And no one noticed him? Because again, they’re just behind the firetruck. Like they didn’t even go further into the, they’re just behind a firetruck. So they’re start looking for the kid, the kid’s 15, black hair, green shirt, and they give the dog a rag that like the kid used to clean his hands with. And then we find out that the dog’s name is Richard.

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: Which is [00:58:00] amazing.

Ellen: That is people name.

Alice: Richard’s trained only to track human scents. And so it doesn’t matter that it’s got antifreeze or coolant on it because chemicals won’t confuse him.

Bex: Okay. Is that, is that real like

Alice: Yes,

Bex: yes? Okay.

Alice: They are taught, so Autumn’s starting to learn scent work. I should be a lot further, but I am lazy. Um, but yeah, so like you can put like food and the scent in the same thing and they know to go for the scent and that’s how they do with like drug detection dogs and stuff like that as well.

It’s really cool, but you can teach them. Um, so the way to teach like the diabetic alert dogs is when you’re having a low, you basically like get, like get a rag or like an old t-shirt or something that like, while you’re having the low and then reward them for smelling [00:59:00] that. And so then when they smell that on you, they’ll start alerting you.

Bex: Oh, that’s cool.

Ellen: So basically they’re asking for treats.

Alice: Yeah. They do it for food generally. So different dogs have different, um, like it depends on how their, like, what their alert is.

Bex: Yeah.

Alice: Uh, so like some dogs will just nose at it. Some dogs will stare at it. Some, some dogs will paw at it.

Um, generally these sort of dogs are taught to either nose at or like, stare. Some are taught to bark. Hmm. But yeah, it’s pretty cool. Dogs are amazing. Like the stuff that they can smell is incredible. And it’s funny ’cause the scent work that we do like for the trials is smelling like, so the first level is birch, so it’s literally like smelling a tree.

Ellen: Well, Richard with his people name, um, has located the boy.

Alice: No, no, we’re not there [01:00:00] yet.

Ellen: Oh, okay.

Bex: I mean, we, we can just skip over the next ’cause it’s pretty ridiculous.

Alice: Yeah. They basically give Sam some painkillers

Bex: and we find out that he’s got kids. So that’s literally it.

Ellen: Oh yeah. They’re getting married in June. Yeah.

Bex: Yeah. Um, Eddie forces Buck to bond with him in order to keep, um, Sam awake. ‘ cause he’s cruel and sadistic like that. Yeah. So Buck is bonding with his ex-girlfriend’s new fiance. Um, meanwhile Richard is finding Milo. Yeah. And apparently his alert is to start trying to dig Milo out of wherever he was trapped.

Ellen: Aw, good boy, Richard.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: What a good boy.

Bex: Oh my God. That just sounds wrong.

Ellen: It’s not a dog name. Right? [01:01:00]

Bex: It’s really not. Especially when you say things like that.

Alice: Anything can be a dog name if you’re brave enough,

Ellen: but it means you go out in the park and you have to call like Richard!

Alice: That’s literally, whenever we have new owners, we’re always like, name them something that you’re not gonna be embarrassed if you are standing in the middle of a park surrounded by people.

Name them something you’re not embarrassed to yell at the top of your lungs.

Ellen: Yeah. All right. So Milo is, is trapped underneath something, but he can’t move. And he says, um, well, he says he doesn’t think he can move and he can’t, but he can wriggle his toes.

Bex: Which Hen says that she’s guessing that if he can wiggle his toes, whatever injury Milo has is not spinal.

But then she’s doing something like, I think she’s got her hand around the back of his neck or something, and she’s feeling around and says that she can’t locate the occiput [01:02:00] ligaments, and which apparently are the ligaments that holds your head and your spine together.

Ellen: Oh, this, this one also just made, gave me the ick. I was like, oh, no, no, no, no. Um, so Chim says he, there’s a dislocation. He seen it in car accidents, but he’s never seen someone who’s still talking after it in front of the patient. Like, yeah, you can’t say things like that, Chim, um,

Alice: in front of the patient and his dad,

Ellen: but yeah,

Bex: but he, but he said it all, it, it’s all like medical talk. So it’s Atlanto-occipital dislocation. The dad’s like, “What is that?” And Hen goes, “Oh, it’s an internal decapitation.” Yeah. Like Henrietta. Yeah. “His spine is intact. It’s just not connected to his skull anymore.”

Ellen: And the dad’s like, “But he’s alive!”

Alice: They just need to get him to a hospital to, so the surgeons can reattach his ligaments. Like it’s easy. [01:03:00] Um, but they also need to cool the saline to preserve as much nerve and tissue as possible. So Chim just finds an ice cooler magically

Bex: He saw a cooler. He’s gonna go get ice. I don’t know where he is gonna get the ice from, but he’s gonna get, get ice.

Alice: I think we’ve spoken already that they’re called eskys here, haven’t we?

Ellen: Yeah, I think we went over that.

Bex: Yeah. ’cause I called it an esky and then you guys went, no, we’ve gotta translate that for the Americans. It’s a cooler

Alice: American-ese.

Bex: Um, so back up in the train carriage of doom, Bobby has decided to play God and he has chosen, um, the girl. He wants to get the girl out, which Buck immediately just went, “Uh, no. If we do that, it’s gonna kill Sam.” And Bobby’s like, “Yes, I’m aware of that.”

Ellen: “Yes, we went over this already, Buck,”

Bex: “We say whoever has the better chance. And [01:04:00] Eddie is saying that the girl has a better chance,” and Buck just flat out says no.

Alice: Yeah, no.

Bex: Eddie’s trying to explain it to him. Like, like “Medically, Sam’s not doing so well. She’s doing okay.” And, um, and Buck’s like, “oh no, okay, fine. You are right. So why don’t, um, why don’t I go on the outside of this very precariously leaning train carriage and then I cut through the side of the train carriage and then we can get them both out that way.”

And Bobby’s like. “No, because the train carriage isn’t secure.” Yeah. That’s why they’re working on the inside,

Alice: If the thing topples, then they can ride it down. But if he’s on the outside Buck’s, like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be crushed by a hundred tons of train, car, whatever.”

Bex: Um, no, “I, I could be trashed by a hundred tons of train car, and I know that’s a lot heavier than a fire truck.”

Alice: Um, so this is where Eddie basically dobs Buck into Dad.

Ellen: Yeah. [01:05:00] Yeah. He’s like, “I know, I know you made a promise.” And Bobby’s like,

Alice: Bobby, what promise?

Ellen: “What the fuck?”

Bex: Buckley, what did you do?

Alice: And Buck goes, “To his fiance. I promised I’d bring him down to her.” Um, and then Eddie, in the most bitter way, he goes, “To Abby, his fiance’s Abby,”

Bex: and Bobby’s like, “oh, for fuck’s sake. Okay. Yep. I see what’s going on here.”

Ellen: Yeah. Buck’s like, “No, no, no, no. It’s not just because of her. Like, he, he’s a, he has two daughters. He’s a father.” And Bobby’s like, no,

Bex: no, it’s a hundred percent. You’re too close to this. Get this, get out.

Alice: Um, “To Abby, his fiance’s Abby.”

Bex: Abby, I, I, I love that. And then Bobby’s just, oh my god, reaction. It’s just, it’s just perfection.

Alice: It is literally like when he’s saying that, it’s like the angry emoji. And then “to Abby, his fiance’s Abby,” and then the angry [01:06:00] emoji.

Bex: But then this gets either better or worse depending on your perspective.

