Welcome to That Weewoo Show: a podcast where Bex, Alice and Ellen watch and discuss every episode of ABC’s TV show, 9-1-1.
In this episode we discuss episode 10 of the fourth season of 9-1-1, titled “Parenthood”.
The 118 responds to a series of calls dealing with parents and their children. Chimney and Maddie adjust to life with their newborn. Hen and Karen are emotionally shattered as Nia is reunited with her birth mother.
Content warnings for episode 4.10:
assisted suicide, abuse of power, bad parenting, cancer, flashback to May’s suicide attempt, foster care system.
Mentioned in this episode:
- The Elevator Game Destiel fanfic by bexgowen (Horror choose your own adventure)
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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, who have shared our social media posts, who have commented on our social media posts or on our, the podcasting platform of their choice as they listen to our episodes.
We love to hear from you, so please keep that up. And thank you to everyone who has taken the time out to rate us on Spotify and or Apple Podcast, which, it gives us the warm and fuzzies to hear what you think about us, and it also helps to get us in more people’s ears, which although slightly terrifying, [00:01:00] to think that more people are listening to us is also a good thing, I think.
Alice: Yeah, allegedly.
Ellen: Thank you.
Alice: But no thank you. We really do appreciate it.
Bex: So let’s dive straight into, um, talking about this episode that we all kind of struggled with, but we will, um, we’ll get to that in a minute. Firstly, Alice, do you wanna remind us about the better times in the past of 9-1-1?
Alice: Yeah. Last week’s action packed episode of 9-1-1, uh, Hen and Karen prepared for their foster daughter to return to her birth mother. The 118 dealt with a fiery car crash caused by a drunk driver in which Albert came close to death. And Maddie and Chimney welcomed baby Jee-Yun into the world.
Ellen: Yay,
Bex: Jee exists now
Alice: finally, we can mention Jee without Ellen going “who?”
Ellen: Yeah. So, uh, speaking of [00:02:00] Jee-Yun, we’re up to an episode that is called “Parenthood”. This is episode 10 of season four, first aired on the 26th of April. In 2021. The official summary says, the 118 responds to a series of calls dealing with parents and their children, including a disastrous birthday party thrown by a mommy blogger.
Meanwhile, Athena and Michael talked to May about her past suicide attempt to chimney and Maddie adjust to life with their newborn. And Hen and Karen are emotionally shattered as their foster daughter Nia is reunited with her birth mother.
Um, and we do have some fairly major trigger, like probably the most major triggers that we can almost have are in this episode. We have, uh, a trigger for assisted suicide. We’ll get to that in a minute. Um, abuse of power, uh, dealing with foster parents and biological parents. Um, bad parenting, cancer. Flashbacks [00:03:00] to a suicide attempt via pills, um, in season one, where May, with May’s attempted suicide, including the 9-1-1 call that Athena made.
Um, and a general warning for foster care system. So we have like just a, a warning that we also didn’t really enjoy… like even though this episode contains some really major and dark, I mean not dark, but heavy subject material,
Alice: it’s very heavy. And I think that’s why I struggled with it.
Ellen: It’s, it’s hard, it’s a difficult watch and it’s probably, I mean, we’ll do the best that we can in terms of addressing some of the, the things that, um, are in it.
But if we, if we do start to make light of things. Just know that that’s how we cope with heavy issues a lot of the time. And we, we’ve said this in the past, that sometimes we make, we make jokes about things that, um, just to help us get through it, you know, because there is a lot of heavy stuff in here.
Bex: I’m flagging right now. It wasn’t the heaviness of the episode, it was literally, I [00:04:00] did not care about anybody in this episode.
Ellen: It, it was a very slow episode in general. Uh, I think they tried to make it really emotionally, um, affecting, but in all it did was kind of draw everything out and make it really freaking boring.
Anyway, we’ll do our best. And, um, I’m sorry if this is an episode that you really enjoy because the rest of us are like, eh.
Bex: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, all right. To kick us off, I am going to drop a quick trivia tidbit in that the episode title “Parenthood” not only reflects the fact that this entire episode is about parenting and parenthood, but I think is also a nice little callback to a previous, uh, gig that Peter Krause had in that he was one of the, um, leads in an ensemble series called Parenthood.
Ellen: Oh yeah.
Alice: Very cute.
Bex: In which he met his previous wife on that [00:05:00] series. Oh. And in, and in very Dexter fashion, she played his sibling on the show.
Alice: Oh no.
Ellen: Oh,
Bex: Right. So, uh, let’s get into it. Um, the summary kept calling this woman a mummy blogger. I don’t know that she’s necessarily a mummy blogger. She seems to be a content creator that focuses on like mummy stuff.
Ellen: Yeah, I feel like she’s on Instagram or
Bex: yeah, she’d be like a mummy TikTok or a mummy instagramer. I don’t necessarily think that she’s got an old fashioned blog, but I don’t think that the people writing the show have caught up with social media trends and they’re still thinking about like the, the early two thousands mummy bloggers where people were literally writing blogs and writing large swathes of words about parenting and mummyhood.
This
Ellen: is, this is 20, 21 like TikTok was around then, right? It wasn’t that long ago.
Bex: Yeah, but how old are the people who are writing the show and how [00:06:00] into TikTok are they?
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Um, but it’s, it’s not TikTok. Funnily enough, this episode has a lot to do with Instagram and I’m wondering why Instagram gets such a shout out from this show.
Ellen: Oh,
Bex: I don’t have an answer.
Ellen: You think it might have been a product placement type thing?
Bex: I have no idea. But it’s just this, like the go-to social media platform seems to be. Insta.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: I don’t, it’s interesting.
Ellen: Mm-hmm.
Bex: Um, but yes, we have “supermom_beth!” Is live for her son Bryson’s 12th birthday party.
And she’s going to use the live to show all of her followers how a successful super mom or a dad throws a birthday bash. And at this point,
Alice: maybe not like this,
Bex: she, at this point, she cuts to her son and she’s like, “How are you enjoying your party?” And Bryson holds his hand up over the [00:07:00] camera in a like, do not film me,
Alice: Bryson.
Bex: Uh, basically he’s, he is not enjoying it at all. He thinks it is the, the most embarrassing birthday party that he has ever had and ever seen. Yeah.
Alice: Yeah. Fair.
Ellen: Because he is 12. He’s not like five,
Bex: he’s 12. And the birthday party is, I thought it was like cowboy or western themed. It turns out it’s barnyard themed.
Ellen: Oh yeah.
Bex: Okay. Which is really cute if your kid is five.
Alice: Yeah. Like one of my friends just had a really cute barnyard theme birthday party for her son’s second birthday.
Bex: Yeah. Bryson wanted to do paintball or laser tag, which I think is much more age appropriate for a 12-year-old. Um, but that would go against, um, you couldn’t monetize that.
Ellen: Can’t really go live.
Bex: She would not, she wouldn’t, her sponsors would not, um, [00:08:00] support that kind of a party.
Ellen: He’s like, “it’s so lame. I can’t believe you you made me wear this.” I’m like, wow. My 11-year-old would not let me force her to wear something that she did not want to wear.
Bex: Like, that’s interesting point that like, I can’t believe you forced me to wear it. I’m like, sir, you still put it on like you’re complaining about it, but you do have some autonomy with your body. You could have refused to put it on at all.
Ellen: Yeah. Anyway, this stuff is for babies.
Bex: Apparently the one good thing about the party is the trampoline, which look is the most decrepit, um, trampoline that I’ve ever seen. And I grew up in the nineties.
Alice: It’s like from the, yeah, it’s from the nineties. I’m pretty sure they found it in a garage from the nineties.
Ellen: And it does have like, you know, fences around it kind of thing. Like it’s not,
Bex: yeah. I.
Ellen: It’s not like an old nineties trampoline.
