Welcome to That Weewoo Show: a podcast where Bex, Ellen, and Alice watch and discuss every episode of ABC’s TV show, 9-1-1.
In this episode we discuss episode 5 of the fourth season of 9-1-1, titled “Buck Begins”.
The 118 race to save the lives of workers trapped in a five-alarm factory fire. Maddie reveals a painful family secret that causes Buck to confront his childhood and answer why he is the daredevil he is today.
Content warnings for episode 4.05:
bad parenting, cancer, a death of a child (not shown on screen), domestic violence, grief, motorcycle accident, industrial site fire.
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Episode Transcript
Maddie: [00:00:00] 9-1-1, what’s your emergency?
Bex: Welcome back to That WeeWoo Show, a podcast where we watch and discuss episodes of the 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 everyone who has listened to our episodes so far. Shared our social media posts and rated us on Spotify and or Apple podcasts.
We will forever be indebted to you for doing so. Uh, our shout outs this week go to Keira, Ella, imakestuff and mayawolfinger for leaving comments across our social media and podcasting platforms. We haven’t talked about comments that have been left in a while, so they’ve stacked up, [00:01:00] um, for probably too many to actually go through and read them all individually.
But please know that we did laugh, um, over the funny ones, and we did appreciate you taking your time out to reach out and give us your thoughts about the, the various episodes that you left comments on.
Ellen: Yeah. Okay. Before we get started with this episode, we just wanted to quickly mention that this, uh, although this episode will be coming out in over a week’s time, so it’ll be a few, like a long time ago by then, but, um, just this week we got the terrible news that, podcasting, our fandom legend, um, Jeremy Greer of Monster of the Week podcast, uh, unfortunately lost his battle with cancer.
Alice, uh, I don’t think Bex, you’ve been, you’d listened to Monster of the Week that much, right?
Bex: No.
Alice: Yeah, I got all the way up to season 10. Yeah. But yeah, like listened to them a lot for a good, like six [00:02:00] months straight. Um, and was definitely like part of my inspiration when I said yes to doing this podcast.
Ellen: Yeah. Obviously this kind of format of rewatch podcast, um, Monster of the Week was a big inspiration for that. And, um, they weren’t sort of the first podcast that I ever got into, but they were certainly the funniest and most insightful. And, you know, Chris and Jeremy had a great, great sort of chemistry to them, to their shows.
So if for some reason you haven’t, um, you are listening to this podcast and you hadn’t come across Monster of the Week before, um, definitely look them up and they’ve, they covered the whole of Supernatural as well as Merlin and, um, they were doing an X-Files show and they, uh, they were doing, working their way through Hannibal.
Alice: They also covered like some of the, some of the Supernatural novels and the comic, like the com, the episode where they did the comic, I was crying with laughter, like trying to drive.
Ellen: Yeah. Very funny and
Alice: crying. It was so funny.
Ellen: So good. So, um, I don’t think that [00:03:00] Chris or any of Jeremy’s family or are likely to hear this, I, I don’t know if they’re um, you know, 9-1-1, uh, first responder show fans or anything.
But, um, we just wanted to wish our condolences to everybody who knew Jeremy and we’re extremely sad that, such a lovely, friendly and um, supportive to the community and everything. He was just really nice guy. So, sad times.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: Lots of love to their Discord community and everything too. ’cause they had a really big, they have still have a very big community there that um, is feeling it a lot this week.
Alice: Yeah, he was just way too young. Like, it’s just awful.
Ellen: Let’s go back to the weewoo show.
Alice: Yeah, which is also super cheery this week.
Ellen: Oh, this week is just full on. It was very full on episode.
Bex: So let’s just jump right into it because this is a very special episode. But before we start talking about that, Alice, could you remind us what [00:04:00] happened in last week’s episode?
Alice: Yeah. Last week on 9-1-1, May graduated to her own desk at the dispatch center, Athena solved a hairy murder mystery and Chimney struggled to keep the Buckley family secret when Buck and Maddie’s parents came to town.
Ellen: That’s right. And this episode is season four, episode five called “Buck Begins”. Uh, we actually watched this episode altogether last weekend because we were,
Alice: we did!
Ellen: In Melbourne together for Supernatural Convention and we had lovely, uh, few days, um, and we watched this episode together. So.
Bex: And yes, there were moments when Alice and I were just watching Ellen and not actually watching the episode.
Ellen: Awkward. Um, no. It was, it was great. It was a lot of fun. So this episode originally aired in February of 2021, and the official summary, uh, says that [00:05:00] Buck confronts the scars of his childhood when Maddie reveals a painful family secret and as well as the 118 race to save the lives of workers trapped in a five alarm factory fire.
So, triggers for this episode include bad parenting, cancer, a death of a child, um, not shown on screen, but talked about, uh, we have domestic violence, grief, and a motorcycle accident.
Bex: I would also probably throw in a trigger for, you know, industrial fire and people trapped in said industrial fire. Although maybe that just goes without saying since it’s 9-1-1.
Ellen: Yeah. And it is a five alarm fire, et cetera.
Bex: Mm. We’re in 1996 and I’m not even gonna pretend to not know who these kids are.
Ellen: Oh, it’s great. It’s great casting though. Like they really,
Bex: it’s very good.
Ellen: Yeah. They really look like them.
Bex: so it’s 1996 and a young Maddie [00:06:00] is teaching a young Buck how to ride a bike without training wheels.
Alice: She is, it’s so cute.
Bex: It’s very cute. I love that in this little clip, we already can see, um, like Buck’s personality coming through because he keeps falling down. He keeps hurting himself. Um, he’s struggling, but he refuses to give up.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Until he, he gets it. So there, there is this moment that is just, I know that it’s normal um, teaching kids how to ride on bikes technique, when you tell them that you’re not gonna let them go or you’re gonna keep holding onto them, when in fact you are letting them go. It’s just the symbolism of Maddie promising that she’s not gonna let him go, but she does let him go considering what happens in the rest of the episode.
Ellen: Oh yeah.
Bex: Um, that just kind of hit me really hard, but, um, he goes on his bike, he’s pedaling Maddie promises not to let him go. She does let him go, but it’s okay because [00:07:00] he is doing it. Um,
Ellen: he’s doing it so well right into traffic.
Bex: He’s unfortunately doing it straight into an intersection. Um,
Alice: I like that he’s like, he’s been using training wheels and then Maddie’s just like, oh no, I forgot to teach him how to steer.
Bex: You know what I, I don’t know if he was using training wheels.
Ellen: No. This is the first time that he’s seen the bike, right? Because she only just found it,
Bex: I had the sense,
Alice: Maddie says, you sure you don’t wanna go back to training wheels?
Bex: Maybe, but I get the sense that this is the first time he’s been on this bike. So maybe Maddie pulls it out, it’s got training wheels on it
Ellen: and Buck’s like, I don’t need those.
Bex: Yeah. So she pulls the training wheels off and like off he goes,
Ellen: oh, maybe
Bex: the, the writers obviously didn’t think that far through.
Um, but yes, Buck is riding straight into oncoming traffic. Maddie freaks out because she didn’t teach him how to turn. He thankfully figures it out pretty quickly, um, [00:08:00] and starts pedaling back up the hill towards her. But a car coming up the road behind them spooks him and he falls off the bike quite spectacularly.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: And this is when I am very glad that I grew up and my mother still lives on a very quiet cul-de-sac. So when my kids were riding on the road, there were no cars.
Ellen: Yeah. Maybe it wasn’t the best place to, you know, start teaching him how to, there, there seems to be a lot of cars around. Yes. Like even when he turns around and comes back the other way, he nearly gets hit by a car again.
Yeah. So, yeah.
Bex: So Buck falls off the bike. Something about that summons the Buckley parents, um, who do not come running out with cries of concern for their child. Phillip comes out quite annoyed that they’re making a ruckus. And Margaret, the mother’s first words are, “Maddie, what did you do to him?”[00:09:00]
Like, I know that older siblings often torment their younger siblings, but I think that’s taking it a little too far.
Ellen: Yeah. He’s like crying and saying, “Mommy!” and Maddie’s like, “he’s fine. You are all right. Right?” Like the, the standard, like older, older sibling thing.
Bex: Yep.
Ellen: But when they see the bike. They the, the tone changes again and Mom is like, “Where did you get that?” so apparently Maddie just found it in the garage and Mom is like getting real mad at Dad.
Bex: Yeah,
Ellen: She’s, you know, he, apparently he was supposed to get rid of this bike and we don’t know, we don’t see until Maddie takes Buck back into the house that Phillip picks up the bike and it’s actually got a little, um, number plate thing on the back of it that says Daniel.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: So you realize that it’s Daniel’s bike.
Alice: Yeah. So Daniel, as we learned at the very end of last week’s episode is their [00:10:00] brother and he died.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: And then the episode cuts back to pretty much where the last episode left off. Buck is still over at, uh, the Madni apartment and Maddi is explaining to him who Daniel is to Buck and to the audience as well. And we find out that Daniel was seven when Buck was born and he passed a year later.
Ellen: Yeah. So he, so Maddie was Daniel’s older sister as well?
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: Right.
Bex: And we also find out that, um, Daniel died of juvenile leukemia.
Alice: Um, he got sick right after the photo of Daniel on the bike that Buck found was taken. And they had three years of doctors in hospitals and every treatment they could find, but nothing worked.
Ellen: Yeah. Buck is, Buck is also thinking the same thing I was this time. Like, it doesn’t make any sense. And like, yeah.
Why [00:11:00] would they keep it from him that, why would they keep it a secret? Unless they, and, and as Maddie says, they were grieving. Um, but is that any reason to just completely not like pro make Maddie promise not to tell Buck. That’s Yeah, but Buck works it out.
Bex: He’s very switched on in this episode.
Ellen: He’s definitely got the brain cell.
Bex: I know we give him a lot of shit. Um, and sometimes he’s written to be like the himbo, but in this episode he figures out what is going on very, very quickly.
Ellen: Mm-hmm.
Alice: Yeah, he does
Bex: because he asks Maddie, “I’m surprised that they didn’t try, um, bone marrow transplant,” which is common technique for treating leukemia.
And Maddie says, “No, we did, but nobody in the family was a match. Not dad, not mom, not me.” And the penny drops and Buck goes, “They couldn’t find a match, so they made one me, I was born to be a match for Daniel.” And Maddie confirms that. She’s like, [00:12:00] “Yes, you were a match. But yeah, didn’t, the cells didn’t graft.
Daniel had a relapse and he died.” So not only was Buck a savior baby, he was a failure savior baby. He was born to save Daniel and he failed.
Ellen: Poor Evan. Poor Evan. Poor Buck.
Bex: No, poor Evan. Because he was Evan at that point.
Ellen: Yeah. I mean, it’s a, obviously they like it. He, he’s taking it really hard. Like that’s a really hard thing to hear like so many years later. Even they wouldn’t have told him that when he was a kid, I’m sure. Well, I hope they wouldn’t have, um, in any case,
Bex: no, he’s,
Alice: they didn’t tell him anything. Yeah.
Ellen: But yeah, he takes it so hard and he just leaves and, and Maddie’s calling him saying “Don’t leave!” But he, he leaves.
Bex: We go to the title card. When we come back, I think it’s the next day, and Phillip [00:13:00] and Margaret are back over at Maddie’s apartment where she has apparently told them that she told Buck everything and they are furious with her. ’cause apparently it wasn’t her place to tell Buck anything.