Alice: Ryan Racting Roices,

Bex: um, because Bobby is trying to tell Buck what he’s planning to do is too risky. And Buck says, “Well, I am willing to take that risk.” And Bobby says, “But it’s not your risk to take, you can’t just rush into any dangerous situation and assume it’s gonna be okay. ’cause sometimes it’s not. And I’m tired of being on the wrong side of those hospital visits.”

And Buck’s brain is still wrapped up in the whole Abby thing. And he goes, “Well Bobby, I’m not Athena.” Completely forgetting about every single time. And I counted, there’s been at least three of them that Buck has been in a hospital bed and Bobby has been sitting at his bedside.

Ellen: Oh yeah.

Bex: Bobby just like looks at him and is like, “what did you say to me?” And Eddie clearly [01:07:00] recognizes that Bobby is like very close to like, literally throwing Buck outta this train carriage.

Alice: Just like tossing him down vertically. Nope.

Bex: We’ve seen Bobby manhandle Buck when Buck pushes him too far before, it’s just like the stakes would be so much higher if we did it at this point.

Um, he tries to get between the two of them, like, come on, we don’t have time for this. Um, tries to get Buck to back off. Buck doesn’t back off, Bobby doesn’t back off. And then we go to commercial.

Ellen: I love how they were all just having a big argument in the middle of the train carriage

Alice: with, with two critical patients, just like, uh, guys?

Ellen: Yeah. It’s like, can you guys all stop arguing and come and rescue us, please?

Bex: Like, we’ll pick between ourselves. It’s fine. We rock paper scissored for it.

Alice: Subway’s like, fuck this. I’m fucking out. Like, you can, I don’t even care anymore.

Bex: Why are you so obsessed with my fiance? [01:08:00]

Ellen: Oh, no.

Bex: Wait, did you say your name was Buck?

Ellen: Yeah. Like, he doesn’t realize until later, but like, they’re right there and, and they’re saying “his fiance’s Abby.” It’s like, can he not hear that from where he is?

Alice: No, he’s pretty like, at this point he’s decompensating, so

Ellen: Okay.

Alice: Like, why are you so obsessed with my fiance? Oh. Did she ever tell you about the himbo that she dated?

Bex: To be fair, I don’t think she ever called him the himbo.

She didn’t?

No.

Alice: Uh, then we have another weird Bathena house moment.

Ellen: Yeah, it’s just a, uh, it’s just a flash of what Athena’s up to. Like she’s just.

Alice: She just reads a file,

Ellen: reads she, she has a glass of wine with her as to fortify her and as she opens the file and has a look.

Alice: But I’m always reading wine when I’m, I mean, drinking wine when I’m reading about my traumas, yous reading, [01:09:00] reading wine, you know, I don’t wanna read the tra, although I did work in a wine bottling plant, so reading wine labels might be the trauma.

Ellen: Oh, that sounds like a cool place to work.

Alice: I mean, I was 18, didn’t like wine. Still don’t, um, and just smelt of it constantly. ’cause

Ellen: oof,

Alice: it’d splash everywhere, so, yeah. No,

Ellen: not so glamorous

Alice: Dad loved it. Lots of free wine. Very easy presents for, um, for that six months.

Ellen: Well she, she starts reading the, the file and starts flashing back to like, the assault. So eventually she can’t handle it, so she snaps it shut and leaves it. And we go back to the train.

Bex: Yeah, we go back to the train.

Ellen: Emotional whiplash.

Bex: After all of the talk of Abby, we’re actually going to see Abby again. Can I just note that Abby’s hair is still perfect and her white clothes are still perfectly white, [01:10:00] even though she has been through a train derailment.

Ellen: Yeah,

Alice: of course. Her hair’s still perfect.

Ellen: She might have fixed it after she got out of the carriage.

Bex: And her glasses are also still intact. Yeah. So

Ellen: maybe she didn’t get thrown around as much.

Alice: She wasn’t in the vertical one, so she’s fine. Yeah.

Ellen: The, the, um, dining car might’ve been a less thrown around, maybe

Bex: at the very least, she should have a stain on the front of her shirt from where she spilled a sidecar over herself.

Ellen: Yeah. Realism people.

Bex: But that’s, this show does not do realism. What are you talking about?

Ellen: No, we’ve established this already.

Bex: So the, the point of this scene is a, just because they needed to get Connie Britton like on screen again, uh, ’cause they, you know, they’d spent all this money to get her on an episode. And yeah, there’s, there’s no real point to this scene. She’s on the phone with one of Sam’s [01:11:00] daughters who is freaking out because Sam has not texted them and he always texts and Abby has to break the news to them that there has been a train accident and their dad is hurt, but he’s gonna be okay because he’s in the best hands.

Ellen: And we go back to, as you have described it, train carriage of Bobby is too tired to deal with Buck’s shit. So he’s just let, Buck has just gone ahead and done the thing. Even though,

Bex: so we went through that massive argument of, you know, this is, this is too risky, it’s not your risk to, um, to take. And then Bobby’s just gone like, fuck it, do whatever you want.

I don’t care anymore at this point. So Buck is climbing the outside of the train carriage. Yes. And is trying to saw through the outside as he, as he told Bobby that he would.

Ellen: Yeah, I was watching this going. Did, did we not just have an argument about how this was too risky?

Bex: Yes.

Alice: Yeah. [01:12:00] There was no resolution. There was no, you know what, go do it. I don’t even care anymore. There was nothing. It was literally just like, you can’t do that. And then after an ad break he’s doing,

Ellen: he’s doing the thing. Yeah.

Bex: Yeah. A few moments later he’s doing it.

Ellen: And Bobby’s right there looking up at him. Um,

Bex: yeah, yeah. Bobby’s left the train carriage, ostensibly to try and get the train carriage more secure now that he has one of his firefighters on the exterior of the train, which is far riskier than being on the inside of the train.

Alice: Bobby’s just like holding the car up,

Bex: like literally using his irradiated Hulk powers

Alice: Finally, the radiation did something. Besides somehow give Michael a brain tumor.

Bex: Ooh, that’s interesting.

Ellen: I don’t think brain tumors are like catching. I don’t think he can be [01:13:00] infected.

Bex: No, but he could have irradiated around Michael, which has caused the, like, the cells in the brain to start beginning mal, um, malformed.

Alice: Dammit Bobby.

Bex: Just Michael though. Not anybody else.

Alice: Yeah, just for Michael. That’s terrifying. Like glanced at him in the over a hallway.

Ellen: We were just saying last week that he’s his support person, so

Bex: Yeah, because he’s feeling guilty because he gave him brain cancer.

Ellen: Geez.

Bex: Oh boy. Okay. Um,

Ellen: let’s stop writing fic,

Bex: right? So and Buck’s on the outside. Eddie’s on the inside being everybody’s support person. Reassuring Rumer Willis that she’s gonna get to the Roxby. Um, she’s not gonna be drumming anytime soon, but they are gonna get her out.

Alice: I mean, there is a drum. Oh, there’s a drummer with one arm. Well, you could, you could drum with one leg with.

Bex: Her gig’s tomorrow night.

Alice: It’s fine. She’ll fine.

Bex: She’s gonna be in hospital for, she’ll be right people to,

Alice: she’ll be right.

Bex: She’s got her leg bone [01:14:00] literally sticking through her stomach.

Alice: It’s just a flesh wound. She’ll be right

Bex: ’tis but a flesh wound.

Ellen: She can do the base drum with her other foot. No problem.

Alice: Yeah. It depends on which leg it is, but I think it’s her… anyway, boy, okay.

Ellen: No, Eddie is, Eddie is trying to convince them that you guys are gonna be, he says “Neither of you guys are missing anything. We’re getting you out.” It’s like, no, no. They’re gonna be missing like the gig. Like there’s no way she’s getting to

Bex: Yeah.