Bex: It’s not early nineties. ’cause we didn’t have that safety shit, but like Yeah, [00:09:00]
Ellen: we just bounced it right off.
Bex: Pretty much. Yeah.
Ellen: Um, but in this case it’s not that, that’s causing the safety issue. I was, I was watching because this, so, okay, so I watched this episode before, like a few weeks ago before we got to it in the podcast. So I did not have the triggers, so I didn’t know what was coming when I watched this. Right?
Alice: Oh no.
Ellen: So I’m watching this and there’s like a party happening and these kids are jumping in the trampoline.
They keep, they keep flashing to the springs and I’m like, oh no. And um, when it actually happened, I was like, oh, okay. That was, that was not as bad as I thought it was gonna, I thought like the kids were gonna go flying or like, you know, it was gonna fall onto the ground. Everyone break their legs or something.
But no, instead the mom. Just announces that they’re gonna play pin the tail on the donkey. And Bryson is like, “I think I liked it better when you had a real job,” and then he fucks off to the trampoline [00:10:00] and um, she’s gone live on Instagram again and she’s talking about like, “Yeah, we’re gonna pin the tail on the donkey. This game’s a classic!” And no one looks like they actually wanna play the game.
No. But um, as Bryson is now jumping on the trampoline, the springs break and fire like ping off and they stab through his mom, his. Like pin her hand to the door that pin her to the donkey
Alice: also her torso.
Ellen: Yeah. They, they like how strong were they have going?
Bex: See that’s the thing. So you had two springs go flying off on the same trajectory, which was pretty much horizontal. ’cause we got like a full on Final Destination Five, 3D kind of moment, seeing the springs come flying at the camera. And then they continue their velocity with enough force that they’re able to go not only through Beth’s hand, [00:11:00] but through her hand and through the wood of the door.
Ellen: Yeah!
Bex: Because we do get to see the bloodied end of a spring protruding through the door on the other side. Now look, being in the nineties with decrepit trampolines, I have seen many a spring go flying off a trampoline bed. None of them flew horizontally. They all just kind of pinged up in an arc and went flying
Ellen: and none of ’em got embedded on in walls or people or like
Bex: Well, no, because they kind of went up.
Ellen: Okay.
Bex: Not just straight. Yes. None of them got embedded anywhere.
Ellen: Like both ends of the spring are, are connected to something. So
Bex: Yes. So for both, for two springs, for both ends to come loose and ping off in the same trajectory at the same angle going, flying straight, not tumbling, not spinning, um, and maintain the, yeah, it’s just, it’s so for the drama, it’s
Ellen: for the drama.
Alice: It’s for the drama. But again, it’s not even enjoyable for the drama. [00:12:00]
Bex: No. Because you’re kind of like, ma’am, you wanted to play pin the tail on the donkey. Now you, you got it. You wanted it, you got it.
Alice: Yeah. Now you’re pinned to the don. Yeah.
Bex: Yes. Now you are pinned to the donkey
Ellen: and even when Bryson calls 9-1-1,
Bex: which ironically yes.
Ellen: He says, “My mom’s pinned to the donkey!” Alright, so this next scene is possibly the best part of the entire, like best as in like the funniest because, and the rest of it is pretty low bar. But, um, I liked this part, yes, because it was really funny. Um,
Bex: because we have the 118 rock up and they have their victim who has been impaled with, uh, two objects. And as we have learned from the show, if you have a person that has got a puncture injury, you do not remove said object, lest they bleed out before you can get them to a hospital. Unless it’s a champagne co impeding a person’s ability to breathe, in which case pop that sucker right out. Um,
Ellen: [00:13:00] yes, Eddie diagnoses that, uh, she, the spring has missed her tendon because she can wiggle her fingers.
Bex: Yes. Um, but Hen is slightly concerned that even though, uh, Beth is stable, um, she’s breathing well, she doesn’t know how they’re going to detach her from the barn door in order to transport her to hospital. Um, and Bobby, using his big brain says, “We don’t, we transport her with it, donkey and all,” and then looks around going, “Where’s Buck?”
Ellen: Hehe, I love this.
Bex: Meanwhile, the most exciting thing that has ever happened to the birthday party as far as the 12 year olds is number one, like Bryson’s mom getting punctured by the spikes. Number two, a firefighter is showing them the circular saw because Buck has got a group of 12 year olds over by the trampoline, and he’s talking them through the circular saw and how cool it is, and they look absolutely [00:14:00] rapt. Um,
Ellen: especially that one kid who goes, “Oh, I bet it could slice through bone too,” and Buck’s just like, oh, okay. Alright then.
Bex: So at this point he gets saved by the, um, the, the chief who calls Buck over because they actually do need that saw, um, in order to cut through the hinges so they can remove the door from the barn.
Ellen: Oh, this was great because okay, they go through a little bit about how she’s whinging, about how it’s a mommy blog and you know, “I spent months planning this thing, blah, blah, blah. My kid hates me,” and Bobby’s like, “He doesn’t hate you. He’s just 12. He’ll get over it.” I’m like, oh, that’s so true. And some days I really feel that.
Eddie says, “Phase one was a success. There’s no way that we can get this door into the ambulance. We gotta call for a flatbed,” and I’m, and I turned to my sister-in-law who I was watching this with, and I said, “Just strap her to the roof.” And then the next scene,
Bex: they’ve literally strapped her to the roof.
Ellen: They’ve strapped her to the roof.
Bex: of the [00:15:00] engine truck. Yep.
Ellen: Could not believe it. Anyway.
Bex: Yeah, I mean, it makes sense.
Ellen: I mean, how else are they gonna, if they, if they have to wait for, for a larger sort of ambulance to come, then she might have be in more trouble than she is.
Bex: I don’t think they were calling for an ambulance. I think they were literally trying to get a ute and they were just gonna strap her into the back of the ute.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: But yep. Strap her to the top of the engine truck. That works fine. So we have to wrap this up because we’re gonna get a title reference. Unfortunately, uh, they get Beth to the hospital, they unload her from the truck onto a gurney. Uh, Bryson got to ride in a fire truck. So that’s, you know, cherry on the, the cake that is his birthday.
Ellen: Yeah. It’s a great birthday now. Yeah.
Bex: He’s got Beth’s phone. And while Beth is, um, trying to apologize to him and tell him that she’s going to give up mommy blogging, she’s gonna go back to her normal job, he says to her, [00:16:00] “No, you were live the entire time. The comments are rolling in. You went viral.” And Beth immediately perks up and goes, “We’re gonna be rich. I’m monetizing parenthood.” Everybody takes a drink and rolls their eyes and goes, oh my God. We’re, that’s the kind of episode we’re in for. And we go to the title card.
Ellen: Yep. So that, that’s like all the fun for this episode. I don’t think anything else is like any No ounce of fun the rest of the time.
Bex: Nope, not really.
Ellen: All right. So we’ll go and check in with the Wilsons.
Bex: Yes. And when we were talking last week about having the, the wisdom of Karen fostering, considering all of the, the trauma in her past, uh, we kind of forgot about Denny and the trauma in his past and his trauma is rearing its ugly little head.
Ellen: Yeah. [00:17:00]
Bex: Um, because with Nia being reunited with her biological or quote unquote real mother Denny is now terrified that he’s gonna be sent away too.
Ellen: Oh, bless him. Yeah. He didn’t sort of let on at all last week that he was. He was sad that Nia was leaving, but he didn’t seem
Bex: No. ’cause they hadn’t thought of that story. Like it
Ellen: scared. Yeah, that’s right. Someone went, oh shit. Yeah, that’s right.
Bex: Like how we gotta really ring the emotional, make emotional wrecks out of everyone.
How can we do that? Hey, how do you think Danny would cope with seeing kids like being sent back to their real moms, considering like these two are not his quote unquote real moms. I don’t know. Let’s write that into the episode.