Alice: Yeah. Poor Buck. Poor Maddie.
Ellen: Yeah. Well, she tells them off, she’s like, ” You can’t tell me what to do. I’m not a kid.” Like, bugger off, basically. And they’re like, “Watch the way you speak to your mother. Oh.” So yeah.
Bex: They’re so, they’re so waspy. They’re so like all of the intricate societal rules and expectations just, oh, they make me so mad.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: Mm-hmm.
Bex: Because, you know, Maddie is supposed to have deference to them simply because they are older than her and they are her parents. And she’s like, fuck that. I’m an adult now myself. You don’t get to tell me what to do. [00:14:00] And Phillip tries to explain to her that they didn’t have a choice because, um, the people of the town were judging them and they were looking at them and they were talking about them after they found out that they, being, the people found out that the Buckleys had, had Evan simply to be a bone marrow donor, and the Buckley’s couldn’t stand having people talk about them and look at them strangely and judge them so they picked up and left to avoid scrutiny.
Ellen: Yeah. I mean, it’s easy to judge them for their dumb decisions, but I mean, the things that you do when you’re grieving are, you know, hard to predict, but like, yeah, they made a right mess of this.
Bex: Completely.
Alice: Yeah. Yeah. It’s ridiculous.
Bex: Margaret tries to justify it by telling Maddie that Maddie’s not a mother. She doesn’t understand yet. I think Maddie was about to slap her.
Alice: Yeah, I would
Bex: because she, she might not have been a mother. She might not have lost a child, but she lost a brother.
Alice: Mm-hmm.
Bex: Then she had to raise [00:15:00] another brother within that household full of grief. And she tells them that no matter how hard they thought they tried, they didn’t try hard enough.
Alice: So then we go to another flashback,
Bex: we go, we flashback to basically witnessing their “trying hard”, which definitely is not hard enough. Margaret and Phillip are arguing in the living room while baby Evan, who’s still like, he’s got a massive bloody knee that nobody has dealt with yet, is sitting on the stairs, listening to them fight.
Um, and Margaret is upset. She can’t understand why Phillip kept the bike, and Phillip is just saying, “I wanted one thing to remember him by.” And I wanna slap Margaret once again because she says “We live with the reminder of him every day staring us in the face.”
Alice: Ah.
Bex: Oh, I hate this woman. Yeah. I hate this woman so much. So while they’re arguing, it’s up to Maddie to [00:16:00] grab the first aid kit and patch Evan up.
Alice: And Evan’s blaming himself.
Ellen: Yes. He’s still Evan. Are we gonna call him Evan when he is a kid? Like,
Bex: yes, because he’s not, he’s still Evan.
Ellen: Yeah, that’s right.
Alice: Baby Buck.
Ellen: He, he like evolves into Buck later.
Bex: I feel like he does.
Ellen: Okay. We can call him Evan. Um, it just feels weird now.
Alice: I know.
Bex: Yeah. But for those of you who aren’t looking at our computer screens right now in the transcripts, if it’s current day, it’s Buck. If it’s a flashback, then it’s usually Evan. Um, mostly because at that point Maddie and his parents are calling him Evan, like it’s only present day that he’s actually being referred to as Buck.
So that’s why I’ve done that. Yeah. But yes, Evan is pretty much convinced that his parents are upset at him, and Maddie is trying to convince him that, no, he’s not in trouble. People just [00:17:00] yell when they care too much, they overreact and they feel bad about it later. And this is kind of confirmed when Phillip calls Evan downstairs and says, “Hey, why don’t we go get you a bike and we’ll get some ice cream later as well.”
And you can see the nucleus of Buck forming at this point, because he’s putting two and two together and he is going, oh, I get hurt and I get attention from my dad. He takes me out to buy a bike and get ice cream.
Ellen: Yeah. He’s like, “they’re, they’re really not mad.” Yeah. And Maddie’s like, “That’s just what happens when they worry.” And Evan’s like, yeah,
Alice: that’s what happens when they worry. Yeah. Oh, so if I make them worry.
Bex: So then we get a hilarious little montage set to Smashmouth, which is an absolutely perfect needle drop because one of the first lyrics is, you know, I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed, and we [00:18:00] get Buck testing his hypothesis.
He sets up a ramp using a piece of plywood and some tin cans that he can jump his bike off. He scrapes his elbow. Phillip comes back with pizza. He goes skateboarding, he’s practicing his ollie, he hits a rock and goes flying, scrapes up his face. Nothing happens. So he decides to climb a tree. He falls out of said tree. Breaks his arm.
Ellen: Yeah. Right in front of mom.
Bex: Mom brings, mom brings him breakfast in bed. Yep.
Ellen: Oh.
Alice: Um, we then have, after this little montage of baby Buck hurting himself, worse and worse, we immediately go to the present day and at the station house and Buck’s told all of them. Like, Buck’s entertaining an entire, like the entire firehouse.
And Eddie is just like, “This explains so much about you.” And Hen’s like, “It’s a miracle that you even survived childhood.” Eddie’s like, “It’s a miracle you survived [00:19:00] yesterday.”
Ellen: Aw,
Alice: Poor Buck.
Bex: And just in case the audience hasn’t figured out, Buck spells it out for you is very clearly. I was like, “It was the only way I could get their attention.” He’s like, “Guess I know why.”
Ellen: He’s still, he’s still really down on himself here. He is just, they just had me for parts and they turned out to be defective.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: So poor thing. And, and Bobby, you know, plays the kind of mediator card and says, “have you talked to them about it?” And he’s like, “No. Like why would I talk to them about?”
Alice: Why would I talk to my parents?
Yeah.
Ellen: But, and they try, like, Hen tries to assure him that he matters too. And he’s like, “Not to them.” So then Chim picks this moment to arrive ’cause he wasn’t there previously and tries to speak to Buck privately and Buck’s like “No, they all heard, like just, they all know what’s going on.” And so then he, you know, Chim’s [00:20:00] apologizing for not telling him already and Buck’s like, “I get it. Maddie put you in a tough spot. She does that.” It’s like, oh Buck, you’re so mad at everybody.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Can I tell you my little head canon for this scene?
Ellen: Yeah,
Alice: of course.
Bex: So in my head. Buck comes storming into the firehouse, ranting and raving about what has just happened, what he’s just learned. Because he found out at some point, I don’t know how that Chimney had learned this story. That Maddie had told Chimney.
So he comes in assuming that everybody at the 118 already knows, because anything you tell Chimney, he will immediately tell everybody else.
Ellen: Oh,
Bex: but then he comes in and he’s ranting and raving and they’re all looking
Ellen: and no one knows
Bex: like, what the fuck are you? What are you talking about, Buck? And so suddenly he has to sit down and he has to explain it all to Bobby, Eddie and Hen.
Ellen: And then Hen goes, [00:21:00] “So that’s what he was keeping a secret.”
Alice: yes,
Bex: yes.
Ellen: And Buck’s like, “You mean Chim kept this a secret from everybody? Oh my God.”
Bex: And so that pisses Buck off even more because he well knows that Chimney cannot keep a secret. But this one secret that was so important to Buck, that was the one secret he kept.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Everything else goes through Chimney. But this one, this such, this important that turns the tide of Buck’s sort of knowledge about himself. That’s the one that he managed to keep a secret. So that’s why he’s even more pissed at Chim. ’cause he is like number one, Maddie told you before she told me, and two, you didn’t go blabbing it.
So I didn’t find out
Alice: oof.
Bex: That’s my headcanon for what the fuck was going on in this scene.
Ellen: I mean, that makes total sense to me.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: Poor Buck, poor Chim. I mean,
Bex: Poor buck.
Ellen: He tried. He did. He did what he was told for once.
Bex: For once.
Ellen: [00:22:00] Oh dear.
Bex: Uh, but yeah, so Chimney, as Buck is stalking away, tells him that Maddie really wants to talk. And then we get another flashback back to 2004, this time where Buck and Maddie are in a Jeep. They pull up in front of a house and baby Buck slash Evan says, “So what did you wanna talk about?” The segues are so subtle in this episode, but I do enjoy them. They are still quite clever.
Ellen: Yeah. Who wrote this one by the way? Do we, should, we should.
Bex: Juan Carlos Coto.
Ellen: Okay. That explains everything. Um, so they pull up and they’re a little older now. We’ve got, um. Maddie says that she heard that Evan got grounded again. “What did you do?” And apparently he tried out for the football team without actually having permission from mom and dad.
Maddie’s gonna tell him something really crazy, but [00:23:00] before she can, her phone rings and it’s Doug and she has to explain that she’s with Evan. And of course she’ll be home for dinner. And Evan’s like, “Why has he always gotta know where you are and what you’re doing?” It’s like, oh, he’s like, I don’t know, 14 years old or something. And he knows exactly what is going on here.
Alice: Mm-hmm.
Bex: Yep. Maddie’s tells, tells him that, um, it’s sweet that Doug always wants to know where she is. That means that he cares about her. And Evan’s like, “I don’t like him.”
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Good instincts. Young Bucky.
Alice: None of us do. None of us do.
Bex: None of us do. So he, he reminds Maddie, “Hey, you were gonna tell me something crazy?” I think we need to point out that it, the. They have pulled up in front of the Buckley’s old house.
Alice: Yeah. So the photo of Daniel that Buck found last episode was in front of their old house and Buck’s just like, “Oh, whose house is this?” And yeah, so then in the flashback, it’s that house.
Bex: And [00:24:00] so there’s like a question in my mind is the… Maddie then goes on to tell Buck that she’s moving to Boston, but there’s this moment that I wonder whether she was actually at this point going to tell Buck about Daniel.
Alice: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Bex: And then Doug distracted her
Alice: because she was like, well, I’m getting out, so this is the only time that I can tell him
Bex: Yes. Instead she says, “Doug’s going to medical school, so I’m going to go to Boston with him and I’m going to work so that he can go to medical school.”
Alice: Yeah,
Bex: I’m gonna do nursing school, study nights, work during the day, support my boyfriend.
Ellen: Ah, Maddie,
Bex: All Buck hears is that Maddie’s leaving him.
Alice: Yep. Maddie’s leaving him.
Ellen: But, but she, he does make her promise that, well, she says, “I’m just a phone call away whenever you need me.” And he makes her promise. They do their little pinky promise thing, which is really cute [00:25:00] every time they do it.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: Um, and I mean, these two actors, I mean, the casting in this episode’s fantastic. They really, it feels like Buck and Maddie, like
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: Even though they don’t look exactly the same, um, as their modern day ones, they, yeah. Excellent work acting people.
Bex: Yes, good job casting.
Ellen: Yes.
Bex: So in another wonderful little segue, Maddie says that. Buck can’t get rid of her that easy. We flash forward to the present where Buck is polishing up one of the trucks and Maddie is lurking behind his shoulder.
Alice: Maddie just shows up. Surprise
Ellen: in the reflection, like even
Bex: surprise motherfucker. But so she has resorted to showing up at the firehouse because Buck is not answering her calls. Or her texts or her carrier pigeons and the myriad other ways she’s trying to get in touch with him and she needs to make sure that he is okay.
Ellen: He attached to a Corgi and it came running Anyway. Um, [00:26:00] we’ve been over that one before. She wants to explain, but Buck is like, ” You’ve been keeping the secret for 29 years. Why is it now an emergency?”