Ellen: Um, but

Bex: the, like, we get the sentiment, but no.

Ellen: Yeah. Um, the carriage starts to wobble around again and everyone’s gasping and, but still trying to cut the outside of the carriage.

Alice: Yeah. There’s literally an external shot of the crowd, like gasping as the carriage wobbles, it’s great.

Bex: Including like, um, Bobby is standing, looking up, kicking himself for letting Buck do this.

Um, Abby is standing there with like her hands clasped [01:15:00] under her chin, clutching at her invisible pearls. It’s like, oh my God. Although, whether she’s worried about Buck or whether she’s worried about Sam, who knows at this point.

Alice: Bit of both. Who knows?

Bex: Mm.

Ellen: Mm-hmm.

Bex: Both, both is good.

Ellen: So they’re all watching from the ground. Buck cuts a hole in the side of the carriage and grins at Eddie through the hole.

Bex: Yes. Eddie’s just looking at him going, you fucking idiot. Yeah. Why do I put up with you?

Ellen: So they get the basket and um,

Bex: okay. And now here’s where the, the wheels start to fall off for me.

Ellen: Yeah,

Bex: because how does Eddie manage to get Rumer Willis out from under the beam and into the basket by himself within the confined space of the train carriage?

Ellen: Yeah. I was kind of thinking, yeah, not thinking that, that, uh, when [01:16:00] they were able to pull her out through the, the hole, they could also dislodge the, um, the beam. But the, but Eddie is there on his own and he’s gotta get her out. Like it… yeah, you’re right it doesn’t make sense.

Bex: And then he’s gonna get Sam out.

Ellen: There’s not enough people in there

by himself. It’s like, it’s like they, they thought three quarters of this through and then they went, shit,

Alice: yeah, it’s close enough.

Bex: How is this actually gonna work in reality? Eh, we are just gonna hand wave this bit. They just magically get out. So they do, they magically get out, they magically get the drama girl out into the basket and down to the ground, and then they get, they go back and they do the same for Sam and they all live happily ever after.

Ellen: Yeah. Even with Milo, uh, we go back to Chim and Hen who are putting a collar onto Milo and then they lift him up on something?

Bex: Yeah. Chim teleports to Hen’s side [01:17:00] to do something. They’re like “3, 2, 1. And…”

Ellen: yeah. Do they lift up?

Bex: We don’t actually see what

Ellen: the, the chair that he’s, or whatever he’s lying on.

Bex: I don’t know.

Ellen: Or have they got something underneath?

Bex: I don’t know because we don’t see,

Ellen: yeah, I dunno,

Bex: we don’t see.

Ellen: Anyway, everybody lives,

Bex: I’m assuming that,

Ellen: except for all people who died in the original train crash. But everyone we here we know, um, is alive.

Bex: Yeah. Um, it’s a little bit touch and go with Milo because they get him out of the, the RV where he was trapped.

They get him on a backboard, everything’s looking good, and then his brain realizes that his body is not connected to the head bone and stops sending signals.

Alice: Well, they threw back first

Bex: Including a very important signal.

Alice: So first they, like, we find out that they’re homeless pretty much. ’cause the dad says that they’re not living in the RV by choice.

And Milo’s like, “What are you talking about, dad? We’re on an adventure. What do we always say?” And Dad’s like, maybe that’s not the right [01:18:00] best thing to say right now. But then we go back to like what the Dad was saying to Donatello earlier and it’s keep your head head up, which is awkward ’cause he’s decapitated, but that’s where he stops talking.

Bex: Yeah. ’cause his, his brain has decided there’s no body attached, so there’s no reason to send signals to, you know, do important things like breathing, which means that they have to intubate him in order to breathe for him, which is, you know, a little bit tricky because if they move his neck too much, they’re going to, you know, complete the decapitation.

Ellen: But Chim very helpfully, um, explains why they’re giving him whatever that chemical is, that they’re, the medicine that they’re giving him. I can’t pronounce that, but it’ll stop the gag reflex and it’s like, oh, that’s very good communication, Chim. Most paramedics would just probably do it without telling the dad what’s happening, but, or, or the audience.

Bex: Most paramedics aren’t, you know, don’t have an [01:19:00] audience watching.

Alice: We are actually taught in like first aid to always say what we’re doing.

Ellen: Okay. That’s good.

Alice: Um, and say it like out loud so that anyone like listening in knows as well.

Ellen: I mean, it’s probably important for other people who are helping you to know what, what you’ve already done.

Alice: Well, not only that, but like, if you, like, imagine if you are starting CPR on a woman and then someone like just wanders past and you’re all of a sudden cutting their top off to put defibrillator pads on. But. All they see is you cutting a woman’s shirt off, like

Ellen: mm-hmm.

Alice: Um, but yes, it’s also a consent thing.

Ellen: Um, they manage to get the tube in and they put the collar back on and he, we don’t know if he’s gonna be okay yet, but seems okay for now. Um, Sam is rescued in the basket and he gets out that way as well. He’s asking after Abby and [01:20:00] um, a helicopter arrives because apparently these people are gonna be medivaced out.

Bex: I think Chim called for the Medivac.

Alice: Yeah, Chim called for the medivac and have the Children’s Hospital and like a surgeon standing by. Yeah.

Ellen: Okay. That’s probably a lot safer than taking an ambulance over some bumpy roads.

Alice: Yeah, exactly.

Ellen: Um, so yeah, Sam and Abby are reunited and he, he like sees Buck and he says, “Oh thank you.” And Abby actually calls him by name and Sam’s like, you are Buck. So obviously Sam has, Abby has told him about Buck.

Bex: Buck’s, sort of very sheepishly goes, “yeah, it’s, it’s nice to meet you. You know, I’ve been hanging out with you for the last hour or so, but yeah, I’m Buck.” So they get Sam into the ambulance, Abby climbs up into the ambulance, maintaining eye contact with Buck the entire time they shut the [01:21:00] doors, she’s still staring at Buck. Ambulance drives away, she’s still staring at Buck. Eddie’s kind of looking back and forth between the disappearing ambulance and Buck and it’s like, “Dude, are you okay?” Um, and Buck just says, “What’s next?”

Very President Bartlett of him. And then he runs off to find something else to do to distract him from what just happened, leaving Eddie, like, what is going on here? Then we go to commercial with, but before we go to commercial, we go, we get another like pullback shot of the crash site with all of the, the ambulances and the pretty lights.

And the debris and the train carriages. Because something bad happened to this episode, swear to God. And as has been the pattern because we were just having a very emotional scene at the train derailment. When we come back from a commercial, we are with Athena. [01:22:00]

Ellen: It must be some time later, right? Because this, unless she’s suddenly come to the decision that she’s okay, she really is okay to talk about it now. And she’s called Brooke Shields back immediately. But no,

Bex: It has to be.

Ellen: Sometime later. Um, she’s talking, she’s ready to talk now. And she, she says she remembers she doesn’t remember much about the attack itself and but the clear me, the first clear memory she has is being in the ambulance.

And she thought she was dying because the look on Bobby’s face, he thought she was dying so she thought she was. And Kara says, but you didn’t. You survived. Athena says she shouldn’t have survived. “He had me. I didn’t even know he was there. I’ve been a police officer for 30 years and I’ve always been able to trust my gut,” and now she’s got doubts.

So at least she realizes that she should have called for backup before she went inside. Um, she feels like she can’t trust her instincts anymore. So [01:23:00] will this be a wake up call for a Athena?

Alice: Will she learn from this?

Ellen: Will will this stop her from doing reckless things? Signs point to no.

Bex: Tune in next week to find out, but it won’t be next week ’cause it’s the season finale, so.