Ellen: Uh, well, thankfully, um, they have a piece of paper from a judge to say that he, that Hen and Karen are his real moms.
Bex: Yes. ’cause they literally adopted him.
Ellen: They, no one will ever come and take him away from them. And they reassure him of that. And [00:18:00] it’s really cute.
Bex: It is kind of cute.
Ellen: And I liked that they sort of, he sort of asked if his real. Uh, no, his other mom not want him.
Bex: Yeah. They literally have him stop and realize what he was about to say and the impact that could have on Hen and Karen and then very carefully chooses his words moving forward.
Ellen: Yeah. Bless him. But yeah, Hen just tells him that she was sick and she wasn’t in a place where she could take care of you, ie, she was in jail. I don’t know if they, if, if Denny knows that his mom is still in jail.
Bex: I dunno. I don’t care.
Ellen: No, I don’t care either.
Bex: I hate Eva. I don’t care.
Ellen: We’re done with Eva. Well,
Bex: we do not want,
Ellen: I hope we’re done with Eva.
Bex: Mention it. Oh God. I, um, I don’t know how much they have told Denny at this point
Ellen: anyway. They do reassure him that no one is ever going come and take him away. And they have a very cuddly hug. And I would like to also be squished to Hen’s bosom [00:19:00] because it looks, looks like a lovely hug.
Alice: Absolutely. Same.
Bex: So from that heartrending moment, we move on to heartrending moment number two, which is the next morning when Nia is leaving the house and Denny is being an absolute sweetheart and he hands over a blanket that Nia apparently kept stealing from him. So he’s decided to gift it to her and he hands over the plush unicorn that, uh, Nia was like giving to everybody. Like it was Hen’s study buddy at some point.
Ellen: Oh yeah.
Bex: Because he knows that that was Nia’s favorite and Nia’s being incredibly cute and she’s asking whether Denny will play with her later and Denny’s like, “Hmm, I don’t think I can.”
Uh, and Carly reminds, ’cause this is all happening in the living room. You’ve got Hen and Karen standing behind watching and you’ve got Carly and Diedra as there were there as well. Carly reminds Nia that she’s going home to her mommy and [00:20:00] Nia is like, “Oh, Denny come with me?” they’re like, “No, Nia, just you. And we’re, why don’t you say goodbye to everybody?”
Ellen: Aw, she’s so cute.
Bex: Karen gives her a big hug. Uh, Hen tries to distract herself from breaking down by asking Nia if she had given the unicorn a name. And Nia very quickly said, she’s going to name a Denny for her big brother. And I think Hen just about collapses
Ellen: That pushes Hen over the edge. She’s, oh.
Bex: And then when, uh, Carly tries to hurry the process along, she doesn’t wanna be like, make it a drawn out process. Um, Nia says, “Bye, see you later!” And Hen tries to like, no, no, you’re not gonna see us later ’cause you’re leaving. And Karen very quickly steps in, ’cause that’s just gonna confuse the situation anymore.
She’s like, “Yes, we’ll see you later.” Yeah, because you know, a two year old’s not gonna understand.
Alice: No, no. [00:21:00]
Bex: And so Carly leaves with Nia, um, they kick Denny out to go to the kitchen where apparently Toni is in there, but she is actually in there this episode. Um, she’s not just floating around the house.
Ellen: Yeah, she is. She comes back later.
Bex: Um, and Deidra reassures Ken and Harron. Ken and Harron. No, Karen and Hen
Ellen: Yes.
Bex: Um, that this is incredibly hard. It’s always hard. It never gets any easier. Um, and Karen acknowledges that and says, yes, this is something we’re gonna have to discuss for next time. And Hen’s like, “There’s not gonna be a next time. I’m not doing this again,” and walks off, which honestly is like, at that point I’m like, yeah, maybe, maybe you shouldn’t. Yeah. Neither of you are ready.
Ellen: You’re not, you’re ready to this, you’re not emotionally mature enough at the moment to be [00:22:00] coping with any of this.
Bex: No.
Ellen: All right. So from one set of parents to the next, um, we’re going to ch to see Madney. And do we, like, we’re including Jee-Yun in the Madni, um, you know, group now, the family,
Alice: the Madney umbrella?
Ellen: Yes.
Alice: I mean, to be fair, Jee’s not really a character yet. She’s just a like, live doll that changes into a baby occasionally.
Ellen: Oh, my,
Bex: A baby doll?
Ellen: Yes, the doll. It, it’s, I mean, the first time I noticed the doll was when, okay, so in this scene actually they show a shot of the baby, of the actual baby, like being cute and looking, and Maddie’s like, “You’re gonna be late if you keep watching her.”
Um, because Chim’s watching her. And then immediately Maddie picks up Jee and holds her like this and the arm just looks like one of those baby doll arms that’s like slightly bent and shiny. And I was like, [00:23:00] oh no. And then from that moment on, I couldn’t help but notice
Bex: it was, I don’t think it helps that anytime any of the actors are holding the baby doll, they are holding a baby doll. Like there’s something about when later on in the scene where, um, Maddie hands the quote unquote baby to Chim and then we get a closeup of Kenneth who’s actually holding the real life baby. ’cause it’s moving. Yeah. The way he’s holding it is much, much more deliberate. Like he’s been much more careful with it than he is with the baby doll. So you just,
Alice: it’s like, it’s like coffee cups. Yes. And once you see the coffee cup, you can’t unsee it. Yeah. Um, like last week I was, I binged through The Summer I Turned Pretty ’cause I’m watching it with friends. It’s the worst show ever, people are obsessed with it.
Bex: Don’t, don’t spoil it. I know it’s…
Alice: Oh my God. You’re, yes. There you go.
Bex: I haven’t seen the new season, so don’t spoil it, but yes, it’s terrible.
Alice: I’ll not say anything.
Bex: No, but it’s addictive.
Alice: It’s awful. It’s addictive. I can’t stop [00:24:00] watching it. I’m glad that it’s not just me. It got to the point where like, I was literally like, yes, that was the last episode for the week. And my friend’s like, oh no, the other one just came out and I was like, oh, for fuck’s sake, there’s another one I have to watch.
Um, like it’s, it’s so bad. Anyway, there was a scene where they were drinking takeaway coffee, and they were just so obviously empty. And I’m like, please, like, if they can’t act with a takeaway coffee cup, just don’t give them the takeaway. Give them, give them something else. Like, I don’t understand how the film industry yet has not just put something like in the bottom of the fake coffee mugs.
Ellen: They just put water in it or something like just to give it a bit of weight.
Alice: They don’t want the liquid sound on the be picked up on the mics, but then just put a weight or something in the bottom. But you put a weight or something. Like surely it’s the film industry, they have a lot of money. Surely they can just get like a bit of Yeah, like a weight of something like, plasticine or something
Ellen: one of those sticky magnets, yeah
Alice: that goes in the bottom and like throws it off slightly. Because the main thing with like liquid is obviously like the weight is different. Like when you pick it up [00:25:00] it’s sloshes.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: Yeah. But like there’s gotta be a way to do that and it just, it’s, they’re always empty and they drive me insane
Bex: and I think, oh my God, that’s an issue with the baby doll versus the real baby. That the baby doll is plastic and has no weight to it.
Ellen: The real baby sloshes around.
Bex: Yeah. They need to make the baby slosh. That’s exactly it.
Ellen: They need, they need a baby doll that wriggles. That, that, that’d be creepy as hell. But yeah,
Bex: it just needs to be weighted. It needs to be like one of those reborn dolls that are like, oh yeah, they have, have the weight of a legitimate baby.
Ellen: Mm-hmm.
Bex: Um, but yeah, the, the baby doll slash real baby in this episode is nuts. Um,
Ellen: it’s very funny.
Alice: Um, the other thing that’s really hard to unsee, just ’cause I’m gonna ruin filmmaking for, um, for all our listeners this week, apparently.