Alice: Yeah,
Ellen: but because you won’t talk to me and you and like she’s worried about him basically, and because he’s working and he probably shouldn’t be, and he takes offense to this. He’s like, “You can’t take that away from me too.” ’cause remember that Buck doesn’t have any life outside work. Work is everything.
Bex: He’s so, he’s so harsh in this scene, but it’s like a truthful harsh, because he whips around and reminds Maddie that they were supposed to be a team. It was supposed to be him and Maddie against their parents.
Um, but now he’s discovered that it was his parents and Maddie against him. Mm. And now Maddie’s not here for Buck. She’s here to make herself feel better about herself. And on that absolute truth bomb, [00:27:00] the alarms start going off. Although, funnily enough, the alarms are going off at Station 51, which this isn’t Station 51.
This is Station 118, but they’re getting the alarm anyway. Uh, there is apparently a five alarm fire at an industrial complex, and so everybody jumps into the rigs and rolls out leaving Maddie alone in the engine bay.
Ellen: When I was watching this episode for the second time, I thought this whole fire business was at the end of the episode and I was so confused. I’m like, we’re only a few minutes in, like, why are we going to the fire already? But yeah, this, we do this part first and then we’ve got flow on things afterwards.
Alice: Yeah. Yeah.
Ellen: So they do roll up to a large industrial complex, which is quite severely on fire.
Bex: Mm-hmm.
Ellen: They’ve got a bunch of different houses there and trucks.
Um, but there’s a, Bobby explains everything as he, you know, as they get [00:28:00] out of the trucks that, um,
Bex: exposition captain.
Ellen: Yeah. Yep. Captain Mehta is, is the incident commander, so his, his show. The guy who’s the commander explains that it’s a hand sanitizer factory, which I think is hilarious considering we’re still in, in officially in pandemic times.
Alice: Yeah. I think they said that it was actually found this a perfume factory. Yeah.
Ellen: And it converted, yeah.
Bex: Actually a perfume factory converted to sanitizer, which I find incredibly realistic because I do remember we had a couple, I think we have a, a gin distillery down where I live. Yeah. Um, and obviously pandemic, nobody is going out and visiting bars and drinking. So they started making hand sanitizer.
Alice: Yep. A lot of places did it
Bex: just to keep afloat during the pandemic.
Ellen: Yeah. I mean if you’ve got the, the equipment to do it.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: Then good idea. Okay. So there are 32 workers inside, but they’ve only accounted for 20 and they, the sprinkler systems aren’t working, so this is what they’re heading [00:29:00] into hand sanitizer that is highly flammable. So, they have no idea where anything’s stored.
Bex: No, because when they converted to hand sanitizer, they didn’t update the city with all of their sort of
Ellen: hazard storage plans, I guess.
Bex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Captain Mehta, who I find it very interesting that he gets introduced in this episode and has such a big role in this episode.
He tells Bobby that it’s basically a minefield in there and then we cut to Bobby relaying this information to the 118 and continuing the thought. So Mehta says “it’s a minefield out there,” Bobby says, “and a large one.”
Alice: Yeah, they do. Like, the cuts are very, ’cause there’s a lot to go through this episode. So the cuts are very quick.
Bex: In case you weren’t listening to Mehta closely enough, or you can’t do the math. Bobby reminds us there are 12 workers unaccounted for, he and Eddie are gonna be joining the 1 33 [00:30:00] going to the Charlie side. Hen, Buck and Chim are going to be working with two firefighters from the 1 41, which is Scott and Lorenzo, I believe.
Um, they’re going in on the alpha side. While everybody is listening to Bobby, buck is in the background dissociating.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Like his head is not in the game at all and nobody except Chim seems to notice.
Alice: Sure. It’ll be fine. It’s not like he just had, you know, big secret revealed about his family. It’s
Bex: like 100, 100% this is supporting Maddie’s argument that he should not be working right now.
Alice: He absolutely should not be working.
Ellen: And he said, like Chim even says to him like, you know, says hey to him and Buck’s just like, “Not now, Chim.” It’s like, no, he’s not about to have like a big conversation with you, but. Anyway, Chim’s like, “You know, you can’t run away from this forever.”
Oh, he might. And Buck’s like, “Sure I can. It’s the Buckley family way.” It’s like, damn Buck.
Alice: Yeah. Oof.
Bex: Harsh but true this episode,
Ellen: You’re not [00:31:00] incorrect.
Bex: To kind of emphasize that running away is the Buckley family way. Uh, we are gonna flash, we’re gonna go back to 2004 back, and Mattie have returned home from wherever it was that they previously lived.
It can’t be that far if they’ve managed to drive there and back to Hershey. And no sooner do they pull up in the driveway, then the parents come racing out into the, uh, the front yard to confront Maddie because while they were driving, um, I don’t know why he did it. Actually, I do know why he did it.
’cause he is an asshole. Um, Doug has called Maddie’s parents to inform them that she’s going to be moving to Boston with him.
Alice: Yeah, she, he just called the,
Ellen: fuck you Duck, duck, Doug.
Bex: Oh, it’s better than every time I was typing his name. I always kept typing “dough” for some reason
Ellen: Dough
Bex: adding that extra h in.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Um, [00:32:00] Maddie is absolutely horrified that Doug has done this, um, Buck’s trying to be supportive and says to his parents that “You should congratulate Maddie ’cause she’s going to nursing school.” Margaret turns around and says, “Oh, don’t be stupid Evan,” and you can just see him.
Ellen: She’s a bitch,
Bex: like it’s deflating and then inflating with anger at the same time as only like a, a teenager can.
Ellen: Mm-hmm.
Bex: And so he stalks off, grabs his bike from the garage and runs away. Well, rides away. Cycles away.
Ellen: Yeah. He cycles away. He’s so angry. He’s like crying and mom’s asking, “Why would you agree to go with him?” And Maddie’s like, “Because I love him!”
Bex: Oh, Maddie.
Ellen: It’s all, yeah, happening. Anyway, we get Evan morphing into a more present-day version of him [00:33:00] as played by Oliver
Bex: Oliver Stark.
It’s a really good transition because we go from like Baby Evan cycling his little heart out on his little push bike, slapping at the handlebars, and then all of a sudden the handlebars that are his slapping are the handlebars of a bike.
Ellen: A motorbike,
Alice: A motorbike,
Bex: a mo, a motorbike. But he’s still angry.
Alice: Yeah, he’s still angry.
Bex: We’ve jumped, we’ve, we’ve jumped forward like seven or eight years. He’s upgraded the technology, but he’s still angry.
Ellen: He’s so angry that he is doing wheelies down the street.
Bex: Angry wheelies.
Alice: Angry wheelies.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: But he’s not paying attention to where he is going and he is going way too fast. And when a car backs out into the street, um, the screen goes black and we get like generic brake, squealing, glass shattering, uh, body hitting metal thumping sounds to indicate that, you know, it’s [00:34:00] motorbike versus vehicle.
Ellen: An accident, yes. Yeah, but we don’t see what happens. I mean, obviously he survives, but we don’t see what happens.
Alice: Yeah. God, I really hope he doesn’t die,
Ellen: and we go back to the factory fire in the present.
Bex: We do.
Ellen: Buck is charging in, uh, with a saw so he can open the door and there’s,
Alice: so he can saw shit
Ellen: a lot of fire inside there. Um, they’re all shouting, you know, trying to work out where to go.
Bex: There’s massive drums that have marked glycerin that have like the big flammable stickers on them. The um, the hand sanitizer, you know those big like metal cans that you get oil in at the supermarket?
Alice: Yeah,
Ellen: yeah.
Bex: There’s like shelves of those kind of metal canisters with hand sanitizer slapped on them. I’m like, who is selling hand sanitizer and like those big metal canisters? I don’t understand. But Hen appears to have taken point and [00:35:00] once they get the doors open and they get the fire knocked down, she sends Chim and Hen in to sort of do recon.
They split up, they go couple of meters in and then report back. Chimney’s way is, uh, no good. Buck’s way, he says he wouldn’t call it clear, but it’s clear enough for them to keep moving. So they head in in Buck’s direction and it turns out to be the correct direction because they find or Buck finds a door that someone has stuffed towels under the, um, the gap under the door to keep smoke out.
So they’re pretty sure that there are gonna be the survivors that they’re looking for. At least some of them will probably be behind that door. And they’re correct. While they’re getting them out, Bobby radios in that he’s found seven people, so they’ve now got five more people to find.
I think I wasn’t counting at this point, but I think they found four, three or four people in that room.
Ellen: How did they get all the way down to [00:36:00] one? Because at some point they like Buck does the maths and works out that there’s one person still missing. That must be later they find some more people. Oh, here we go.
It’s later when, yeah, later. He says, one team found seven victims and others found four, which there’s still someone in here. Okay. That’s, yeah.
Bex: So Bobby found seven. They found four. They’ve still got one guy to go. So, um, but Bobby also reports that he and Eddie have been separated from two of the team that they were with.
So he’s sending somebody back out. Buck says to Hen, “You hear that? They need help.” So he goes off with Hen’s blessing to go and give Bobby some help with Chim yelling after him, “Be careful!”
Ellen: Yeah, right. This is Buck, this is like angry Buck. He’s not gonna be careful. So, and in this scene, there’s a lot of cutting [00:37:00] back and forward to the past and to the present,
Bex: thankfully. Thankfully, um, they do caption all of this.
Ellen: Yeah. And it’s fairly obvious what’s happening anyway, because it’s either in a hospital or in a building that’s on fire. So
Bex: Yes,
Ellen: either way it’s, the flashbacks are pretty obvious.
Bex: Um, so we are flashing back to a hospital in 2012 where a nurse is approaching the nurse’s station. There is a, a male nurse standing behind said desk who gets their attention by saying, “Oh, Maddie.” And we realize that the nurse that we’ve been following is Maddie. She finished nursing school, she graduated, she’s now working at a nurse. The other nurse tells her that there is some kid in exam room three that insists on seeing her.
He says that Maddie pinky sweared. Nurse doesn’t know what that [00:38:00] means, but he won’t leave.
Ellen: But we know who that is.
Alice: We know who it is!
Bex: Well at the mention of pinky swearing, Maddie knows immediately who that is and she goes racing, um, to exam room three and pulls aside a curtain and it’s buck,
Alice: it’s baby Buck.
Bex: And I don’t know exactly what they have done. They’ve definitely like brushed his hair down and forward.
Alice: Oh, he’s got the curls. Like this is the first time I was like, oh my God. He has curls,
Bex: but they’re flat curls.
Alice: So cute.
Bex: And I don’t know whether they’ve applied the makeup on him or they’ve turned the lighting up or whatever, but they are very much trying to give this his 21-year-old Buck and I am buying it every single second.
Ellen: Oh, his eyes look huge, he’s just a baby,
Alice: he’s so cute, he’s got this like,
Bex: oh, like at this point Oliver is still like in his thirties, but I would totally buy that he is only 21.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: He’s not in… oh, he would’ve just, yeah. Turned, what year are we in? 2021?
Bex: Yeah. [00:39:00] He would’ve
Alice: just turned 30,
Bex: just gone thirty. But he is not 21 anymore.