Ellen: Yeah. Yes.

Bex: Tune in in a couple of months to find out.

Ellen: Bless her. But, uh, it’s gonna take time for her to heal and try and regain her trust in herself, she says. So poor Josh doesn’t get much of a run in this episode, but, uh, we have a brief scene with him giving his impact statement in court in front of Greg.

Bex: Which I understand is important to like finish off Josh’s storyline, but why do we need it?

Ellen: Yeah. It’s a funny little addition.

Bex: I could understand it maybe if what Josh said on the stand was, you know, so terrible because it aligned with the, the other storylines and the episode title and everything [01:24:00] like that. But, um, it doesn’t, it’s,

Alice: no, I think it’s just closing the door on that chapter.

Bex: I, yeah, no, no, I know. I just, did it have to be now? Did it have to be in this episode? Did we actually have to close that door? I, I dunno. Hmm. I do like, I will give them props that they did manage to drag Greg in for this one scene.

Alice: The real Greg,

Bex: the real Greg and him sitting there in his prison jumpsuit kind of glaring at Josh while Josh is, is, um, giving him his little speech.

Yeah. Where he says that, um, he’s gonna be able to walk out of this courthouse and have drinks with friends and Greg is gonna be sitting in a box every morning thinking about Josh and Josh can choose never to think about him again. Okay.

Ellen: Good for you, Josh.

Bex: From the courthouse, we’re gonna go [01:25:00] to the doctor’s office where we get the good news that the tumor has shrunk by almost 30%.

Ellen: Yeah. It’s a miracle,

Bex: well, that’s what Athena says.

Ellen: Yeah. Um, Michael says it’s, it’s not a clean bill of health or anything, but it’s, it’s a start, so

Alice: Yeah. It’s looking much more positive than it was.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: So Athena is planning, um, dinner so that Michael can share the good news. He’s all for it. He wants to come over and tell the kids.

Um, but then the elevator dings and somebody gets onto the elevator and Michael looks and sees that it’s, it’s Dr. David from ” Powerless” and suddenly all plans of having dinner with the kids go straight out of his head. Because last time he saw Dr. David, he was talking to another man and then sprinted out of the hospital just as Dr. David was going to ask him out.

Alice: Yeah. [01:26:00]

Bex: So he needs to fix that.

Ellen: Yeah. So he runs to the elevator and jumps on,

Alice: slides inside

Bex: and goes. He can’t, he can’t, he slide into his dms, so he literally slides into his elevator.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: I will say Dr. David doesn’t look upset to see Michael, so he is obviously forgiven him for, you know, talking to another man and running off.

Ellen: All right, so Buck has met up with Abby. Ugh.

This is a very weird scene. Yes.

Alice: And Be, Bex is very excited about this scene, apparently.

Bex: Oh my God. So it’s, yeah. It’s Buck’s supposedly getting answers out of Abby. It’s like they’re, they’re catching up and Abby says that she is sorry that Buck had to find out about Sam this way and Buck’s looking at her going like, that’s what you’re sorry [01:27:00] for.

Yeah. Not for, you know, ghosting me or, yeah.

Ellen: She doesn’t say sorry for any of the rest of it at all.

Bex: No. I’m sorry you had to find out that I have a fiance because you had to rescue him from a train carriage. Yeah. Um, I wasn’t actually planning on telling you at all. Oops.

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. She just fully ghosted him. Too awkward for Abby, I guess.

Bex: So. Sh well she, she kind of explains ’cause Buck’s like, “Did you know that you weren’t coming back? Did you know that you were leaving me for good and when did you know that you were leaving me? Was it in Morocco or Paris or Dublin, or when I was kissing you goodbye and promising that I would wait for you at the airport.”

And she explains that like we kind of discussed in our, um, sort of season one wrap up when we were talking about Abby, that she was lost. She was all about other people and then she left and she discovered who she was and [01:28:00] she was afraid that if she came back to Buck and to LA, that she would lose herself again even though she missed Buck, even though she wanted to see him, she wanted to keep herself more.

And Buck takes all that in and then just goes, “I’m glad to see you’re happy.” And then that’s the end of the scene.

Ellen: I mean, he handled it with a lot more grace than perhaps she deserved, but

Bex: I just, let’s finish the episode and then I can go off about it.

Ellen: Alright. Okay. So it’s party time and this is the graduation party of the class of 2020. And all of Mom’s dorky work friends are there.

Bex: And Mom’s dorky work friends’ family members.

Ellen: Yes. So there’s a few, [01:29:00] there’s a few of May’s friends who have just graduated as well, but most of the people seem to be like members of the 118 and their families.

Bex: Oh. And you can tell that they just graduated because they’re still wearing their mortarboards and graduation ropes.

Ellen: Yeah. As you do to a party.

Alice: Yes. I’m not even sure they’re allowed to keep those.

Ellen: I guess it depends.

Bex: Uh, it depends if you’ve rented them or bought them. Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah,

Bex: like some schools you can rent them in which case No, you do have to hand them back. But if, if, um, I know I had to rent my robes, but I got to, I had to buy my mortarboard, so.

Ellen: Okay. I’m pretty sure I rented both of them for my,

Alice: I never graduated, so can’t answer this.

Ellen: I don’t, I don’t have like a mortar board lurking somewhere in my house, so I must have given it back.

Bex: I don’t know where mine is. I did used to have it anyway. But how will people know if it’s a graduation party if you don’t [01:30:00] have like, actual graduates in the background?

Yeah. To remind you.

Ellen: Yeah. So, but I mean, I love this scene mostly just because everyone is having such a great time.

Alice: Yeah, it’s great.

Bex: Yeah. It’s, it’s so much fun. They’ve got, um, a photo booth with props and they’ve got various different combinations of cast members in the photo booth getting like, dressed up and just hamming it up for the camera. Um, which is a lot of fun.

Ellen: Yeah. Including like, as you were so excited about Alice, the, um, beads scene.

Alice: The beads scene

Ellen: Buck ends up with a bunch of beads around, like they look like those Mardi Gras bead things around his neck. And then he accidentally, jumps up and flip flips them into, into Eddie’s face. I don’t know how it happens, but Eddie’s just like,

Alice: yeah. So Oliver like turns around and like smacks Ryan in the face. Yeah. And then apologizes for it while Ryan’s gone [01:31:00] cross-eyed. And that was actually just them fucking around and like got like, it was not scripted,

Bex: but it’s so cute because the beads fly up and, and like hit um, Ryan in the face and Ryan’s like cross-eyed and he sort of lifts a hand to sort of, you know, make sure that his nose is still attached to his face and Oliver is just like bending down and like hands like, oh my God.

Ryan, are you okay? You’re okay. It’s so cute.

Ellen: Dorky work friends.

Alice: Um, there’s also a giant guest book, and Buck’s helping Chris like write his, but before he helps Chris with his, we see Bucks note and like, I don’t know what the fuck is with Oliver’s fuck-ass handwriting, but you can barely read it. We can read “You did it.” And then the second word looks like “cowavis”. It’s like what?

Bex: I’m pretty sure it’s [01:32:00] congrats, but

Alice: it’s definitely supposed to be congrats. But it looks like “cowavits”

Bex: the, the n is stretched out. The T is a dot on top of it instead of…

Ellen: yeah the T isn’t even joined up.

Bex: Instead of a stroke.

Alice: Yeah. It’s just, and then Buck looks like it’s got an H at the end instead of a K.

Bex: I don’t know if this is gonna make it into the episode, but before we started, like actually recording, there was a full like handwriting analysis of this and discussion about whether this was Oliver’s handwriting or whether this was a prop person writing this.