Ellen: Thanks a lot.
Alice: Um, the paper bags are never paper. They’re like a vinyl because they don’t want the crunching sound of the paper.
Ellen: Yeah. We’re not gonna be able to unsee that now either.
Alice: Yeah. Once you see it, like, whenever they have grocery bags, they’re always vinyl and [00:26:00] like, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. They, they’re better at least than the coffee mugs. The coffee mugs, like, as soon as there’s a coffee mug in a scene, it makes me angry. Like, it physically makes me angry because no one, like,
Bex: except Jensen,
Alice: no one’s not as bad.
Bex: Jensen can act with a coffee cup.
Ellen: God damn you, Jensen Ackles.
Alice: I’m gonna have to find Jensen with a, yeah, he can do everything though. So
Bex: I’m pretty sure that, that there is a clip or there is an interview or something where he talks about like specifically training himself. How
Alice: Yeah, there you go
Bex: to drink out of a coffee cup and make it look legitimate on scene.
Ellen: Ah, see that’s true acting, that.
Alice: That’s it.
Bex: Yeah. It’s like on their resume, you know, they can ride horses, they can roller skate, they can drink outta coffee cups and make it look real.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: All right. Um, right back to the scene. No,
Ellen: we’ve already, we’re already derailing ourselves. Yeah.
Alice: Yeah. Thanks for, um, thanks for listening. Sorry we’ve ruined, um, TV magic for you, but be, I need people to be as angry as I am, so. [00:27:00] Okay.
Bex: So the, uh, the point of this scene is that, um. Chim is going to work. I’m guessing he must have been off on paternity leave. This is his first shift back and he’s leaving Maddie at home with not one but two children because Albert is living with them while he’s still convalescing and he’s still suffering, um, from these traumatic injuries from the car accident and needs a lot of help.
Like to the point where they are, Maddie and Chimney are sort of cooing over Jee-Yun, um, and Chimney is like regretting that he has to leave and we hear Albert sort of shriek in the background and hear the thud of something, um, because he tried to get something off a shelf by himself, but he’s still having balance issues from his like traumatic brain injury and it fell down.
Alice: Yeah. Poor Albert, like Chim’s like, “why didn’t you ask me or Maddie to help?” and he’s like, “You already have a baby to take care of. You don’t need two.”
Ellen: But you. But Chim doesn’t want him to hurt himself [00:28:00] when he should be asking for help. And Albert seems to be very frustrated with his lack of progress. He’s like, “I should be better by now.”
Alice: Yeah, he mentioned the accident was weeks ago.We find out, um, a couple scenes later. It’s been eight weeks. So
Bex: that’s still, that’s very, very short in like recovery time.
Alice: Yeah. Oh absolutely. But yeah, even though we had a break between like last episode and the episode before that, I don’t know if there’s a break between… no. There’s literally a week break and it’s been eight, uh, it’s been two months.
Bex: Yeah. We’ve just time jumped.
Ellen: So we’ve had a time, time, skip.
Alice: Yeah. Yeah,
Ellen: yeah. He’s like, Chim’s saying to him like, “You just, you have to be patient. Let us help you and just, you need to just rest.” And Albert’s like, “It feels like all I do is rest.”
Bex: That’s what you need to do to get better. So Chim goes off to work. Uh, leaving Maddie at home with the invalid and the baby. And [00:29:00] the first thing we see of Chim at work is that he’s showing baby pictures to, uh, Eddie and Buck mostly. I think Bobby is there.
Ellen: This is the most adorable scene because they’re all just cooing over these baby pictures.
Bex: You’ve got, um, like Bobby, who is like everybody’s dad, so he’s always gonna love babies. You’ve got Eddie who has a kid, so he like, he’s predisposed to loving babies. And then you’ve got Buck who’s just gonna kidnap any baby that he sees.
Alice: Yeah, literally.
Bex: So of course he’s gonna love.
Ellen: So yes, they are all predisposed to be loving baby pictures.
Bex: They all, and especially this is Chim’s kid, so they love
Alice: Yeah, I was gonna say, I don’t care about baby photos, but then I’m like, no, I do for people I love, like, I like seeing my best friend’s kids all the time. Like one of them just sent me a video earlier today. Um, of their kid, their 2-year-old dancing to The Living End.
And I was like, yeah, you go little man, you go dancing. Um, but like then I have like an acquaintance that shares baby photos all the time in an unrelated like group chat. And I’m like, I don’t care. [00:30:00] Like that baby could be the star of a show called Babies I don’t care about.
That’s a line from the office. I’m not that funny. Um,
Ellen: okay, well these guys are all loving looking at the baby pictures.
Bex: I do like this cute little exchange where Chim is like scrolling through the photos and she’s like, this is the photo where the first time she smiled and Eddie’s kind of peering at the screen going, “You sure that’s a smile? It’s the same face Buck makes when he is gassy.”
And Buck just kind of looks at him and then goes, “You know what? I will take that as a compliment ’cause it just means she looks like me.”
Alice: Yeah.
Ellen: It’s such a weird exchange for people who aren’t a couple. Anyway.
Alice: But you honestly, Chim’s not even like, Chim’s not even someone that I work with, he doesn’t exist and I’m still just like, show me all the baby photos! On ya, Chim.
Ellen: Bobby says that having a kid is like walking around with your heart, outside your [00:31:00] body and Chim’s like, that’s weird and morbid.
Bex: What’s really interesting is that they’re talking about, um, Chim and the baby and how he and Maddie are coping with the arrival of, um, of Jee-Yun and looking after her and Albert. But as soon as they see Hen walking to the kitchen, they all suddenly shut up and immediately change, um, the topic of conversation just to Albert.
’cause they’re all very conscious of the fact that babies might be triggering to Hen at this moment.
Ellen: Mm-hmm.
Bex: But Hen has rallied, she’s got a cake box. Um, and she’s disappointed that there are no balloons, there’s no banners, there’s nothing celebrating Chim’s return back to work.
Ellen: Yeah. Chim says he doesn’t really need any of that stuff, but, um, he’s like, no, we celebrate every good moment when we can show [00:32:00] me the baby pictures.
Bex: And he’s like, and she’s, she’s not, she’s not lying. She legitimately wants to see those baby photos. And she’s cooing over them just as much as the others.
Alice: Well, yeah. ’cause they’re her best friend’s babies. Like of course she wants to see it.
Bex: Yes. Doesn’t matter that she’s hurting, that she’s, quote unquote, lost her baby. She’s gonna be there to celebrate Chim’s.
Ellen: Yeah. And she says, “She’s so big already!” And we are like, yeah, we know This child is like huge for an eight week old baby.
Bex: But what’s really interesting,
Ellen: the baby that they have in, in the, in earlier in the other, um, scene actually looks maybe like it could be an eight week old.
Bex: Right, right. This, the, the baby that they have in this episode looks like age appropriate compared to the massive toddler that they had on FaceTime at the end of the last episode.
Ellen: Yeah. I dunno if it was the same baby, but,
Bex: oh, it’s definitely not the same baby, but it’s just ridiculous that it’s gone from, you know, this tiny little baby during the birth scene to, you know, the toddler that ate that baby over FaceTime [00:33:00] and now it’s shrunk back down to like a normal size baby.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Alright. Speaking of babies,
Ellen: And Chim’s like, “They grow up so fast.”
Bex: Um, well actually, speaking of babies that don’t grow up so fast, let’s head over to, where are we going? Irvine Street, uh, where a young man is trying to break into a house. Except it, uh, kind of backfires on him. He’s trying to climb up a, a trellis that has twinkle lights and some sort of flower woven through it.
But as he gets to the top of the trellis, it breaks away from the front of the house and he, uh, swings and some assaults and crashes to the ground.
Ellen: And then he calls, he still has his phone with him, so he calls 9-1-1.