But I’m still still buying that. He’s, that he’s 21 just by dint of what they’ve done to his hair, what they’ve done with his makeup and the fact that Oliver has got like ultra blue eyes in this scene and he’s keeping them very, very wide.
Ellen: Yeah. Aw.
Alice: The widest eyes ever.
Bex: Yeah. But he’s come running to Maddie because, uh, he crashed his motorbike and he needs her help.
Ellen: He can’t go home.
Bex: He’s fine, like physically. Yeah. ’cause he got kicked outta school again.
Ellen: Aw.
Bex: Because he used the tuition money to modify said bike, which is probably now a write off. And also to bankroll some keggers.
Alice: Because, you know, what else do you do?
Ellen: Nice work Evan.
Bex: And he wants to go stay with Maddie. And Maddie immediately freaks out.
Ellen: Yeah. Poor Buck, he [00:40:00] just, uh, he doesn’t understand why, like, obviously he doesn’t know about Doug, but Maddie can’t have him at home, but he thinks that she’s just, you know, rejecting him.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Yeah. What’s really interesting is that throughout this entire scene, we’ve had a very tight shot of Maddie’s face, and after Buck says, paraphrasing, like, can I come stay with you and Maddie hesitates, and Buck says, “Oh, it’s because of Doug. Doug hates me.” We get a slightly wider shot and we can see that the hand that Maddie is using to hold a clipboard is in a very thick, very heavy brace.
Alice: Hmm.
Bex: And so we as the audience realize, oh shit. It’s not that Doug hates Buck, it’s that whatever abuse was going on previously has now turned physical.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: And he’s literally hurting Maddie. And Maddie does not want Buck in that house to witness [00:41:00] that possibly, also so that Doug won’t hurt Buck as well.
Ellen: Poor Maddie.
Alice: Poor Maddie. Poor Buck.
Bex: Maddie’s trying to explain that, you know, being married, it’s complicated. Um, and so their, their household situation is complicated and Evan, Buck says, “Well, try being at home. It got so much worse since you left. Mom and Dad think I’m a total loser and I’m not.” He’s like reassuring Maddie, like, “I’m not a loser. I am gonna be something. I just don’t know what that something is yet.”
Alice: His eyes are so big. My little baby Buckley,
Bex: Maddie promises him that they are going to figure out something.
Alice: Poor baby.
Ellen: Yeah,
Bex: it’s so sad. It’s like the way he says, he tells Maddie the way that his parents look at him. They look through him. Like, no one, no one should live like that.
Ellen: Aw, all right, we’re [00:42:00] gonna jump back to the fire. And Buck is he’s, he’s still trying to get to Bobby, but before he can get very far, there’s like a big explosion and the someone over the radio says that the last explosion took out most of the supports.
So the structural integrity is not good. But, um, so Mehta says that “Everyone needs to evacuate. Full evacuation, everyone out.” So this is where Buck says, over the radio, “One team found seven victims, others got four. That means there’s one person still in here somewhere.” And the commander guy is like, “Yes, we’re aware of that, but it’s too unstable. You need to leave.” And Buck’s like, okay, alright, fine, I’ll get out. But he just turns around and runs right back in.
Alice: He just says, “On the move,” and it’s like, yeah, okay.
Bex: But it’s like he, he, [00:43:00] he tells Mehta he copies and then you see him for a moment, he’s looking at the exit sign and then he looks at the fire behind him and then he looks at the exit sign.
He looks at the fire behind him. And then when Mehta’s like obviously understanding that Buck is not immediately complying with his order, says, “Evacuate the building. Now that’s an order,” Buck immediately turns and runs back into the fire.
Alice: Yep.
Ellen: Of course he does.
Bex: It’s very much like you are not Bobby. I don’t have to listen to what you say. Oh,
Alice: You’re not my real dad.
Bex: Yeah, exactly.
Alice: Oh dear.
Bex: And it’s in one of these very, very subtle but very clever segues, we get back, turning and running back into the fire. And then when we, um, come back from commercial, Margaret is calling him reckless and saying that he does dangerous things without giving them a second thought. She is referring to the motorbike, but it’s just so [00:44:00] fitting that that’s what she’s saying as soon as Buck is like turned and run back into the fire.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: And I do have to note that like all through this part, I’ve got like Buffy the Vampire Slayers, like one time “Once More With Feeling” just playing in my head with Buffy singing about going back into the fire. Oh, my head is a funny place sometimes.
Ellen: Uh, so there, there should basically mom and dad are shouting at him for being reckless and doing stupid things and “why were you even in that part of town? Why weren’t you in class?” I’m like, wasn’t he just riding down the street that their house was on?
Bex: I’m pretty sure he was riding down the street. ’cause that looked like the same intersection that he was like riding his push bike down when he was like a kid.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: It could just be that, that’s just where they filmed. They like, they had permission to close that street and they went, well, we need a couple of, um, scenes like with, uh, Oliver on a bike, so let’s just do it on this street while we’ve got permission.
Alice: Yeah. Just while we’re here.
Ellen: Yeah. [00:45:00] Anyway, basically they found out that he’s out of school again and, um, but before he has to explain himself, uh, Maddie shows up and
Bex: saved by the older sister.
Ellen: Yeah. Like, she doesn’t come in or anything, so I’m guessing this is after the part where the parents have cut her off so she doesn’t even wanna see them, but he just runs out to the car and off they go. So they, they can’t have gone too far because Buck is in the middle of telling her that the timing was kind of awesome, that, that they were just asking him about school and stuff
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: But Maddie stops the car in the middle of the street.
Alice: Is Maddie back from Boston then? She must be.
Ellen: She’s back in town.
Bex: Yeah, she’s in hospital. That hospital that she’s working is Hershey.
Alice: Oof. So she’s really that close. Yeah, far out.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah. So she gets out [00:46:00] of the car and she tells Evan to get out and then she gives him the keys to the Jeep and um, you know, tells him that this is your, your way out of here.
And he’s like, “You’re giving me the Jeep?” I’m like, oh, is this the same Jeep that he has later? I guess.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Yes. Oh, so do you remember um, when Eddie bought that brand new car with his like fight club money?
Alice: Yes.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: And we were talking about um, like car sponsorship ’cause that was quite clearly 9-1-1 brought to you by General Motors and we were saying that Buck was never going to get a car upgrade? This was why, because the Jeep that he was driving was the Jeep that Maddie gave him.
Ellen: Aw.
Bex: Uh, so he thinks it’s amazing that she’s giving him the Jeep, but he has no idea where he is going to go. Maddie says it doesn’t matter. The point is for him to go as far away as he can and to be happy and he’s looking a little suspicious at this [00:47:00] point and says, ” ’cause you know that’s what you did?”
She’s like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what I did.”
Ellen: Yeah, that’s totally what happened.
Bex: Yeah. Yeah, totally. What I did, um, Buck sees right through her. I was like, come on Maddie, you don’t have to pretend. I know things aren’t good with Doug.
Ellen: He’s so perceptive.
Bex: Doesn’t know the full
Ellen: sometimes.
Bex: He’s so perceptive. No, but he’s perceptive. He just didn’t have the full information. He knew something was up with Doug. Maddie just didn’t let him know exactly what was going on. But when she tries to deny that anything’s wrong, Buck says, “Why don’t you come with me? No more dad, no more mom, no more Doug. Just you and me against the world.” And when Maddie sort of says, “well, where are we even gonna go?”
And Buck says, “it doesn’t matter. The point is just to go,”
Alice: yep, “I did just say that, didn’t I?”
Bex: But it’s so tempting and, and eventually she says, yes. She makes a [00:48:00] decision. “Yes, yes. I will go with you. Let’s get the hell out of here together.”
Ellen: Oh.
Bex: But back in the present, Buck is in fact not getting the hell out of there. He is getting further the hell in there because he’s gone further into the fire to find that one person that
Alice: The fire Yeah, the fire.
Bex: Yeah. Yeah, if they’re not gonna put the segues in, I’m gonna put them in myself.
Ellen: Uh, but he is, he, he’s shouting and like looking for people and he hears someone hitting some metal and, um, he finds a guy,
Alice: uh, he does find a guy.
Ellen: He finds a guy and it turns out to be, uh, Samba Schutte, I don’t know if that’s how you pronounce his name, but Yes.
He’s, he’s from, um, Our Flag Means Death. I didn’t realize it was him because he is got a mask on
Alice: because he’s wearing a mask.
Ellen: But later I’m like, his voice sounds really familiar. And um, and it wasn’t till the second time I watched it and I saw his name actually come up in the credits at the beginning. You know how [00:49:00] they have the guest stars sometimes in the
Bex: mm-hmm.
Ellen: In the, in the titles. So in my, ah,
Bex: the actor’s name is Samba, or the character in our flag means death is Samba?
Ellen: No. The character… oh my God. Now you’re gonna, it’s been so long since I watched any of it. Uh, I’m gonna totally gonna look it up.
Bex: I never watched it.
Alice: I haven’t watched the second season.
Ellen: You should watch it,
Alice: to be fair.
Ellen: Yeah. Look,
Bex: I have a thing about Australian and New Zealand accents in television shows. Irony. Yes. But I can’t do it.
Ellen: It’s, it’s very silly. It’s extremely silly, but, so good. So good. Um, his character’s name is Roach.
Bex: Okay.
Ellen: Um, and he is just very funny. But, um, yeah, in, so this, this was before… Our Flag Means Death came out after, let me see. Like it started in 2022.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah, 2022 was when it came out. [00:50:00] So I guess around the same time probably when this was, um, shooting then, or just, just after. So yeah, he, he’s like slightly funny in this, in this episode. Um, because he is an actual comedian. Yeah,
Bex: he’s very funny considering the situation that he’s in.
Alice: He’s so, yeah. It’s great.
Ellen: Yes,
Bex: because, um, buck asks him if he’s hurt and he says, “no, I’m, I’m lost, not hurt, I’m lost. There’s too much smoke.” Um, Buck reassures him that it’s okay and he’s gonna get him out. He asks the man if he can breathe and the man points at the, like the N95 respirator he’s wearing and going, “This is helping. The fire’s not though,” Sir, really
Ellen: so Buck kind looks around, but there’s just fire all around them. And
Bex: yeah, every way that he goes, he gets blocked by fire. Yeah, he’s, he’s lost, which is what the man says. He goes, [00:51:00] “Oh, so we’re both lost now.”
Ellen: Yeah. Yeah. So another quick jump back again to 2012, and this is obviously the next morning or something, the next day. And, uh, Evan arrives at the hospital, but Omar sort of grabs him as he goes past, which is the nurse that’s Maddie’s workmate.
And, um, he goes, “Evan, Evan.” And Evan says, “oh, have you seen Maddie? I was supposed to pick her up, but she’s not here. She’s not answering her phone.” And Omar just hands him a note and says
“She left this for you,” and she left him a letter to tell him that she can’t leave with him.
Alice: Yeah. Yeah. So, once again, Buck’s feeling abandoned.
Bex: Abandoned.
Alice: Um, yeah. So the, the note from Maddie says, “Dear Evan, I’m sorry to tell you this way, but I can’t leave with you for one crazy minute. I really thought I could do [00:52:00] it. But then reality set in and I realized that my life is here, but yours isn’t. It’s still ahead of you, and I want you to find it.
Find the thing that makes you happy, the people that make you feel loved. This is your time now, Evan, go find your place in the world and never look back.”