I think we came to the conclusion, this is Oliver.

Alice: It’s a hundred percent Oliver. Um, for some reason they let him have a sharpie, it it to disastrous results. Um, I’m, I’m pretty sure Buck should have just let Chris write his own, because like whenever we see Chris writing anything, it’s amazing. So

Ellen: It’s difficult to write on a whiteboard. Okay. Like it on a vertical page.

Bex: It’s not that hard. [01:33:00] It’s not that hard. The hardest thing about writing on a,

Alice: it’s not that cowavits!

Bex: The hardest thing about writing on a whiteboard is staying in a straight line and not like going up or down. But

Ellen: True.

Bex: You should still be legible.

Alice: Yeah. Or at least semi legible.

Bex: I’m pretty sure that everything we’ve ever seen, quote unquote, Christopher write has been a prop person. I don’t think they’ve ever let Gavin write anything.

Alice: It looks way too good to be a seven or 8-year-old, or however old he is in season three. Anyway, so. Buck asks Chris what his note, what he wants his note to be. And it’s “May your dreams come true, May.”

Ellen: Aw,

Alice: he’s a funny kid.

Ellen: So cute.

Bex: Speaking of May, she is posing with Maddie in the photo booth and Maddie is asking her about whether she’s excited about USC and that Maddie knows that Athena is certainly excited about USC and May’s like, “Actually, um, do you have a minute because there’s something that I wanted to talk to you about.”[01:34:00]

Dun dun dun.

Ellen: What’s May gonna talk to Maddie about?

Alice: Uh, so they immediately drop everything and walk off.

Bex: Yes.

Alice: Um, and then we go to the fire pit, which is where…

Bex: The money pit?

Alice: Yeah, just where the fire was. Karen calls it a money pit and Michael’s like, “it’s gonna be great.” And Hen’s like “You don’t see the greatness, Karen?” Like

Bex: It’s apparently remote controlled and like Hen is very skeptical that the remote is going to be able to light whatever that is.

Yeah. Um, and Michael gets very insulted. He is like, and when it’s, when he says it’s gonna be great, he then immediately storms off. He gets very sulky at these big parties.

Alice: Yeah. In his house.

Bex: It’s not his house. Not

Ellen: his house where he no longer lives

Alice: Criticizing his fire pit. [01:35:00]

Bex: He doesn’t even have the brain tumor to sort of explain why he is, you know, being such a little bitch in this one.

Ellen: hang on. So is this fire pit inside the house?

Alice: Yep.

Bex: It’s going to be, yes. It’s gonna be where that wall was that, um, Bobby and Michael destroyed.

Ellen: Okay.

Alice: Yeah. It doesn’t seem safe at all, but he’s an architect, so I’m sure he knows all about fire safety.

Bex: Mm. Um, but I, I do, I love that, like Karen and Hen and like Karen is just sort of looking at the, the construction, whatever, and Han’s like, “It’s greatness, but don’t you see the greatness?”

And Karen’s just like, “No, no, no, no. I don’t see the greatness.” Which is either incredibly good acting from these two women or they just let them ad lib.

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah.

Bex: We get more party shenanigans. Um, then we get a scene with, um, Bobby and Athena where Bobby comes up behind Athena while [01:36:00] she’s doing something with the cake and he startles her.

Alice: Oh.

Bex: Like she literally jumps when he comes up behind her and puts his hand on her shoulder.

Alice: Um, she does recover quickly, but it’s still like, it’s still a really sad

Ellen: Yeah. Trauma. So much trauma for everybody. Anyway. Um. He said he apologizes and said it was a great party. And she says she had time on her hands and May deserved it.

It’s been 30 years since she’s been a civilian. “I’m not sure you’re ready to have me home. All at home all the time.” Um, but Athena, you have been at home before this. There was,

Bex: Remember that time you got all of your taxes done like seven months before they were required, or that time that you took over cooking family lunch at the station because you had nothing better to do.

Alice: Yeah. Like you were just suspended Athena, but sure.

Bex: You’ve had plenty of time not [01:37:00] working.

Ellen: I feel like that suspension stuff was earlier this episode, right? I mean this earlier, this season.

Alice: Yeah, it was earlier this season.

Ellen: Anyway, let’s, let’s not remember that.

Bex: No. ’cause the writers didn’t, um, but Bobby says that he could get used to Athena being at home because apparently he’s also forgotten that he’s had that experience before.

Um, but says that he’s not gonna get the chance to get used to her having at home because he knows that she can’t wait to get back out there. And Athena’s like, “Yeah, I can’t wait to get back out there.” And then Bobby walks away and the smile just drops off her face. It’s like, yeah, woo. Can’t wait to get back out there.

Oh. And then it wouldn’t be a season finale without a montage with a voiceover, especially a voiceover that I don’t really know ties into the episode.

Alice: Then we get some like flash [01:38:00] forwards while the graduation’s also happening. So yeah, we get a flash of Hen channeling her inner House by using the glass, um, walls of the locker room to write notes on, and Chim walks up on the outside and holds up a copy of the MCAT prep guide and says, “Can I help?” so he’s accepted.

Bex: Yeah. ’cause Yeah, ’cause we didn’t mention that, um, when they were dealing with Milo, Chim fully meaning it this time says that Hen is brilliant for managing to, you know, intubate this kid, uh, without hurting him any further, Milo is going to live because of Hen, because she’s actually brilliant and he’s come to accept that her brilliance is such that she really does deserve to be a doctor.

So yes, this is him showing her that he has accepted that she is going to be a doctor and she’s going to leave him and he’s going to help her.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: Doesn’t need all of the fun words. He’s going to, you know, show his [01:39:00] support.

Ellen: Aw.

Alice: Um, we also get. Scene of Chris getting onto the bus for camp and Eddie’s waving goodbye and he opens a card Chris made him that says, “You’re gonna have a great time. Love Christopher.” Which is in much better handwriting than Buck’s on the guest card, but sure.

Ellen: Oh, it’s so cute though, that he made a card for Dad that says you are gonna have a,

Alice: I love Chris’s cards. They’re adorable.

Bex: You’re gonna have a great time with me not being around, Dad.

Alice: Oh yeah. I think Chris is more worried about, um, Eddie than about camp.

Bex: Yeah. Uh, what else? We get Hen doing yet another practice test and hovering while Karen and Denny mark her paper and then celebrating, because I guess she got over the 511 that she wanted. Mm-hmm. We get Michael going on a date with David at a restaurant.

Alice: Uh, we [01:40:00] get, we go back to the graduation party where Buck apologizes to Bobby for the train and Bobby goes, “Yeah, it’s all right. We both got a little hot. Are you doing okay?” Um, Buck just goes. “Yeah, I think I am.”

Um, so the voiceover has been through these scenes and it’s Maddie and she’s going, uh, people tend to fear the unknown. We look ahead, but we also look away afraid of what terrible things might be coming down the line. We survive because we don’t face our fear alone.

We band together and we find strength in numbers. Truthfully, the not knowing that’s not something we should fear. It’s something we should embrace. It’s what makes this all such a great adventure, because this life you have to be ready for anything.

Bex: Which doesn’t really tie in with the episode title, but it does tie in with what happens next.

Alice: Yeah. So we go back to the graduation party and Chim [01:41:00] goes up to Maddie and brings her a plate of food.

Bex: No, I think that’s his plate of food. Like she’s talking to somebody and Chim’s standing behind her and she spins around and he’s sees what he’s eating, and pulls a face and tells him that it smells terrible.