Bex: He calls 9-1-1 on himself.
Ellen: Yeah. And may I like, they’ve put her on nights already. I don’t know how old you have to be to do a night shift, but she’s, she’s on [00:34:00] tonight. Um, she asks him for his name and location, and he just tells her where he is. He doesn’t want to tell her his name.
Bex: He’s also whispering.
Ellen: He’s whispering. He’s like, just send someone quietly. May’s like, why are you whispering? But then we go over to Josh, who is also on the phone asking someone Where, where are you right now?
And the woman and her husband who are inside the house have also called 9-1-1 to report an intruder. Um, and then they’re gonna send that, they want them to send the police. So May notices that the police have been dispatched and she sort of jumps up and goes, “Hey Josh, why have you sent police there to my broken leg?”
Bex: Yeah. It’s interesting because as Josh types in the address, it flags that RA units have already been dispatched and as Josh is typing in that he needs police dispatched it alerts on May’s screen that.
Ellen: Yeah, that’s a cool system.
Bex: LAPD has been [00:35:00] dispatched, so May is questioning Josh, like, “Why have you just sent police to my like, person that’s fallen over?” and he’s like, “Why are you sending ambulances to my potential break and enter?” And they, they, so
Ellen: it doesn’t take them long to work out what’s going on.
Bex: Yes. It takes us a little bit longer though, ’cause we’re gonna cut back to the, to Irvine Street and the scene where the 118 of course have arrived. Um, Chim and Hen immediately run over to check on the young man who was trying to break in, whose name is Connor.
And we learned this because the woman who was calling 9-1-1 races out of the house as the ambulance gets there and screams his name.
Ellen: Okay. So apparently this guy has a compound tib-fib fracture to the right leg. So he is got bone sticking out.
Alice: Ew.
Ellen: But he’s still got blood flowing,
Bex: which is good. So while Chim and Hen are working on Connor, uh, the husband and wife [00:36:00] start bickering with each other because, uh, Trish, who is the wife slash mother of Connor turns to her husband.
Uh, we do get a name. I think it’s like Harv or something. Where is it? Ho Yes. It’s Harv. Yeah. Trish turns to Harv and says that this is all his fault. And Connor says that it is all his fault because he’s the one who kicked Connor out of the house. And it was either he snuck back into the house or he slept in his car
Ellen: and suddenly everyone is like taking notice of what the conversation is. They’re like, oh, something’s happening here. Like, mainly Buck and Eddie. They’re just like, what’s going on?
Bex: Yeah. This is probably the most interesting thing that’s happened all night for them.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Um, the hu the Harv, the father slash husband tells Connor that there were other options other than breaking in or sleeping in his car.
He could, you know, get a job or he could pay them rent. Um, [00:37:00] Connor says that they don’t need the rent because they’re already rich and Trish chimes in and tells her husband to stop being so hard on him. He’s going through a quarter-life crisis, which is hilarious because um, Harv says, “That’s not, that is an absolute load of…” and before he can say bullshit, Buck jumps in and says, “Oh, no, that’s a real thing. I, I, I’ve been through it.” And Eddie just starts laughing.
Alice: I think Buck’s still going through it at this point.
Bex: He’s so still going through it.
Ellen: To be fair, I think Eddie also had a quarter life crisis when he started joining Fight Clubs and so on. But anyway,
Alice: yeah.
Ellen: Oh, they have an argument about not, not Eddie and Buck, um, the husband and wife have an argument about being the good cop and the bad cop, and
Alice: yeah, Eddie and Buck generally are generally agree on parenting, so it’s fine.
Bex: This is funny though, ’cause the, the husband’s like, you wanna be the good cop, so you always make me the bad cop. I’m sick of it. And Chimney, who is like [00:38:00] two weeks into being a parent, says, “Can’t you both be the good cops?” And every single person at the scene, including Buck, says simultaneously. “No,”
Alice: no.
Bex: Which Chim’s like, “What I mean, but like the tough luck doesn’t actually work. Right? It just makes your kid hate you.” And Hen’s like, “Uh, some kids need discipline,” and Buck’s like, “But not too much.”
Alice: Yeah. Eddie goes, “I’m curious to know what your definition of too much discipline is.”
Bex: So am I actually, I mean, we know what his parents were like. Um. Disciplining him would have meant that they had to pay attention to him.
Ellen: Yeah I was gonna say they didn’t discipline him. They just ignored him.
Bex: Yeah. So I don’t know where he is getting this ideas about discipline from. Interesting. Um, but at this point, Athena has joined the party because of course she has. And, um, Harv notices that she’s arrived and [00:39:00] demands that she arrest Connor as he’s being loaded up into the ambulance.
Ellen: Yeah. Then we get the, you know, Athena doesn’t know that they’re related, so, and Hen says, “You want her to arrest your son?” And Athena’s like, “They’re related?” So then we get the explainer of why, um, or basically what has happened. So they had, he wouldn’t leave. They tried to kick him out, but he wouldn’t leave and he was “taking us for everything we got.”
I’m like, well, I don’t, I don’t think you can do that.
Bex: That’s your kid.
Ellen: But anyway. Yeah.
Bex: Well, he, he wants Athena to arrest. Um, he wants Athena to arrest the kid because it’s breaching the restraining order that they had out on him. . But Bobby says, “You might wanna check this out first,” because he’s been doing a little bit of sleuthing.
Apparently he’s still in amateur detective mode.
Ellen: Oh, yeah.
Bex: And he has realized that
Alice: he’s going through the garbage. He’s,
Bex: I wouldn’t have put it past him, but No, he’s noticed that the bolts that were securing the trellis to the facade of the house, [00:40:00] um, very, very clean breaks, almost like they were cut.
Alice: Yeah. Um, apparently the dad was just up there repairing it.
Ellen: He. And Connor’s like
Bex: and the trellis was, the trellis was fine a few days ago.
Ellen: It was fine the last, last time I broke in. Yeah.
Bex: Right. And so the husbands thinks that that’s the gotcha moment. He’s like, “See, he just admitted to breaking in!” And everyone else is going um, sir, that’s, that’s not what we are taking away from this situation. We are taking away that you um, you’ve done something to the trellis to cause your kid to fall and break his legs.
Ellen: Yeah. That’s like kind of messed up, buddy.
Bex: Yes. And they’re all mad at him, including his wife and he turns to his wife and said, “you have coddled Connor too long. You need to decide who side you are on.” He clearly is expecting her to side with him. He is a hundred percent wrong because the next cut [00:41:00] we get is Trish jumping into the back of the ambulance with her kid and Athena leading Harv off in handcuffs.
Ellen: Yeah. And she tells him not to bother coming back ’cause she’s gonna change the locks. Bobby says to Athena, “Interesting parenting techniques.” So we almost get a parenthood, but not quite
Alice: nearly.
Bex: Don’t wait. Um,
Ellen: so just take half a drink
Bex: At this point I was kind of siding with, um, Trish and really thought Harv was like going far too hard. Um, the scene at the end of the episode though, I’m revising my, my position on this and I think that Harv had it right
Ellen: yeah,
Bex: I don’t think it was correct that he, you know, um, there’s a word that I’m looking for that I can’t think of right now, where like he intentionally did something to the trellis to, to cause it to fall down.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: But I think he had it in the right, in like kicking the kid out and that his mother is definitely [00:42:00] coddling him.
Alice: I don’t know how he, um, I don’t know how he got a restraining order though, because.
Ellen: Yeah. Unless the kid was like being violent or something.
Alice: Yeah. Like,
Bex: well, I mean, the kid’s not a kid. He’s in his twenties, so he is a full grown adult. I don’t know, for the drama.
Ellen: Um, but anyway, it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. Uh, I don’t care.