Bex: I’m pretty sure Buck stopped reading at the, my Life is Here, but Your Isn’t Line.
Alice: Yeah. Um, and yeah, he, he’s,
Bex: he’s read that and just gone, oh yeah. So I, I, she doesn’t want me either.
Yeah. Like, my parents don’t want me. Maddie doesn’t want me either. And that explains the, he like literally crumples the note. Tosses it in the bin and storms out of the ward. Scaring one of the guys, one of scaring, one of the extras who’s sitting in the opposite room.
Ellen: Yeah, that looked like a really natural reaction actually, when he barged through the doors, he’s like, oh.
Bex: Because he literally like pushes the doors open, the, the little venetian blinds on the window starts swinging. I’m sure that they told this extra look I just, we just need you to [00:53:00] sit in this chair, pretend that you’re waiting. Um, and the extra sort of sitting there going like, this door’s here. No one’s even gonna see me. I’m not gonna get, oh shit, there’s an actor! Wait, where’s he going?
Ellen: But back in the present, he’s still trying to get outta the factory. Uh, they see an exterior wall and they hope that it’s equipped with a door. Good job, Roach. Um, the fire flares up and they see like a gantry thing that they, they’re gonna have to climb and walk across to get to a door, um, or at least to get to the wall.
And Buck says, “oh, do you? We’re gonna have to walk here. Do you think you can make it?” And Saleh, who’s the, the name of the guy says, “I would like nothing more than to make it.” it’s like, all right, let’s do it. But
Alice: he is doing his best.
Ellen: There are more explosions as they’re, as they’re going over it and they go flying [00:54:00] basically.
Bex: Yes. ’cause apparently the explosions, which is just, you know, the sanitizer and the glycerin, um, igniting is enough to rip the catwalk, gantry clean in half, um, and send Buck flying into the side of a giant metal vat to the point that you can hear metal or metal ringing as he like his head or his mask makes impact and. He goes dropping into the commercial break.
Ellen: Ouch.
Bex: We come back to commercial back in 2012, back at Maddie’s hospital. Um, I think this is like my favorite sequence from this episode.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: Oh, this is great. Yeah.
Bex: Cause Maddie
Ellen: It’s adorable!
Bex: Comes… What?
Ellen: It’s adorable.
Bex: Did you say it’s horrible? It’s adorable. I thought you said it’s horrible.
Ellen: It’s horrible. Yeah.
Bex: All I heard was the bull sound. I’m like, what?
Ellen: No, adorable.
Alice: Ellen’s like, fuck, baby Buck.
Bex: Uh, so Maddie [00:55:00] comes to the nurse’s station and Omar tells her that, um, the mail room sent up like a bunch of mail, including a postcard that’s from her brother, and it’s a postcard from Georgia with the catchphrase Welcome to Adventure on the front. Um, so she flips it over, um, and starts reading and we get Buck doing the voiceover of what he’s written on the back of the postcard.
Although it’s not what he has written, it’s what somebody in props has written because it’s actually legible.
Ellen: Yeah, the handwriting is so neat.
Bex: They have not let Oliver anywhere near these postcards. It’s
Alice: not after the, um, whatever the fuck the graduation thing was.
Bex: Um, so the first postcard, um, Buck says that he’s done being mad at Maddie mostly. Uh, he’s been bouncing up and down the East coast picking up some odd jobs. He hasn’t found his place yet, which I retract my earlier statement that he stopped reading after [00:56:00] Maddie told him,
Alice: oh, there you go. Yeah.
Bex: That his place wasn’t with her because she does go on in that letter to say that she hopes he finds his place somewhere.
So he’s telling her he hasn’t found his place yet. Um, but he’s met some cool people, but he misses her and he’s sending the, the postcards to the hospital because he doesn’t trust Doug, not to toss them in the trash. Um, and then finishes the postcard with, have you left him yet?
Ellen: So, and Maddie’s face as she’s reading this and as the voiceover does this like face journey where she’s like, she’s like really fond and then she’s really, you know, worried and then she’s like, gets to the end and she’s like, oh no, I haven’t left him yet. Like, whatever.
Bex: And we do see that when she slips the postcard into her pocket, um, there are scratches on the back of her hand. So no, she definitely hasn’t left Doug. And things are not getting any better.
Ellen: Hmm.
Bex: But the, the needle drop for this whole sort of montage scene, [00:57:00] um, is this song called “One of These Things First” by Nick Drake.
And when I looked up to find out what the lyrics were, genius lyrics tells me that the song is a, is a desperate song about what dreams the singer could have been. He had the potential for so many things, but realized none of them, he dreams of being capable, but he doesn’t know how.
Alice: Oh,
Bex: and if that’s not the perfect song to encapsulate Buck in this moment, I don’t know what is.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: After Georgia, Maddie gets a postcard from Virginia Beach and Buck tells her that he’s finished bartending school and he is the coolest mixologist in Virginia Beach. And he met a girl who likes to surf. So he started learning to surf and he really likes the ocean. Maybe it’s ’cause he never got to see it as a kid.
Alice: Um, when he is out there, it just feels like there’s nothing but possibility. It’s like, oh.
Bex: But then the next update is from Florida saying, uh, yeah, that thing with a girl didn’t [00:58:00] work out, so he stopped surfing.
Alice: The thing with the girl seriously did not work out. So I don’t know what happened there. But, um,
Bex: but he’s working construction now. Um, and this postcard comes with a photo of buck in a high vis vest with a safety helmet standing by a pile of plum.
Ellen: Aw, that’s really cute.
Bex: Because he is working, because he is working with guys who frame houses. Um, and so he’s just bopping around Florida following the work.
Ellen: Yeah. And he got someone to take a photo of him at work.
Bex: Yes.
Alice: Someone take a photo of me for my sister.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Yes. But then it’s cute because he’s written this on a postcard, but then he is put the postcard and a photo in an envelope to post,
Ellen: uh, he ends up in Flagstaff, Arizona, and then he got to California. So I don’t know why he is telling her about California when the postcard is from Arizona, but Okay.
Um, we got to, he, when he got to California, he wanted to try and become a Navy [00:59:00] seal, which we have heard about before. Um, and you don’t have to enlist. And she like, he likes the ocean. “I mean, these, these are the guys who got Bin Laden, the baddest of bad asses, right? Who ya?”
Alice: Um, and then the next postcard, Omar’s reading it because,
Bex: oh, I love this.
Alice: And he just, like, Maddie walks in and Omar just looks up from the postcard and he goes, “He quit the seals.” And Maddie’s like, “Are you supposed to be reading those?” And he goes, “I’m living vicariously. And he sent another pic. Is he gonna be an Indian next? ’cause I feel like he’s working his way through the Village People.”
And it’s the cutest photo ever because Buck sitting on the bonnet, which is hood for Americans, um, of the Jeep holding a lasso and wearing a cowboy hat.
Ellen: Oh yeah. He’s working on a dude ranch.
Alice: He’s working on a dude ranch.
Bex: He got all the way out to big sky [01:00:00] country.
Alice: Yeah, he’s in Montana.
Ellen: It’s so cute.
Alice: Um, oh, it’s so cute.
Bex: And I mean, Omar’s not wrong because he’s been a construction worker and a cowboy. Um, if you count the seals, then, I mean, the original village people was a, it was kind of army. So if we just go like generic military, that’s like three of them. Um,
Ellen: the only one that’s left, he’s been a biker.
Bex: If you, he was a biker because he had a motorbike, so he was on a bike.
If you count LAFD, then as like, just like first responder, that kind of correlates to the cop. Um. I mean, yeah, he’s, he’s like, he’s five outta six. Yeah. He’s getting there and nobody’s gonna do the Native American anymore because, you know, that’s just racist.
Um, I did not realize that the village people were meant to be like [01:01:00] gay sexual fantasy archetypes. I found that out today.
Ellen: Were they, were they meant to be or did they just become that through
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: Like culture?
Bex: Nope, they were put together because, because the biker was like a leather daddy. He was always intended to be a leather daddy, and they recruited from the gay district.
Alice: Okay. Beautiful.
Ellen: Brilliant.
Alice: Excellent.
Bex: Anyway, so, uh, Cowboy Buck, uh, working on a dude ranch, um, misses the ocean to the point where Maddie’s, the next postcard Maddie receives is from Pacific City, Oregon. And Buck telling her that he made it back to the ocean. But it’s too cold in Oregon. So he’s thinking of checking out Peru.
Alice: And Maddie’s just like, why Peru?
Bex: And then Buck answers the question that he didn’t realize that his sister was gonna be asking. Uh, because one of his ranch hand buddies tends a bar down in Peru. So he is going to use his mixology teachings, um, and become a bartender again.
Alice: [01:02:00] Yeah. Mm-hmm. Um, whereas like, funny how life comes full circle and Maddie’s like “More like going in circles.”
It’s like, ah,
Ellen: I mean, she’s not wrong. She’s got a big pile of postcards there. Yeah. Does feel like he’s going round.
Bex: Yeah. We didn’t mention, but every time we cut to Maddie reading a postcard of bucks, there is something else wrong with her. There is a a different bruise. A different mark. More evidence that Doug has been abusing her.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah. So there’s like a, a dark side to this humorous montage.
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: But then we get possibly the best, uh, part of this whole thing, which is we cut to what Buck is getting up to in Peru.
Bex: We don’t get a postcard from Peru. We get Buck in Peru.
Ellen: We get in Peru. He looks so good.
Bex: And oh my god.
Ellen: He looks like he’s having the time of his life.
Bex: He looks like Malibu Ken. [01:03:00]
Alice: He looks like Malibu Ken.
Bex: He’s got the frosted tips. I don’t know what the fuck they’ve done with his hair. He is got like a pooka shell necklace and a Hawaiian shirt. They’ve slapped the fake tan on him.
Alice: His job is cocktail.
Bex: Yes.
Alice: Oh my little like, oh my God. So good. They had, the costume department had way too much fun with this.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: Um, but they’re watch, he’s watching some firefighters on the tv.
Bex: He’s watching Backdraft in Spanish.
Ellen: Yeah. Okay.
Alice: So yeah, big firefighter movie happening in the background in Spanish. Um, I just gotta say as well, so obviously like he’s been on a dude ranch, he’s been like, you know, going up and down the coast in his Jeep. I’m just real sad for him that he didn’t get to fuck his way through all the boys that he [01:04:00] met because like,
Bex: how do you know he didn’t fuck his way through all the boys?
Alice: If he didn’t, I’m very sad for him. Hopefully he did.
Bex: I’m sure there were many, many, a confusing encounter through all of his, through all of his adventures, especially on the dude ranch,
Alice: right?
Bex: Got himself a little Brokeback Mountain action going on there. But he, he’s not to this day quite sure what happened or what it all means.
Alice: It was, it was totally normal. It was just, dude bros.
Ellen: It’s, it’s totally straight when you’re in the dude ranch.
In
Alice: the same sleeping bag. Yeah, it’s fine. Yeah, they said it was normal. It’s fine.
Ellen: Bless a dude comes to the bar. Speaking of dudes. Um,
Alice: yeah, Connor
Ellen: Orders another beer. Connor,
Alice: uh, sorry. I believe this is the friend that he was on the dude ranch with.
Bex: I think so, yeah.
Ellen: Do they actually say his name at any stage? Or is this [01:05:00] just,
Bex: um,
Ellen: are we allowed to refer, refer to him by name?