Alice: Yeah. And Chim says that it’s the salmon thing that she loved last time she had it, and then she, then he goes, “I can’t believe you’re still not feeling well. Have you seen the doctor?” Like, we haven’t seen her not feeling well at all, but like she had a yawn. But okay.

Bex: Again, with the, this is, this is another line that makes me think that something went terribly wrong with this episode because we’ve got the, still not feeling well yet.

We have not seen any evidence of Maddie not being well.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: I mean, yes, we had that yawn at the beginning of the episode, but there was no context to that yawn. There was no, oh my God. Are you still. Like, are you sleeping okay? Or, um, like anything to explain that this is [01:42:00] a, something that has been continuing.

Not just like a, a random yawn.

Ellen: I think it’s just Chim telling us rather than showing,

Bex: but I want them to. That’s what I’m talking about. It, it, something’s gone wrong, but they’re not showing us that shit. They’re resorting to telling us.

Alice: Yeah. Have you forgotten who wrote this? Because it’s very tell not show.

Um, anyway, Maddie immediately like, yes, panics and goes, “Oh my God, we have to go right now.” And she was like, “What? Why?” And they just leave like, okay, sure.

Bex: But, but all right, we’ll finish off and then I’ll, I’ll,

Ellen: I can feel a rant coming on.

Alice: So we’re in Chimney’s apartment ’cause we still dunno where Maddie lives.

Bex: I think Maddie’s in wit-sec. She we’re not allowed to see her apartment.

Alice: She lives in the RV park. It’s very awkward

and Chim’s pacing, like pacing back and forth. And he is like, “Anything yet?” And Maddie goes, “gimme a minute.” And Chim goes, “It’s already been over a minute. I mean, [01:43:00] what’s taking so long? I thought all you had to do was pee on a…” and this is where Maddie comes out of the bathroom and holds up a like, positive pregnancy test.

And her face is like in shock. Chim’s like, “Are you sure?” And then she holds up another stick, which is also positive.

Ellen: And then they have a little celebration about being pregnant. Like Chim Chim doesn’t look too,

Alice: you’re pregnant? We’re pregnant.

Ellen: Convinced to start with, and then they are both very excited about it.

Bex: No, I do love that. Like, Chim’s like “You’re pregnant?” And Maddie’s like, I didn’t do this by myself, buddy. We are pregnant.

Alice: We we’re pregnant.

Bex: But yes, they, they both end up being very happy about the pregnancy and the, the fact that they’re having a baby, and that’s where the episode ends. Mm-hmm. Randomly. Um, okay. So,

Ellen: alright, let us have it,

Bex: Let’s start with the pregnancy one, because that’s [01:44:00] so like the, the whole woman suddenly finds food disgusting equals pregnancy is like a well established trope in, um, in TV shows and movies. It’s like, it’s a cliche. Um, yeah. But we normally get more than one instance of woman finds food disgusting.

Ellen: It was very sudden, wasn’t it? Not

Bex: It’s like we saw Yeah. It’s like one time, oh my God, I must be pregnant.

No, we need like, the, the audience needs to be able to put the dots together. So we need, in order for me to fully buy this storyline, it should have been, we should have seen more examples of Maddie complaining that she was tired. We should have seen more examples of Maddie actually being nauseous and throwing up in the morning.

And then you start connecting the dots. And when you get to the, oh my God, you’re nauseous, you’re throwing up. Oh my God, you’re suddenly so tired. Oh my God, you find food disgusting. You must be pregnant. And they missed all of that and just jumped straight [01:45:00] to the, oh my God, I’m pregnant. Which makes it,

Alice: yeah, see the, like the vomiting trope does my head in. I don’t think I’ve known a single woman who before they knew they were pregnant was like full on vomiting at everything.

Ellen: I think you can get it. Usually it’s only people who have,

Bex: it’s a short hand in the movies.

Ellen: Yeah, it is. It is a trope and like a cliche, you’re right.

Alice: Like all, all the friends I’ve had that have had children, um, ’cause I only have dogs. Um, the, the first symptom is always extreme fatigue. Like, one of my friends, I knew she was pregnant before she did because she was super tired and I was like, they were trying, um, and I was like, uh, honey, have you taken a test? And she was just like, no. Like I’ve had a really busy week. And I was like, sweetheart. Maybe take a test.

Ellen: Um, I’ve never felt like, okay, that’s not true. I was gonna say I’ve never felt such bone deep fatigue [01:46:00] is when I was in my early pregnancy, but I have since then. Um, but, but no,

Alice: after the baby’s born, yeah.

Ellen: I do know people who have really bad, um, morning sickness and like to the point where they are like, are throwing up so much, they can’t keep anything down often and they have to go into hospital to get put on fluids because

Alice: Yeah. But that’s not normally the first

Ellen: that will happen. That will happen very early.

Alice: That’s not normally the first sign.

Ellen: No, but not, not with most people. No.

Bex: Yeah. But I mean this, we’ve, we’ve, well established this show is not good on the realism, but the point is that like movie and TV tropes is tiredness plus nausea, plus food equals pregnancy.

It’s like an easy way to

Oh, half the time they

Alice: don’t even do the fatigue. It’s just the vomiting.

Bex: Just the vomiting. But it’s, it’s an easy way to signal to your audience what is happening. Yeah. So the audience can feel clever when they put those very obvious clues together before the characters on the show do.

But we don’t get a chance to do that here. We get one clue and are suddenly expected to jump to the same [01:47:00] conclusion that Maddie went to, which is like, you can’t,

Alice: yeah.

Bex: There’s no way that having watched this episode multiple times, there’s no way that you can know that she’s pregnant just from what we get to see of Maddie in this episode.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Um, so interestingly, I was wondering whether this was a last minute addition to cover for Jennifer Love Hett being pregnant. Um, so I was doing a little like backwards and forwards math and turns out, no, it’s just standard woman on TV show is having sex and is in a relationship.

Therefore the only viable storyline for her is pregnancy. It just so happened

Ellen: right,

Bex: that Maddie’s storyline of being pregnant then later on coincides with one of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s pregnancies.

Ellen: Oh, well they timed that very well then, didn’t they?

Bex: There’s no, there’s no way that they could have known when they wrote this that [01:48:00] she was going to be pregnant.

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: See, I assume they shoehorned it in because she was pregnant, but

Bex: No, ’cause I’ve got like, so this season finished in, finished filming around January or February.

Alice: Yeah. But if it didn’t air until, because they might have,

Bex: but, but Aiden wasn’t born until August of 2021. So that’s a fucking long pregnancy.

Alice: Okay. No, no. Hang on, hang on. What’s nine months before August 2021?

Ellen: November.

Bex: November.

Ellen: November, 2020.

Bex: And they’d already started filming season four by then.

Alice: Oh, there you go. Because I assumed that like they’d filmed everything and then shoehorned it in, which is why it seemed so weird.

Bex: No, but then they, they aired this episode in May of 2020, so like, Aiden wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye at this point.

Alice: Yeah,

Bex: it was literally just,

Alice: there you go.

Bex: [01:49:00] Maddie’s like, Maddie either has cheating or pregnancy as her storyline. We can’t do cheating because we,

Alice: we just did that with Hen.

Bex: we’d have to deal with trauma, so therefore we need pregnancy. And it’s just, it just worked out that, you know, they started filming, they get to season four and she’s, they’ve got Maddie as like pregnancy storyline.

Then she comes to the producers and goes, oh, actually I am pregnant. I’ve gone. Well, that’s great timing.

Alice: Yeah. Because like, it seems so shoehorned in

Bex: Yes, yes. But then that might also just be because of the way that the episode was edited together.