Bex: Let’s, yeah, we don’t, we don’t actually,
Ellen: honestly, I don’t care. Um,
Bex: no, we don’t,
Ellen: we go back to, um, Madney and poor Chim. Yes. I feel for him in this moment. And, and Maddie, to be honest, because these early days of baby or parenthood are rough as hell, especially when you have to go to work.
Bex: They are, and especially when you’re doing a 24 hour shift. So Chim’s just worked 24 hours, he’s walked into the apartment and Maddie literally throws Jee-Yun and at him, and then walks out because she has to now go start her shift. So even though Chim might have got some sleep in the firehouse, um, he still, he [00:43:00] now needs to stay awake all day to look after Jee-Yun and Albert.
Alice: This episode just was already bugging me at this point. But like Maddie’s, like “I’m running so late,” and as soon as she hands Chim the baby she leaves. I’m like, how are you running so late when like Chim just got home? You can’t have le left before Chim got home unless you were planning on ha doing handover in the lobby.
Bex: It was literally, it was just for the, her throwing rapid fire instructions at him and then leaving before he acknowledged that he’d understood any of it.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Just to like really nail in the, the coffin of that. He’s so tired.
Alice: Yeah. So Chim’s overwhelmed. Um, but Maddie’s back at work two months.
Bex: But here’s the thing,
Alice: after having a baby,
Bex: like she gets to work and it’s not like she gets straight to work either because there’s a party.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: So she can’t be,
Alice: they’re greeting her with a party and Yeah. If she was late on her first day, they absolutely would not have cared. But like, I, I [00:44:00] totally understand being like anxious about being late, but like. So, um, yeah, they have a cake and because they didn’t get a chance to throw her a shower um, they’ve got like gift baskets and one’s for her and one’s for the baby. The one for her has like cheese and booze and, you know, that sort of thing, which is cute.
Bex: All the stuff that she couldn’t eat while she was pregnant and probably still can’t eat if she’s breastfeeding. Yeah.
Alice: But anyway, that’s fine. Yeah.
Ellen: And then they all start throwing advice at her since they couldn’t give her a baby shower and she’s just standing there going, okay.
Bex: You know, no, and I love Linda’s advice. She’s like, “Don’t listen to anybody’s advice, but I am about to give you advice that you do need to listen to.”
Alice: Yeah. Which is, don’t listen to advice,
Bex: but her, her advice really is good advice. So if Maddie was gonna listen to any advice, I would listen to Linda’s, which is, um. [00:45:00] “You can have it all, but you can’t do it all. You need to get help. You need to delegate. Don’t be a martyr.” And Sue chimes in.
Alice: Yeah. And Sue agrees.
Bex: Yeah. You, um, “it takes a village. So use your village.”
Ellen: And then Josh keeps it real and says, “Are you ready for this?” and Maddie’s like, “no.” Like, yeah. I’m not surprised. It hasn’t been that long.
Bex: Nope.
Alice: Yeah. Two months. Far out.
Bex: And we get kind of the, the first inkling of the storyline that’s gonna happen in this episode, in that we’ve just had Linda and Sue reiterate, you know, you need help. You need to ask for help. You need to let other people in.
And when Josh says, uh, starts talking about babysitting, even though he’s like, “I don’t wanna babysit, but you know, I will help you in any other way that you need.” Maddie very confidently says, “No, it’s fine. Chimney’s got it.”
Alice: Chimney does not
Bex: Chimney does not in fact have it.
Ellen: He doesn’t have it
Bex: at all. No, it is chaos.
Ellen: [00:46:00] So he reminds Albert, like he asked Albert if he took his medicine and Albert’s like, “oh no, I forgot.” So Chim gets the medicine then.
Bex: But while he’s ch, while he’s trying to get, make sure that Albert is taking his medication, he’s trying to make lunch either for himself or for Albert. And he also has a bottle on the bottle warmer so that he can feed Jee-Yun.
Ellen: Yeah. And
Bex: all at the same time,
Ellen: the bottle warmer, he tries to pull it out and burns himself. And I’m pretty sure those bottle warmer things are only warm water to warm, like you can’t burn yourself on it. Because it’s,
Bex: no, if there isn’t, could you imagine how like that’s the plastic cap that’s going over the top of the teat?
Can you imagine how hot the teat is?
Ellen: Yeah. Um,
Bex: and how hot the milk inside the bottle is if like Chimney’s burning himself on the outside?
Ellen: Yeah. I mean, it’s designed to just warm it up a little bit so that the the’s no possibility of burning the baby. So you are definitely not gonna burn yourself on it. So, I don’t [00:47:00] know what they were thinking with this. But anyway, for the drama, he burns himself on the bottle warmer.
Bex: So whoever has, whoever wrote this episode, which I think is Lindsay’s got, um, her name to it, um, does not know what like mommy content creation is like in the 2020s and also has never used a bottle warmer before. I used, I had a bottle warmer, but it was just like this, um, machine you poured hot, you poured water in the bottom of, and it just like produced steam.
And then it would steam until it got to a certain temperature and then it would like let you know that it’d reached that temperature. And then I think at that point it like switches itself off so it won’t exceed that temperature.
Ellen: Right.
Bex: But anyway, that’s not the important point of this, um, scene. The important point of this scene is that Chim is like juggling so many balls at this point, um, that he’s completely overwhelmed and then there
Alice: He’s dropped them all. Yeah.
Bex: Like he, well, there’s a knock on the door and that just all the balls go flying ’cause that he is not capable of [00:48:00] handling yet another ball being thrown at him. Um, and he, neither he nor Albert were expecting anybody, but it turns out it’s Mrs. Lee.
Ellen: Yay. It’s nice to see Mrs. Lee again
Alice: or Anne. Chimney’s still not, not quite comfortable with calling her Anne,
Bex: which is so cute,
Alice: meanwhile, Albert from the lounge room just goes, “Hey Anne,” because he was not raised by Mrs. Lee.
Bex: Exactly. It’s, it’s, it’s quite hilarious the different relationship that the Han brothers have with Mrs. Lee and the level of comfort.
Alice: That’s so cute.
Bex: Because, you know, Albert’s met her as an adult, so he’s quite happy to, um, to communicate with her on an adult level, whereas, um, Chim’s like a little bit more respectful of her. Um, so Anne comes in and she immediately just like tries to take over, not in a bad way, but she can clearly see that Chim’s struggling
Alice: in a grandmotherly way. Yeah.
Bex: And she wants to help. She’s like, “I’ll take the crying baby. I’ll give her the bottle. You [00:49:00] two eat.”
Alice: Yeah. So she’s brought soup, which is lovely, Chimney is very grateful for the soup, but is like, “yeah, you weren’t just in the neighborhood, were you? Like, did Maddie ask you to come check in on me?” And Mrs. Lee’s like, “You’re so suspicious. Maddie asked me the same question when I called her yesterday.”
It’s like, yeah. So she was checking in, but
Bex: but she just
Alice: in a good way.
Bex: Yeah. She just wants to see if they need any help. Chim immediately brushes her off. She’s like, you know what, we are fine. And we’ve got it all under control. Albert looks at him like he’s suddenly grown a second head and gone, “What are you talking about? We absolutely need help. Hey Anne, do you mind taking me to my therapy session so that Howie doesn’t have to late this afternoon?” Yes. Albert use that village.
Alice: Yeah. Um, then Chimney’s just like, “Oh my God, you remembered your appointment. That’s great.” And Albert’s like, “No, I can just read.” ’cause he is standing right next to the calendar. It’s, but yeah, the calendar on the fridge is chaotic.
Ellen: Yeah. [00:50:00] ’cause Chim and, and uh, Maddie are working opposite shifts at the moment. Which is not sustainable. I don’t know why they ever thought they’ll be able to handle doing it that way, but
Bex: because they had no idea. Nobody ever has any idea before you go into it.
Ellen: No, no.