Bex: I’m ref. Hmm.
Alice: Do we? Yeah,
Bex: we do. Like Alice and I do.
Alice: We do, yeah.
Ellen: Oh, we see him again sometime.
Bex: Yes. Because 9-1-1 love to recycle characters. Okay. Yeah. So, yes. Um, I did include his name in this because I knew who he was. Um. But technically, no, we can’t because we never actually find out his name.
Ellen: He’s just a guy. Um,
Bex: he’s just a guy.
Ellen: He,
Alice: he’s just Connor.
Ellen: He’s, he says
Alice: he’s just beach.
Ellen: Yeah, beach. He’s just beer.
Bex: His job is beer,
Ellen: he’s just beer.
Alice: His job is beach.
Ellen: He asks, tells Buck that. It’s like, it’s cool. So cool that it comes from Hershey because that’s where chocolate was invented, man.
Bex: And then Buck, well actually is him. Yeah. “Well actually chocolate was [01:06:00] invented down here in ancient Mexico.” um, but
Alice: Connor’s, like, ” I don’t care.”
Bex: Connor sees a pretty girl and he’s just like, his attention is on boobs and ass and he is no longer listening to anything Buck is saying.
Ellen: Yeah. Now his job is ogling.
Bex: Interestingly, Buck was not ogling, Buck was too interested in his like weird facts. Yeah. Um.
Ellen: Yeah,
Alice: hashtag adhd.
Bex: Um, so Connor says to Buck, “You should come to LA with us. We’ve got this bitching craftsman in Arcadia.” Um, and the camera sort of pans over to this bunch of guys over at the table laughing, having a good time. Um, and Buck asks like, “Do you guys all live together?”
And Connor’s like, “Yeah, it’s kind of like a family. You go, we go, like the movie,” which it’s a movie reference and Buck does not get it because we have canonically established that the Buckley’s [01:07:00] were deprived of popular culture and don’t know anything.
Alice: Honestly, I’m pretty sure the Buckleys just didn’t have a tv.
Ellen: Maybe. Yeah.
Alice: Which is why he kept going out and hurting himself ’cause he was so bored.
Bex: But it turns out that the movie that Connor is referencing is Backdraft because he points at the TV behind Buck and. Buck turns around just in time for the characters on TV to say, albeit in Spanish ’cause it’s dubbed. Um, “you go, I go.” and so Buck turns back and goes, “So tell me about LA,” which then brings me to the question, are these the frat boys that Buck was living in with in season one before he moves in with Abby?
Alice: I choose to believe yes.
Ellen: Could have been. Although this, that was a number of years later. Like
Bex: not that many.
Ellen: What year is this? 2015? Yeah. No. So yeah. Yeah. It would’ve been only a few years later.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: Talk about coming full circle. [01:08:00]
Bex: Coming full circle. Everything’s making sense now.
Ellen: Mm.
Bex: Um,
Ellen: we’re connecting the dots!
Bex: So We are, and it’s not just with red string in one of those weird, like, serial killer murder boards. Um. So in a very subtle segue, Buck says, “uh, so tell us about LA.” And then when we cut to him and the factory fire, it’s a closeup of an unconscious buck focused on the Los Angeles written across the front of his helmet.
And it’s such a, um, in typical Buck style. He, he’s had his, like, he’s had his bells rung from being yeeted into the, the large metal vat. So he is a little bit disorientated. He’s sort of very slow to sort of wake up. But as soon as he sees Saleh, he immediately, full attention, full focus. He’s up and ready to go. ’cause somebody needs him.
Ellen: Yeah. And poor Saleh, he’s like, “Thank you for attempting to save me. [01:09:00] It appears this vat had a different plan,” and the vat has fallen on him and onto his legs basically, and he can’t get out of it. Buck tries to move it, but it’s not moving. And then he is like, “it’s also very heavy.”
Like I don’t, I don’t know if this like, if he was always meant to be such a dry character, that was unintentionally hilarious, but it’s just turned out really funny in such a heavy episode. Um,
Alice: yeah.
Bex: Yeah. Uh, so yes, the vet is very heavy because Buck can’t lift it by himself. He tries wedging his fire acts under as to get a little bit leverage that’s not working.
Um, he tells Saleh that he will, he will get Saleh out of there. Um, and Saleh just says, “Well, you’re gonna have to hurry because the fire is getting closer.” Meanwhile, the rest of the 118 having followed orders, have evacuated the building and got their, um, [01:10:00] various, uh, patients handed off, and Chim is doing a headcount and he realizes that Buck is not with Bobby.
Ellen: Oh. He’s like, what the fuck has he done now?
Bex: So ask Bobby, where’s Buck? And Bobby is like, he, “I sent him in there with you. I could be asking you the same question.” And Hen’s like, “We sent him to you.” It’s, it’s like, who had their eyes on the baby? Nobody had their eyes on the baby. And now the baby is gone.
Alice: Which, which one have you had Buck as your buddy? Which one come up,
Ellen: Eddie. Eddie, what you done with him?
Bex: Wasn’t Eddie’s fault this time. Um,
Alice: this time,
Bex: In perfect timing, Buck comes over the radio, uh, a radio over to the incident commander. Um, and the incident commander is just like, “Buckley, did you ignore my direct order to evacuate?”
And Bobby’s like, “Yeah, he does that sometimes”.
Alice: Yeah, it’s just like, yep.
Bex: And that’s not me paraphrasing. That is literally how, that is literally the line. And that’s [01:11:00] literally how Peter Krause says it. Like, yeah, he does that sometimes.
Alice: He does that sometimes.
Bex: So. Buck reports in that he’s found the last victim. Um, but he’s pretty much, he’s stuck and he could like really use some sprinklers, really use some water backup. But they don’t have the sprinklers online yet. So the incident commander deploys a, um, I think a hose team. He calls ’em Rick team. Uh, there’s a bunch of guys with a hose suddenly go running off in the direction, in a direction, and reassures Buck that a rescue team is coming, he tells Buck to stay still.
And Buck’s like, yeah, I’m, I’m not going anywhere. And just at that moment there is a massive explosion with like huge fireballs coming outta pretty much every open space that there is in the factory.
Ellen: Yeah. And everyone’s aghast. We get, we do get, flashback now. Um, just in case we [01:12:00] wanted to find out what happened to Buck, we can’t know yet because we have to have a flashback first.
Yes. Um, they love doing that. Uh, so, okay, so this is a, a flashback to something that we’ve seen before. Amazingly
Bex: slightly extended version of it, but yes.
Ellen: Yeah. So Buck turns up at the 118 firehouse and he’s writing like we get the voiceover as he is walking in, um, because he is writing another postcard apparently.
“California is amazing. I think you’d like it here. It’s a hard place to feel sad. Maybe it’s all the sunshine.” That’s a nice thought. Um, “today’s my first day as a probationary firefighter, so wish me luck.” and then as he walks in, um, we see his uniform like spot that says Buckley on it.
And he says, “There were three other Evans in my class. So everyone calls me Buck now. I kinda like it.”
Bex: And then they literally cut and paste in the scene from “Bobby Begins Again” where Buck shows up at the [01:13:00] kitchen and they razz him up by pretending that they don’t know who Captain Nash is.
Ellen: Yeah. It feels mean this time because we know how much shit Buck’s been through.
Alice: I know, poor Buck.
Bex: See?
Ellen: It’s like, come on, you says, you say here in the notes that Background Firefighter is there?
Bex: Background firefighter is sitting next to Chim!
Alice: Background firefighter!
Ellen: Did we not know who background firefighter was last time? Or we just didn’t notice?
I think
Bex: we knew who he was, but I’m wondering whether like they’ve, we are getting a different cut of the of the scene. So it’s slightly wider. So we’re actually seeing who is sitting next to Chim at the table? I don’t know, but it’s very much background firefighter. For a second I thought it was Captain Gerrard and I was about to freak out and realised no, it’s not Gerrard, it’s just another,
Ellen: no, he’s gone by this stage.
Bex: Old man with a, another older man with a, a mustache. But yeah, background firefighter.
Ellen: Well after that quick flashback that we’d already [01:14:00] seen, which like is so nice because it means that he’s finally found his place. Right? I don’t, I don’t think Buck knew that yet. But, um, you know, after all the searching he’s been doing the last couple of years before that, it’s nice to see him finally get there.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: So back in the present, uh, there, the Buck and Saleh are okay after the explosion Okay. Is a relative term.
Bex: Relative to Yes.
Alice: Like, are they?
Ellen: Saleh said. He said, okay. They survive the explosion.
Bex: Yeah. Like Buck literally threw himself on top of Saleh to use his turnout to protect him from the, the flames.
And he, he gets up and he starts looking around and I, I do love this little nod, uh, ’cause Saleh asks like, “What are you looking for?” And Buck goes, “I was fire marshal once, remember, I remember the rules and regulations. They’re the factory should have fire extinguishers.” Um, and he manages to find one ’cause he’s [01:15:00] gonna use it to like, try and hold back the fire for that little bit longer.
Um, unfortunately, Saleh is starting to lose his battle with the smoke and he’s struggling to breathe. So Buck takes off his O2 masks and puts it on Saleh, and the guy goes, “What if I’m wearing this how are you gonna breathe?” And Buck says, “I’m just gonna hold it.”
Alice: Yeah. Like what?
Bex: This is, this is not trying to hold, to go to the toilet before, like you …
Alice: This is breathing, Buckley.
Bex: Need to breathe, Buck.
Ellen: Yeah. You can’t hold your breath for that long.
Bex: No. We get a nice little action sequence where Buck like swings himself up and slides along the fallen catwalk to get to the fire extinguisher quicker. Looks very cool. Um, and the fire extinguisher thankfully works and he’s able to, um, put out a little bit of the fire for like five seconds and then he is extinguished all of [01:16:00] the extinguisher.
Mm-hmm. And it barely, barely put a dent in the fire. Yeah. At this point, s is like, yeah, okay, we’re dying. I’m dead. And he gives up, he loses consciousness and Buck looks like he’s seconds away from giving up himself. When the sprinklers finally kick in. And water starts raining down.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: And Buck’s like, no. Okay. They haven’t given up on me. I’m not going to give up on Saleh. So he grabs his ax, he ties a rope to it, he uses it as a slingshot, throws the rope over a beam that’s up above him, ties it to, uh, puts a carabiner on it, puts the carabiner on the, the vat that’s still across Saleh’s legs to make a makeshift pulley system so he can try and pull the vat off Saleh.
But it is just far too heavy. And even then, him, like almost horizontal, lying [01:17:00] fully on the ax. He can’t shift it.
Ellen: Yeah. And he’s like yelling, but it’s, it’s silent. We can’t hear because this beautiful music playing over the top. Yeah.
Bex: And then just as he’s about to give up again and another firefighter appears.
He grabs onto the rope and starts pulling and then three more firefighters appear and Buck looks over his shoulder at the sudden, sort of slack on the rope to realize that the 118 have joined him and they’re helping him…
Alice: his family!
Bex: pull the vat off Saleh and it works. Buck couldn’t do it on his own, but with his family,
Ellen: they’ve all got his back.
Bex: They’re able to lift the vat off, Chim peels off to pull Saleh out from under the vat.