Because they finished filming in January, February, and then everything shut down. Yeah. So the last four episodes have were they had to work with whatever they had shot. They couldn’t go back and do reshoots. They couldn’t do ADR. They just had to deal with it. So [01:50:00] things got probably shoved in order, like, we need this storyline, but we, because it’s gonna build up the next season possibly.

If we’re ever allowed to have a next season, God knows what’s gonna happen when that’s gonna happen. Yeah. But we’re, so we’re just gonna shove it in ’cause we need it. They’re just in case.

Ellen: Well, I, after having not known about the, having to edit things in Tim Minear’s, uh, home office, I think they did a brilliant job of finishing off the last few episodes, then. Like this, this episode is, uh, possibly the “Powerless” one. But the, but before that, I hadn’t really thought that the editors had done a bad job at all. I think the episodes flowed together pretty well. No, I, this episode’s quite choppy, but like

Bex: this one, this one’s not good.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: Um, but yeah, the up till now it’s, they did well working from their couches.

Alice: [01:51:00] Yeah,

Bex: I’m kidding. I’m sure that all of the editors have like, actual proper computers in home offices.

Ellen: I mean, it was the advent of working at home, wasn’t it? So we all, we all made do with what we had. Oh God. That seems like such a long time ago now. Five years ago.

Alice: I know. It’s insane. I was going through my phone earlier today actually to delete stuff ’cause I was trying to clear space ’cause my phone’s almost full and I can’t possibly get rid of the dog photos. Um, but yeah, like I got to like 2020 and I was like, oh my god. Like just so many photos of me like bored at work. Mm.

Ellen: I was just going insane with my children at home, trying to work.

Alice: It was a great time to not have children. And then I, I remember trying adopted a dog at the end, end of it was, and I was like, this was a terrible idea.

Bex: I was trying,

Alice: Kidding, Autumn, I love you!

Bex: I was trying to work from home and [01:52:00] homeschool two kids at the same time. Yeah, me too. As well as do all the house stuff. It was nuts.

Ellen: Yeah. Thankfully our schools didn’t close much.

Bex: Can I rant about Abby now?

Ellen: Yes.

Alice: Go for it.

Ellen: Go ahead,

Bex: because I love Abby. You guys know that I love Abby.

Ellen: Yeah.

Bex: You know that I’m like big Abby supporter. I hated Abby in this episode.

Ellen: Yeah, that’s understandable.

Bex: Mostly because I don’t understand why she had to be there for this episode.

Alice: They just wanted to bring her back.

Bex: But why?

Ellen: Yeah. I mean they gave, they gave Buck some closure.

Bex: Yeah, but did he need the closure?

Ellen: Well, I mean, Abby just kinda left him hanging. I mean,

Alice: but like he’d already moved on. We got the move on scene. Yes. In like season two.

Bex: Yeah, exactly. We had “Haunted”, we had him let her go. And there has been [01:53:00] nothing sort of in the rest of season two or all of season three to indicate that Buck is still kind of hung up on her. There’s been no,

Ellen: only the references to Abby in the last few episodes.

Bex: Well, but those were just to, you know, signal that we were gonna get Abby back, but like, he was hooking up with Taylor and, but there was none like, oh, I can’t really hook up with you because I’ve got, you know, I’ve got issues with women.

Apart from the fact that like, I can’t hook up with you because I don’t want to disrespect you because I’ve learned not to disrespect women, but it wasn’t that, you know, my heart is with someone else. Get with anyone this season. No, ’cause you’re too tied up with Eddie. Yeah. Cool.

Um, but like there’s been nothing to nothing. Again, there’s been nothing to show us that he’s been preoc, that Abby has been a preoccupation, that he needed closure. They’re just all of a sudden telling us here she is [01:54:00] so that Buck can get closure that I don’t think he really needed.

Ellen: Yeah. No, I don’t, I don’t see the point of her being, it could have been anybody, but I mean, it was nice to have her back for a little bit.

Bex: It was lovely to have her back. But the other thing that pissed me off is that she had such a dramatic re um, reintroduction to the show and then they did nothing with her.

She went from being, from making this absolute kick ass 9-1-1 call to literally just standing by and watching the men folk do all the heavy lifting.

Alice: Yeah. And like she, she was in season one, we got a actually like, you know. Yeah. She pretending to save lives.

Bex: Yeah. I mean, I know that she’s just a 9-1-1 dispatcher. She doesn’t have any medical training. She would be more of a hindrance than a help if she actually tried to pitch in and help. But

Alice: She could have gone looking for survivors. But no, instead it was, she’s just moved on with a fiance

Bex: and she’s just gonna stand there and moon over these men while everyone else works around her.

It just, it feels like such [01:55:00] a waste. And then when they do have that scene where she and Buck actually have a conversation, Buck doesn’t say anything. Yeah.

Ellen: No,

Bex: it’s all Abby. It’s all Abby again, talking about herself, which is fine, but I feel like if you were gonna have closure that you would want Buck to have more to say to her, to like, to really explain.

And I know that Tim Minear has, and this is why I don’t read the interviews, ’cause you know, death of the author and everything like that, I don’t care what his intention was. I only care about what actually comes across in the scene.

But he’s, his interpretation of what happened in that episode was that, and I’m just gonna read it, was that, um, “Buck feels mature to me at the end of that story. He feels like a guy who realizes that a chapter is over. It did them both some good. And he can’t be angry at her.” And

Ellen: I feel like he can be angry at her. [01:56:00]

Bex: Yes. Why can you not be? I think he can be angry at her. Why can’t he tell her how he felt?

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: Yeah.

Bex: Why can’t he ask her about the letters that he sent? Like, did you get my letter? Can I please get some stuff off my chest instead of just, I’m happy that you’re happy.

Ellen: He does let it go very easily.

Bex: Which you could like chalk up to him being more mature and having gone through lots of therapy and everything. But I just, I wanted so much more from Abby being back, and I did not get it. And it annoys me every single time we get to this episode. Mm-hmm.

Alice: So it was literally since “Haunted”, which is the episode where he moves out, right?

Bex: Mm-hmm.

Alice: Is that h That’s haunted?

Bex: That’s haunted,

Alice: yeah. Cool. So since “Haunted”, it has been 19 months. So apparently Abby found herself, found a guy with children and got engaged in 19 months.

Bex: No. [01:57:00] No. But how long had she been gone before Buck gave up on her? Because there was a good couple of months between the end of season one and episode six of season two. So we say two years at least.

Alice: Yeah. But like in Yeah, two years, which, like, if you wanna find yourself, don’t jump into an engagement, like Buck had so much more right to be angry about the fiance thing when she was like, I needed to find myself. And it’s like you haven’t though, you’ve just jumped into another relationship.

Bex: She found herself in another man’s bed, apparently.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: No,

Bex: look, no, I’m, I’m not mad at Abby’s storyline. I am. I feel that that’s perfectly acceptable, that she goes out, she finds herself in Europe, she meets someone.

That relationship is a lot healthier for her than the relationship she had with Buck. I’m okay with that. I’m just pissed off that they dragged her back into the story for this episode.

Alice: Yeah. [01:58:00]

Bex: That if they’re gonna bring her back, I wanted something more. I wanted either her to be a little bit more kick ass of her own accord.

Like she’s apparently lost herself and just become completely incapable of doing and found herself. But she can’t do anything without Sam now,

Alice: yeah, she’s, my life was all about helping people, so now I just don’t help anyone. It’s like, oh, okay. Yeah. Cool.

Bex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s like what I used to be really, I used to be really proactive and, and now I just stand back and observe everything.

Alice: Like whereas, well, like Maddie’s whole life was not helping herself and helping other people. She escaped Doug, but she’s still helping other people.