Alice: I remember one of my friends, her and her husband worked from ho worked from home, and they were like, oh, like when we go back to work, it’ll be fine. Like, we’ll just have the baby and um, and he’ll go to daycare like two days a week and then the three days, like, it’ll be fine because I’m part-time, so I’ll only have to look after him two days a week and yeah, no, he’s at daycare five days a week now. It literally lasted like two weeks and they were like, yep, no daycare. Bye.
Ellen: Oh, it’s, it’s impossible to do, to do work at home when the kids are at home. Believe me.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Especially at, um, at this age. Like at, yeah. Yes. Jee-Yun would be sleeping a lot, assuming she is a, like a good sleeper, which I don’t think she is considering.
Maddie is constantly saying, I like, I try to put her down. She starts crying, but. [00:51:00] That sleep only lasts for a couple of hours, and then you’ve got a baby that you can’t just leave somewhere while you’re working to entertain themselves.
Alice: And like, you don’t know when they’re gonna wake up either. Like, it’s not like they have like great sleeping hygiene. So it’s not like you’re like, okay, I’ll put a two month old down at like 10:00 AM and it’ll sleep until 4:00 PM when I’m done with work. Like, no, that’s not how it works.
Bex: Oh, or they might, but then they’re gonna be up from, like, they’ll be up 4:00 PM until like 3:00 AM and you’re not gonna be able to do anything.
Um, so yes, the schedule, but that, um, between Maddie’s shifts, Chim’s shifts, probably Jee-Yun’s appointments and Albert Albert’s appointments, um, is chaotic. And Chim acknowledges this when Anne walks around to take a look at it and he says like, “I know it looks crazy, but we’re making it work. We just, we wanna make sure we don’t lose a second with Jee-Yun and we’re not willing to leave her with strangers.”
I think he means, like in his head, he’s talking about putting her in daycare.
Alice: Yeah.
Yeah. Like he doesn’t, I don’t think, like, they [00:52:00] don’t wanna get a nanny or daycare like, or use childcare.
Bex: Anne takes it personally. She hears,
Alice: yeah. Anne’s like, “oh, well I’m a stranger to the baby, so that’s my,” and he’s just like, “no, no, no, no, no. Come back!”
Bex: And she like, literally yeets the baby at him, grabs Albert and books it out of there.
Ellen: Yeah. No, it’s sad that she, she assumes that she’s the stranger. It’s like, no, like you are the, you know, stepping up grandmother, you know, like, yeah.
Bex: Yes. But I think she’s always, I think we’ve seen it through the series, it’s that she’s always very reluctant to take a large role in Chimney’s life because she feels that she’d be like overstepping his own mother.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: She doesn’t want to, um, diminish her even though like she is the one that is actually there. And I don’t think Chim would mind either.
Alice: No. So like, remember that like. Um, Mrs. Lee and Chimney’s mother were best friends. Yes. And so I feel like Mrs. [00:53:00] Lee definitely doesn’t want to replace Chimney’s mother.
Ellen: No.
Alice: And so she’s very res, like, she’s very aware of that because she already like helped raise Chim after his mother died. And so Yeah, she’s definitely got that in the back of her mind.
Bex: Yeah. And Chimney’s just so tired. He just doesn’t know what he’s saying at this point.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: Literally he’s delirious. He’s like, no, come back. Please just take the baby.
Bex: Because yeah, as soon as she hands the baby over Jee-Yun and starts crying again, and so Chimney is suddenly left in this apartment with like, he hasn’t had anything to eat. Um, Albert’s gone at least, but he’s been left with a crying baby. He’s like, “no, Anne, please.”
Ellen: Aw,
Alice: somebody help me.
Bex: Oh boy. Okay. We cut to the Wilson household where, um, Hen’s torturing herself by sitting in the bedroom that had become Nia’s, which is like wall to ceiling pink.[00:54:00]
Um, clutching. She’s sitting on her very pink bed clutching one of her stuffies, one of Nia’s stuffies. Um, and Toni has decided to make an appearance out of the kitchen. They’ve let her out of the kitchen where they’ve like chained her to the stove. Um, and she comes in,
Alice: she sleeps on the, like in the, um, in the pantry.
Ellen: Yeah. We were wondering where she was sleeping last week, the other week.
Bex: Yeah, in the kitchen. She isn’t allowed to leave. Um,
Ellen: oh,
Bex: she comes in to console her child because like, this is her daughter. Um, and her daughter is sad because she had to give up, quote unquote, her own daughter. Which I think Hen even said like, she, she misses her.
She loved her, she loved Mia… Nia, that’s her n. She loved Nia, like she was Hen’s own. And she, uh, is, she’s mourning the fact that, uh, a year from now Nia isn’t gonna even remember [00:55:00] who Hen is.
Alice: Yeah. That’s definitely hard.
Ellen: Yeah. Toni does assure her that she might not be able to remember specific things, but “she’ll remember that you made her feel loved and protected and safe.”
Yes. So they have a hug and Hen just bursts into tears and it’s really sad. Yeah.
Bex: It’s very sad,
Ellen: but cathartic potentially for Hen
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: Um, so that’s a short scene. Um, we go, we go to the Bathena household and. Um, Athena is clearing up after dinner and apparently the kids are going to Michael’s place, um, to help him with his spying out the window.
So he’s, I, we’ll just forever associate Michael’s place with that now. May asks Athena if, uh, sorry. May ask Harry if he can pass her phone ’cause it’s on the table, but as Harry hands it to her, he just looks at it. [00:56:00]
Bex: Oh, it’s ridiculous. The phone is face down on the table. He picks it up and like, yes, I know that there is settings in a phone that as soon as the phone goes face up, the screen like turns back on, but it turns back on and immediately opens to Instagram.
What? There’s no lock screen, there’s no homepage. It’s just immediately flip to turn onto Instagram.
Alice: As if any teenage girl would just have their phone unlocked.
Bex: Exactly.
Ellen: Yeah. You don’t get to be mad about it if you don’t be phone locked.
Bex: So not only do the writers or the people on this phone on this episode not know how, um, mommy blogging works in the 2020s, how baby bottle warmers work.
They like, they already didn’t know how phones work from the last episode that I went off on how bad their idea of how technology works, or you guys went off on my behalf, on how bad technology is. Um, but it’s still, they have not learned from their [00:57:00] mistakes. Um, but it is for the drama because then Harry reports that, um, Layla liked one of May’s Instagram posts, which then brings, uh, to Athena’s attention that May and Layla are back in contact.
Ellen: Oh. And Athena gets really cross about this, like, “Why are you talking to her?” And May said she reached out a couple of weeks ago to apologize and Athena’s like “You told her to go to hell, right?”
Bex: May said No. May’s like, “no, I, we went and got coffee.” Yeah.
Ellen: And this is not what Athena wants to hear.
Alice: Not at all.
Bex: Oh, it’s so hard as a parent though, holding grudges on behalf of your children.
Alice: Yeah. Oh, literal mom hold grudges on people worse than I do. Yes. Like I’ll mention someone and she’ll be like, oh my God, remember when they did this thing? And I’ve totally forgot about it.
Bex: I, there are so many kids that I like [00:58:00] hate to my core because they have done something to wrong my child. And my child will still be like, playing with them and talking to them and being friends with them. And I’m just sitting here like, do you remember when they did this?
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: And it’s not, it’s not even to the point of like, driving my child to a suicide attempt. It’s like, no, it’s something completely stupid. Like they tore up a Pokemon card or something. Uh, yeah. And like, made my kid cry. But, but yes, parents, we hold onto grudges.
Alice: Oh yeah.
Ellen: But I mean, Athena does take this to like, uh, I don’t wanna say the extreme, but she, she like yells at May about it, like. Sort of,
Bex: to be fair, I think a Athena is slightly traumatized over
Ellen: Oh yeah, very.
Alice: A hundred percent. Yeah.