Ellen: They’ll make it out
Bex: and they all make it out. Next thing we see Buck, they’ve managed to get them out of the factory and Buck is sitting in the back of the [01:18:00] ambulance, I assume, because Hen was checking him over.
Ellen: He looks rough, like his eyes are all red and he is like covered in soot.
Bex: Well, he has been wandering around without his mask and respirator. Yeah. So he is been, you know, inhaling smoke for a while.
Ellen: Yeah. Um, Bobby’s trying to make him feel better because he’s saying he got lost and he didn’t know where he was. And Bobby’s like, “That place is a maze.”
Bex: I do appreciate that Bobby had every right to like chew him out and yell at him about like being an idiot, but instead he’s like trying to reassure Buck and make him feel better.
Ellen: Yeah. He’s had a rough week.
Alice: Even Hen’s, like “no one was surprised you stayed in there.” And then Buck goes, “I almost gave up if you guys hadn’t come in, then…” Hen’s like, “But we did and we always will.”
It’s like, aw,
Ellen: it’s family.
Bex: And, and then Athena shows up [01:19:00] simply because Angela Bassett is contracted to appear in like every single episode.
Alice: They’re like, oh, fuck with her. Give, give Angela anything to do this episode. Get her in.
Ellen: And, um, Buck looks terrified for a moment because he is like, oh no. Mom’s here to chew me out too.
Alice: Yeah. Mom’s gonna yell at me.
Ellen: Oh, I’m in trouble.
Bex: Like dad was playing, like dad was playing good cop and here is the literal bad cop.
Ellen: Yeah. But she’s not, she’s really, she’s really nice to, she’s probably the nicest that she’s been to him for ages actually. She’s usually chewing him out for something
Alice: like, do you reckon Bobby texted her on when she was on the way over and was like, be nice to Buck. I know. I think it’s, he’s had a real shit day, okay.
Bex: I think it’s just the way, because Athena walks over and Bobby like immediately makes a beeline to sort of cut her off and he’s like, “Firefighter Buckley here. Pulled out the very last victim,” and the way he’s talking to her, it’s very much like. He did a good thing. Okay. Be nice [01:20:00] thing
Alice: he a good thing. Like nodding. Nodding yes. Like he did a good, he was good. Right? Um,
Bex: Athena, god bless her, immediately picks up on this and is like, “Yes, of course. He, of course he went back in to pull out the very last victim.” And Buck is still moping. He’s like, “Yeah, but then everyone else had to come in and pull me out.” And Athena tells him, “well, I’m sure that whoever you saved is just glad you were being Buck.”
Buck’s like, “I don’t even know what that means.”
To which Athena tells him, “It means that you never give up. That’s what being Buck means to me.”
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: And it’s, it’s so sweet.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: This is why we keep saying that Bobby and Athena are Buck’s real parents. ’cause now that you’ve met his parents.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Compared to them, Bobby and Athena treat him so much better.
Ellen: Yes.
Alice: Yep.
Bex: And actually appear to care about him.
Ellen: [01:21:00] They’re encouraging. All right. So the, the next scene must be a little bit later, the next shift maybe, or a couple of days later. Bobby and Buck arrive at the 118 station, um, and Eddie is there waiting for them.
And Bobby says that he’s got a clean bill of health from the doctors. So, and then Eddie, like, as Bobby disappears, he goes “Show off,” to Buck.
Bex: Eddie’s been pacing backwards and forwards waiting for them to come back.
Ellen: Yeah. Um, but also he’s been pacing outside because he doesn’t wanna be inside with Buck’s mom and dad,
Bex: pretty much. Yeah.
Ellen: Because they’re inside waiting for him.
Bex: They are upstairs in the loft. And so Buck very hesitantly, goes upstairs and approaches them. Um, it’s so awkward. He’s trying to be so polite. I’m guessing he never apologized after sort of yelling [01:22:00] at them the last time he spoke to them after going off at them.
Yeah. Which they so rightly deserved. Yes. Um, he, he says, you know, I hope you weren’t waiting too long. And his father says, “No. The, the other firefighters were very kind. We got to hear a lot of stories about you.” And Margaret says, “They seem to like you.” I’m like, yeah, no shit lady. Just ’cause you didn’t like him doesn’t mean that nobody else likes him.
Ellen: Oh,
Alice: yeah.
Bex: Like, well, you happen to have a very lovable son. Yeah. Just because you never saw that. Sorry. I really do not like Margaret Buckley.
Ellen: I’m getting that. I guess,
Bex: like, you’re getting that from me, or you’re seeing, you’re watching Margaret Buckley and you understand?
Ellen: No, she’s, she’s pretty awful. I think she’s like deeply, deeply disturbed as, as a person.
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: And it’s really coming out as just being a big meanie to everybody basically. Yes. But anyway, Buck apologizes to them. [01:23:00] Like they sit down at a table and Buck’s like, “I’m sorry about Daniel,” finally, now that he knows,
Alice: that’s it. Like if he’d known the whole time
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: He could have like, ugh, he would’ve understood.
Ellen: Yeah. I mean, it’s not really something that you wanna tell a kid, a little kid. Like he, they could have told him that he had a brother who died. Like that’s, I think important for him to probably know, but. The, the rest of it that the reason that he was born was to be a donor is probably not something you want a kid to know.
Alice: but like, but not even just like say like, yeah, we had a, you had a brother who died and that’s why Mom and Dad are so detached.
Like at least it had make sense. Like there’s so much that like now I’m older and I understand like the stuff that my parents went through when they were like my age, like early twenties, I’m like, oh, that’s why they’re like that. And I give them more grace [01:24:00] now. But he didn’t have that opportunity because they never told him.
Bex: Yeah. And they never allowed Maddie to tell him.
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah. It’s sort of hard to know when, like maybe we can talk about this at the end, but it’s hard to know when is the right time to tell a child something like that. So, but I mean, they didn’t treat him well anyway, so no. Anyway, they try to, now they try to, uh, say to him that, you know, we never blamed you.
None of it was your fault. And he’s still like, I still wish I could have done more. It’s like, bug stop. Stop being like that. Yeah. Um, his dad calls him Evan, and he’s like, “No, people who know me call me Buck.”
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: And then, and his mom actually says something nice for once and she says, “You were born to save someone and that’s what you do every day. We are so proud of you.” It’s like, oh, finally [01:25:00] she says something worth saying.
Yeah,
Bex: I don’t buy it, no, I don’t buy it.
Ellen: But it’s such a nice sentiment,
Bex: but I don’t buy it because there’s nothing in the previ, like nothing prior to this scene that makes me believe that they are proud of him.
Ellen: No. Coming out of her mouth that I think that’s, that’s bad. But what I mean is that he was born to save someone and that’s what he does. Oh, that part.
Bex: Oh, that’s,
Ellen: that’s a, is really nice.
Bex: Yes. That’s a, that’s a beautiful sentiment. Yes. Um, but Margaret acknowledging that and saying that they are proud of him. No, don’t buy that at all.
Ellen: Yeah. It’s a weird kind of back flip from them. Like not long ago they were kind of mad about everything.
Bex: I have a theory about it. I’ll wait till the end of the episode and I’ll tell you my theory. Yeah. Okay.
Ellen: Okay.
Bex: So back goes from this meeting with his parents down to the locker room where Chim is getting changed. Um, and obviously things are better between the two of them [01:26:00] because.
Chim checks in on Buck and he is like, does that, “did that go okay?” And Buck’s like, “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.” But even as he’s saying, yeah, I think so. He’s just walked like face first into his locker and it’s just closed his eyes and it does not look at all like he is okay or it is okay or anything is okay.
Alice: Oh, poor Buck.
Bex: Uh, but Chim does have an ulterior motive for checking in on Buck because he needs things to be okay with Maddie as well. Yep. Um, and Buck’s like, yeah, I might be okay with, with parents, but I, I’m not okay with Maddie still.
Alice: Yeah. He’s feeling very betrayed
Bex: and Chim tries to mediate the situation. Um, and Buck reiterates that Maddie should have told him about Daniel, about family, about everything. And Chim says that she didn’t want Buck [01:27:00] to think that he wasn’t loved and Buck’s like, “But I wasn’t.”
Ellen: Hmm.
Bex: Chim’s like, no, “Maddie loved you,” and Buck counters with “She sent me away, she handed me the keys to the car and sent me on the way I needed her and she wasn’t there. She sent me out of her life.”
Ellen: Oh, it’s so heartbreaking,
Alice: It hurts so much.
Bex: And you can just, you can see, see Chim sort of staring at him for a second. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? And then realizes what he’s talking about. He is like “The, the Jeep. That’s what you’re talking about?” Um, because while Buck might’ve read the note that Maddie left him when he went to pick her up and she wasn’t there and then booked it out of the hospital and not looked back, um, Maddie explained more of the situation to Chim.
We see what happened after Buck Stormed out of the [01:28:00] hospital, which was that Maddie was at the hospital, but she was completely black and blue and covered in blood. Yeah. Because Buck had, uh, Doug had found out that she was going to leave and beat her within an inch of her life. Yeah.
Ellen: Oh
Alice: and Maddie didn’t want Buck to ever know,
Bex: Maddie didn’t want Buck to see that.
Ellen: Yeah. Omar tries to, uh, tell her like, “Maybe your brother could help, like you should have gone with him.” And she’s like, “No. He, he can never know,”
Bex: still don’t understand why.
Ellen: Yeah. I mean, maybe she was protecting him from Doug
Alice: and was embarrassed probably too.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: It’s just, it’s just one more thing that nobody told Buck.
Alice: Mm-hmm.
Bex: But I mean, we’ve already dealt with that. That’s fine. Doug is dead. We’re. We’re moving on. Yeah. Then we cut back to the Madney apartment where [01:29:00] Maddie is cleaning in an attempt to calm herself while she’s waiting for Chim to come back from work and talking to Buck. Um, because as soon as Chim walks in, Maddie’s first words were, um, “Did you…” like, did you get a chance to talk to him or did you see him?
Um, but the him in question is like sulking behind Chim, like very reluctantly. He’s followed Chim home and is come into the apartment and Chim just books it out of there. Like, I’m gonna leave you two alone. I’m getting outta here.
Ellen: Yeah. And Buck tells her that mom and dad came to the firehouse and he forgave them. And Maddie looks pretty surprised. She’s like, “oh, that must have been difficult.” But Buck explains that it wasn’t really that hard because it’s hard to feel betrayed by someone you didn’t really think you can count on anyway. Ouch. And it’s also easy to lash out [01:30:00] on the person, you know is always gonna forgive you.
So I guess it’s half an apology to Maddie. Yeah, kind of. He says that he keeps thinking about what it would’ve been like if he’d known about it, would he still have been him and Maddie’s? Like I’m pretty sure you would always be Buck.
Bex: If anybody has any recommendations of any like Buck New Aus, please drop them in the comments.
Um, please let us know ’cause I’m fascinated and really don’t know how to use ao3’s tagging system to try and find the good ones. Um, so if you know of a good one of someone who has written that fic, please let me know.
Ellen: They must be out there.
Bex: They must be. I just can never find them.
Ellen: I’m guessing there’s still not as many 9-1-1 fics as there are Supernatural ones, but
Alice: Oh God, no.
Ellen: I’m sure they must be out there. So Buck asks Maddie to tell him about Daniel. It’s because [01:31:00] he can’t ask Mum and Dad, but he would like to know what he was like. So Maddie agrees.