Bex: I just,

Ellen: Her fiance was in trouble inside the train. Maybe she was just having a, having panic.

Alice: No, but like, I wish that it, she’d come back instead of doing the fiance thing, she’d come back on her own merit

Bex: or she’d come back and done the fiance thing, but just had more, was more active in this episode.

Yeah. Had more of a, a role [01:59:00] for herself in this episode, and I understand that they brought her back because it adds weight to the, the Sophie’s choice of do we save Sam? Do we save the girl? We have to save Sam because he’s connected to Abby. But I have a feeling that Buck would be adamant that you had to save both of them regardless of who it was.

’cause that’s just Buck.

Ellen: Yeah.

Alice: Yeah. Like he doesn’t want anyone to die.

Bex: He didn’t extra, we’ve already, like he, yeah. He doesn’t need the extra emotional weight of, I have an emotional connection to this guy through Abby. It’s just, there are two people here and I’m going to save both of them ’cause that’s who I am.

Alice: And like, I feel like they’re giving Abby a fiance just so that Buck stops pining over her. But like, they could have just had a mature conversation where Abby could have been like, you were great for me at the time, but like, I’ve moved on now. Like there, there could have been a conversation and there wasn’t,

Bex: again, we didn’t see, we didn’t see the pining. There was no pining,

Alice: No. Like there should have been more conversation. There should have been. But [02:00:00] instead it was just like, oh, I’ve got a fiance so you can’t, and Buck’s like, okay, cool. I’ve moved on.

Bex: Or this scenario happened at the end of season two.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: Oh yeah.

Bex: When the wounds are still fresh,

Alice: I feel like they then the fiance thing would’ve been real fucking fresh. Jesus.

Ellen: I feel like, uh, like we’ve, this is not the first time that I’ve thought this, and I may have said it before that. I think having such a big cuss, like I, I love the fact they have a big ensemble cast and it’s great to see all their different stories coming together and, but I think sometimes the fact that they have so many different people to follow around means that we don’t get the full depth of story progression that we could for a lot of characters because there’s not enough time to like go into every single character’s emotional journey through the whole of their arc for each season.

Alice: Yeah.

Ellen: Which perhaps is what makes it such a great, uh, vehicle for fan fiction [02:01:00] because there’s plenty of gaps to be filled.

Bex: I think that it can be done with an ensemble. You just have to have writers that are willing to write for every single character and not have their, their preferred characters.

Ellen: Yeah. And that’s, that’s really difficult to juggle.

Bex: So like, we might have a little, we might have more of Buck’s like emotional progression with Abby if he wasn’t relegated to the “but why” in like every second episode.

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. It would, it takes like a probably a lot more planning and finessing across the whole of the season, and we don’t seem to have that.

Bex: Oh, I’m not, I’m not saying that it’s easy. It’s probably really difficult to do when you have a, a rotating writer’s room and not like, you don’t have the showrunner writing every single episode, a la Shonda Rhimes or Aaron Sorkin, who have every single character’s arc in their head and are pulling it out every episode.

Ellen: Yeah. [02:02:00] Um, but. Anyway. Maybe we should, maybe we should keep that until next week.

Alice: It just, I felt unfulfilled.

Bex: I love Abby. I wish that this episode had been more for her and for us.

Ellen: Yep.

Bex: I just think this episode is very weak, especially for a season finale.

Ellen: Yeah. I mean, I thought the train, like rescue scenes were really great, like high tension kind of, um, nail biting stuff, but Yeah.

Bex: Except for when they didn’t actually show us the rescue, they just hand waved.

Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. That part up until the rescue part,

Alice: up until that part, like, I liked, I liked the brief tension where you, like, where you found out that they could only save one.

Ellen: Yes. And having the argument in the, in the car and like all that stuff,

Bex: 0.25 seconds of tension, which then was completely useless because they saved both of them anyway.

Alice: They saved both anyway. Yeah.

Bex: and Buck did what he wanted.

Alice: Yeah. But yeah, it’s just, it’s a very weirdly paced

Ellen: and then undercut with the fact that they kept cutting back to Athena, just sitting at the table looking at her with a glass of wine. [02:03:00]

Alice: Yeah. I just, I just wish Athena’s thing had been earlier in the season, so she had more time to decompress from it rather than literally like three scenes.

Ellen: Yeah. And we do say that in the past that like, um, we have said in the past that characters don’t get a chance to deal with their trauma, but she has, she is dealing with her trauma. Well, she’s trying, attempting to deal with her trauma in this episode, but yeah. Weirdly cut in between the high kind of tension scenes with the train.

Alice: Yeah. Anyway, do you agree? Do you disagree? Um, it’s probably too late to tell us now.

Ellen: Well, you can, you can always leave a comment on this particular episode, let us know.

Bex: Yeah. But it may not make it to our season three wrap up episode.

Ellen: Yeah. I think if by the time that, uh, listeners are listening to this, it will be too late.

But, um, you can always leave us comments and let us know. So next week we are gonna do our wrap up. Anything else to say about this episode before we [02:04:00] go on by the way?

Bex: I could keep ranting about this episode for a while, but I’m not going to, ’cause I actually wanna go to bed at some

Ellen: point.

Yeah, me too.

Alice: Oh, but Bex, Bex…

Bex: no.

Alice: Season three,

Ellen: no more ranting

Alice: No, no. Season finals. Season three or season six?

Bex: Oh, fuck. Um, ooh. As in which is better or which is worse?

Alice: Well, like it’s 50 50, so whichever one’s worse means the other one’s better.

Bex: Oh, season three is worse.

Alice: Wow.

Bex: Did not like the ending for season six, but up until the last five minutes, it was a well written, well paced, well shot, well constructed episode. The ending just sucked.

Alice: Interesting.

Bex: This one was Tim Minear just, like everything was scattered on his living room floor and he is just picking up pieces and slapping them together and calling it a [02:05:00] day.

Ellen: If you’re listening, Tim Minear, sorry. I’m sure you did your best.

Alice: No, we’re mad at him this week,

Bex: No, no. See, I think at this point he’d also mostly checked out of 9-1-1 because he was too busy with his new baby Lone Star.

Ellen: Let us know what you thought of this episode. Please be, be kind. You can leave us a comment, uh, on thatweewooshow.com directly on this episode’s post or in Spotify and all the usual places.

Listen out for our next week episode, which will be our wrap up for season three, and we will see you then. Bye

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 [02:06:00] to find out the number.

If you enjoy our podcast, you can help us out by leaving us a review on Spotify or your preferred listening app and by sharing our social media posts. Find out more at thatweewooshow.com.

[first outtake]

Bex: Tries to talk the older man off his ledge, um, tries to calm him down, just

Alice: tries to talk the older man off

Bex: Okay, you know what, I’m done. I’m not talking anymore. Done. Good night.

Ellen: Okay. Look, the exciting part is about to happen, right?

Bex: No,

Alice: we’re hardly into the episode yet,

Ellen: and it’s not anything to do with getting off. Um, well, they get, they’re about to get off the train. Um, so….

Alice: Lucky train. [02:07:00]

[second outtake]

Alice: Poor El. You know how Eddie does the, like the angry emoji and goes, um, “Abby, his fiance’s Abby?” Ellen’s just the angry emoji while editing his episode.

Ellen: Yeah,

Bex: Ellen’s just grabbing sound bites and slapping them down together. I don’t care if this makes sense here. I’m putting it here.

Ellen: That’s what I do every week.

Bex: It’s an homage to Tim Minear. I’m just gonna stick this bit here and then I’m gonna stick this bit here.

Ellen: If it’s good enough for Tim, then it’s good enough for me. All right, all right, let’s get outta here. Um, okay.