Alice: Yeah. Maddie’s like, “It would be nice to talk about him again.”
Ellen: Hmm.
Alice: And it just broke my heart
Bex: At this point Buck notices the, the baby box that’s still on the coffee table. He says to Maddie, “Tell me the truth. I don’t have one of these, do I?” Um, and rather than saying yes, you don’t have one, um, Maddie tells him to stay there and she disappears. Just long enough for Buck to start going through the box again and finding the photo of Daniel again.
Um, when she comes back, she’s got a plastic bag it looks like, um, a disposable bag from the hospital maybe, um, that’s full of Buck’s postcards.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: And she says, “I don’t have a box to put some postcards in, but here.” [01:32:00] Um, and Buck is absolutely gobsmacked that she kept all of them because when she left Doug, she only had two suitcases and yet she used up precious space in those two suitcases for his postcards.
Yeah. Because as she says, everything that mattered most was in those two suitcases.
Ellen: So Sweet. She always had Buck’s postcards to look at when things got hard.
Bex: Yeah. She always had Buck. And then we get a montage.
Ellen: Oh, the cutest montage ever.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Yeah…
Ellen: you don’t agree?
Bex: We can talk about afterwards. Um,
Ellen: okay.
Bex: But it’s, it’s a Maddie and Buck montage. It’s just all of the Buck and Maddie [01:33:00] moments. Um, so we’ve got all of the times that Maddie patched Buck up after he hurt himself when he was a kid. We’ve got Buck saying, uh, “But being a firefighter is my life!” after, you know, the firetruck fell in his leg and he’s concerned that he’ll never get to work again.
And Maddie has said that even if he’s not a firefighter, he’ll still be Buck and they’ll still love him anyway. There’s Maddie scolding buck about the blood clot. And if he’d been alone, she doesn’t know what would’ve happened to him when he started coughing up blood.
Ellen: This, there’s ath surprise party at, um, Athena and Bobby’s house, which Buck looked very surprised, but we are not sure if he actually was surprised because we think someone gave it away first.
Bex: That was, was he acting surprised or was Oliver just really bad at acting at that point? Like, we don’t know what was going on there.
Ellen: Yeah, there’s lots of other cute stuff.
Bex: There’s lots of, there’s Maddie and Buck boxing. [01:34:00] There’s Buck and Maddie drinking wine together on the couch. There’s Maddie slapping Buck’s hand away from the, the food when it’s Chim’s birthday party at Eddie’s house.
It’s just like every little moment between the two of them over the last two seasons, um, culminating in all of their pinky promises and Maddie promising that she would never leave Buck behind. And the episode ends with Buck saying, we always had each other.
Ellen: Aw.
Bex: Which is absolute bullshit. And it’s not how I think the episode should have ended.
Ellen: Yeah, you’re right. They didn’t always have each other. There were large stretches of time where they did not have each other,
Alice: they didn’t have each other at all.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: So how should it have ended then, in your opinion?
Bex: Okay, so I was trying to work out why I’ve always this ending unsatisfying. And I think it’s because so much about Buck’s story [01:35:00] and who Buck is was about him. And they actually mentioned this in the episode, is about Buck trying to find his place in the world, trying to find a family that will love him. And he finds that in the 118. He finds that in Bobby and Athena as his defacto parents.
He finds that in Chim and Hen and Eddie and Chris and everybody else around him, but. At the end of the episode, and we’ve talked about this, sometimes it’s really subtle times, sometimes it’s a subtle as a sledgehammer with this show, that they will often disregard found family and prioritize blood family.
And that’s what they did in this episode.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: They went, it doesn’t matter. The buck was trying to find his place and he found his place with the 118. It’s more important that he reconnects with his parents and that his parents reconnect with him and that we emphasize the relationship he had with his like blood sister.
Alice: See, I, I feel like they did [01:36:00] the whole found family thing when they pulled him outta the fire. So like they did, they co I feel like they covered both.
Bex: I just feel like they should have emphasized the found family aspect and Buck finding his place in the 118 more.
Ellen: I mean, they could have added some 118 bits to the montage.
Bex: Yeah, like when they got the montage, it was literally even the scene sections that were 118 related, like Buck’s surprise party, or there is, there was a section where it was Eddie’s um, graduation. Yeah. They got, yeah, their, their handing Buck cake. It could have been more about the 118, but no, it was literally focused on Buck and Maddie.
That was what prior that was what prioritized.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: And I feel like that’s not the story that they were trying to tell with Buck. That’s not the important story for Buck.
Alice: I, I get what you are saying, but I just love Buck and Maddie so much that I don’t care. So like I, [01:37:00] I see your point of view. Um, but I feel like they, they did that with the, like before the 118 pulled him out.
Bex: Oh yeah, 100%. That’s what that scene was.
Alice: Yeah. And then this is about like forgiving Maddie and resolving that.
Bex: I just don’t think that his parents should have been given the grace.
Alice: Oh yeah. Like, fuck. But like he, he’s, he’s moving on at this point more than anything.
Bex: And that’s why I hate that line where it’s like Margaret saying, oh, we’re so proud of you. It’s like, you’re not proud of him. Nothing that we’ve seen indicates that you’re proud of him, but this show needs to have his, like biological family connect with him.
They can’t leave it as them being estranged, so they’re gonna ram in a last minute forgiveness and reconnection.
Alice: I think it’s not even a reconnect. ’cause like, just knowing that we don’t really get much of them later, I feel like it was more just closure for Buck than an actual, like he’s, [01:38:00] he’s closed the book on that and he’s just like, okay, like I get why my parents are fucked and let’s just put them in the corner now.
Ellen: Well I’ll be happy to not hear from them again. Yeah.
Yeah. Interesting. I mean, did they, it would’ve been nice if they’d had something at the end for the, for the 118 as well. You’re right, especially since this is supposed to be, this is Buck begins, this is like the, the formation of Buck episode, you know?
Bex: That’s just my feeling.
Alice: As I said, I just love Buck and Maddie, so
Bex: I do love Buck and Maddie too. I just feel like that ending was a little bit of a let down.
Ellen: Mm-hmm.
Bex: For me.
Alice: Yeah. Fair.
Ellen: Yeah. I really enjoyed this episode. Um, apart from obviously the shitiness of his parents. Um,
Bex: so now do you kind of understand our perspective when we’ve been watching sort of season one, season two Buck, because we knew this the whole [01:39:00] time.
Ellen: Yeah. Now I feel like I need to go back and watch some early episodes and just know. You know more about Buck’s motivations for things.
Alice: Yeah. Like going back and watching it. It’s just like, oh,
Bex: I think we’ve, we’ve mentioned this before perhaps, or maybe we’ve talked about a privately off air, um, about whether the writers had this in Buck’s character arc from the beginning.
Alice: Yeah, we discussed it when we watched,
Ellen: when we were watching it together.
Alice: When we watched it together, yeah.
Bex: Yeah. So did they know from the get go, like when they were coming up with the characters like Evan Buckley, born and as a savior baby, family has, um, abandoned him emotionally so he became reckless in order to seek attention. Discovers family in the 118. Did they write season one and Season two Buck knowing that, or was that a storyline that they came up with a lot later and just works to when you retcon it [01:40:00] and use it?
Alice: Yeah, it works so well. Yeah.
Bex: Use it to sort of understand Buck’s motivations in season one.
Ellen: Yeah, I mean, I guess they didn’t need to have all the details hammered out from the start. They could have just known that something had happened, in his past that he was running away from, that’s why he didn’t have any family in town or whatever.
And I mean, and they had to, they would’ve had to make up some kind of backstory when Maddie showed up as well. But yeah. Did they know all of these details right from the start? Who knows?
Alice: Oh, that’s cute. The, the girl who played Maddie in 2004 is named Maddie.
Ellen: Oh, that’s cute. Yeah. I feel this episode did a, a great job of like explaining like, you’re right, that they, they retconned… If they didn’t already know it, they’ve retconned everything so perfectly. Like it just explains all of all of why Buck is like that.
Bex: Yes, yes.
Ellen: In a very neat bow.
Bex: And [01:41:00] especially when you go back and you watch Season One Buck and his relationship with Abby and you’re sort of starting to look at it through this lens going like, oh, he’s just a little baby boy who’s desperate for love.
Yeah. Poor buck. Desperate for love, desperate for a connection. And Abby didn’t even surf. And it, it really makes you understand why he was so adamant that he had to be a firefighter and he had to be a part of the 118 because they were his family and like he didn’t have another family.
Alice: ’cause he, he literally doesn’t have anything else
Bex: because his family was emotionally distant. Um, yeah.
Ellen: Yeah. And that point, he didn’t even have Maddie until she showed up. Bless him. Alright, so shall we just talk about what’s happening next week?
Bex: Yeah. Alice’s favorite episode next week. What have we got a,
Alice: we do have, it’s all right. You know,
Bex: uh, next week the 118 feels jinxed and Eddie tries to move [01:42:00] on in his personal life.
Uh, the summary says that the 118 believes their fabled firehouse superstition has come true when they have the day from hell with a never ending series of bizarre emergency calls, including Athena in hot pursuit of the 118s firetruck, a man who duct tapes himself to a freeway billboard, a garage full of fireworks, and a restaurant manager who destroys his own business.
Ellen: Oh, I feel like we’ve seen some of these things before.
Bex: Meanwhile, Eddie feels a spark with Christopher’s former teacher, but admits that he may not be ready to move on just yet. Okay that’s the weirdest summary for that episode.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: But Okay,
Alice: sure. Why not?
Bex: And the, the triggers for this episode are so weird, um, [01:43:00] because they include clowns,
Ellen: what?
Bex: discussion of depiction of grief, um, high speed traffic pursuit, and randomly, octopus.
Ellen: Okay. Sounds like we’re for a ride. Okay.
Alice: Octopus.
Bex: Yep. I mean, I know what they’re referring to, but it’s just, that’s so random. Just.
Ellen: Well, let us know what you thought of this episode. Please, um, let us know in a comment or you can post, um, on the episodes post on thatweewooshow.com or you can send us a dm however you’d like to do that. Thank you to all the people who’ve already been sending us comments. We love to hear from you. You can find all that contact information at [01:44:00] thatweewooshow.com.
Thank you so much for listening this week, and we will talk to you next time for episode episode six, which is called “Jinx”. See you then.
Alice: Bye!
Bex: Bye.
Ellen: 9-1-1 is a fictional show, but many of the situations portrayed happened in the real world too. If any of the topics we’ve discussed in this episode have affected you, please know you are not alone. You can call or text numbers in your country for help. Just Google crisis support in your location to find out the number.
If you enjoy our podcast, you can help us out by leaving us a review on Spotify or your preferred listening app and by sharing our social media posts. Find out more at thatweewooshow.com.
[outtake]
Alice: Come. Come here. Get inside. Come here. Would anyone like a dog? Come here, go to bed. I have one for sale. [01:45:00] Going for to any home. Not even a good home. Go to bed. Go to bed. Lay down drop. Wait.
Bex: As you can tell, she’s very well trained, very responsive to commands.
Alice: Come. No. Come here. Drop
Ellen: Bless.
Alice: Stop crying. Come up. No, I don’t want kisses. No, don’t do it. Bed. Drop that, drop.
So yeah, any home. Not even a good home. Just any home.
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