Bex: Very trauma traumatized having to call 9-1-1 and perform CPR on her daughter.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: So, yeah. But
Ellen: she’s been triggered majorly.
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: She just goes off about, “Now she’s your friend again? Like, what are you doing? Like you can’t let her back into your head again.” And May’s [00:59:00] trying to tell her that they both changed and she’s giving her a second chance.
Eventually, May just like storms out and that’s the end of that scene.
Bex: Yeah. What was really interesting is that when May questions why Athena is reacting like this, Athena yells, you know, because the last time you were friends with that girl, you tried to kill herself. And Harry’s like, wait, what?
Alice: Yeah. Harry had no idea. Poor Harry has also just been traumatized here.
Ellen: Oh.
Bex: Because if we think back to like, Harry was there when it happened, but Athena just told him that May was sick. I think this is the first time that he’s realized exactly the level of quote unquote sick
Ellen: Yeah. How serious it was
Bex: that May was Yeah. Like what actually happened that afternoon. Um, but as this show does, um, we are gonna trauma dump and then we’re gonna cut to commercial and we’re not gonna come back to it. So, poor Harry. Uh, so yes, we’re gonna go commercial. We are gonna come back from commercial, at a [01:00:00] residential house where Chim and Hen have been dispatched because there was a call for an overdose, except the woman who answers the door does not appear to be in any hurry.
She seems confused as to why LAFD are there and she has no idea what they’re talking about. Uh, until Hen tells her that the call came from this address from an Ellen Saxton, um, who turns out to be the woman who answered the door. That’s her mother. So everyone goes rushing into the house and we discover that Ellen, who I am going to be calling like Davida Wallace.
’cause that’s entirely what this entire scene is, is elderly woman who is suffering from, uh, late stages of cancer. It has reached her brain. Um, and she’s done. She wants out, she’s OD’ed on her [01:01:00] medication and she wants them to let her go.
Ellen: Yeah, they sort of, when she reveals this, like we can go through this scene fairly quickly because a lot of it’s just repetitive and really, really freaking sad. So,
Alice: yeah, it’s just really sad.
Ellen: It’s just really sad.
Alice: Um, I made the mistake of watching this the day before, visiting my grandparents in the nursing home, and I was just like, yeah, no, not happy with this. Yeah. And just, yeah.
Bex: Unfortunately I recognized what was going on. Like they were David Wallacing us and just my emotional center of my brain just shut down and went, yep, nope, you done care. I see the tricks. I know what you’re doing, and now you have lost me. I, they have no effect on me.
Ellen: Your evil spells have no effect on me. Um, no, the, she, she, after she, when she reveals that she’s taken something and it’s, it’s too much, you know?
Um, Chim and Hen kind of rush into action and try and work out what [01:02:00] she’s taken and everything. And she gestures at a,
Alice: she’s like not telling
Ellen: no, she’s like, I’m not telling you. And also you can’t do anything because I’ve got this bit of paper here that says that. Um, I don’t want to be treated. So basically they can’t do anything and they’re like, well, why did you call 9-1-1 if you didn’t want help?
And she actually called them so that they would be there with her daughter when, because she didn’t want her to be alone when it all happened, which is kind of really sweet. Interesting, but also very sad.
Bex: Very sad. Um, interestingly, my favorite medical show, The Pitt kind of covered a situation like this where they had a patient who had an advanced directive and a DNR, um, except once he went unconscious, um, his kids overruled his DNR and the, the hospital had to follow the kids’ wishes because they were kind of his, um.
They [01:03:00] had like, power of attorney and Like power of medical.
Alice: Yeah, the medical decision. Yeah.
Bex: So even though the father had made the the wishes, like, I don’t wanna be resuscitated, I don’t wanna be put on machines to extend my life. Um, the kids went, no, you’re gonna put him on the machines ’cause that’s what we want.
Alice: Yeah. I was gonna say was
Bex: Fuck what he wants.
Alice: This was, this is the, like the brother and sister and the old man?
Bex: Yes.
Alice: Oh, it was hard.
Bex: Yeah. So apparently the takeaway is you can have all the DNRs and all of the advanced directives you want, but once you lose consciousness they mean nothing. And whoever is in your care can overrule you.
Ellen: Damn.
Bex: Luckily that doesn’t happen in this episode though, but it can happen. So just something.
Ellen: No, instead we get the, um, the, the David Wallaceing aforementioned, um, where we have, uh, like to the, the “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac.
Bex: Oh yeah. They break out the Fleetwood Mac Oh my God.
Ellen: Which is just such a sad [01:04:00] song in the first place, but there’s, but yeah, there’s a montage
Alice: basically, um, the mother’s like, yeah, “You gave up your entire life to take care of me. Now it’s time for me to give it back. Um, I’m not leaving you. I’m setting you free when you have your own kids. You’ll understand. Um, and this is the last thing I can do for you. So let me.” Then, yeah. The montage shows like a whole bunch of the daughter when she was little, um, like asking if there were monsters under the bed.
Bex: It’s basically we together, it’s like little snippets of their life together to show what, you know, what a the mother-daughter relationship and the highs and the lows. But the fact is that they were always there for each other. Um, probably the only big takeaway from this is that the very first scene with the little girl is that she is shown to be playing with a locket that her mother is wearing.
Um, and that comes back into play at the end of the episode, but it’s just like, blah, blah, blah land.
Alice: We don’t even see what’s in the locket. It, it’s literally just a locket,
Bex: it’s just a locket that she’s wearing. Yeah.
Alice: Yeah. Like it’s, it could be any piece of [01:05:00] jewelry, but no, it’s a mystery locket.
Bex: Yeah. Mother-daughter relationship. Highs and lows, ups and downs, but they love each other to the end. “Landslides” playing so, so sad. I could care less, couldn’t care less. I know we went through that last time. Um, and by the time we get to the end of the montage, the mother is dead.
Alice: Um, so they check, she’s not breathing. Uh, Chim goes to call it in. Um. Julia is like, “What do I do now?” Hen says, “Take her with you.” And I assume she means like spiritually, not like,
Ellen: not like pick her up and take her with you.
Alice: Technical.
Ellen: That’s grim, but…
Bex: Fold her up and put her in a suitcase?
Alice: It’s very weird phrase… Like, like we cut back and like, she is like just watching TV with the mom, like dead in the armchair,
Bex: she, Norman Bates-ed her.
Alice: Yes. Literally what wasn’t it just last week? We were,
Bex: yes. We were talking about Norman Bates. Yeah.
Alice: Good. [01:06:00] Excellent. Yeah. So, um, Linda’s brother comes around and shows me how to
Ellen: No, no, definitely spiritually, um, remember her and move on.
Alice: Yeah. It’s a very weird phrasing.
Ellen: It is weird phrasing.
Bex: It is. Um, and that’s it. That’s literally the entire sequence. It was just. To toy with our emotions and it, for me anyway, it failed dismally. I don’t think it’s ever worked. And this show makes me cry. Like there are parts of this, this series that no matter how many times I watch it, I will cry. This episode’s not one of them.
Alice: No.
Ellen: Yeah. I’m sure if you had, if you’d been in a similar watching someone fade away situation, then maybe it might have tugged on a few extra heartstrings, but Yeah.
Bex: But no, if you’re telling a story, you, you shouldn’t just be catering to the people who have had the, the [01:07:00] experience that you’re telling on screen. You need to make everybody in the audience feel it.
Ellen: Yeah. And, and, and we don’t know this person.
Alice: Yeah. Like my wife hasn’t been hit by a car on a pedestrian crossing and died. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t cry like a baby when Shannon died.
Bex: I have never had a, um, a fire engine fall onto my ankle and then have an entire city rush to lift a firetruck off said ankle, um, yet
Alice: you haven’t? What have you been doing with your life the rest of us have?
Bex: No, but that makes me bawl like a baby every time I watch that scene
Alice: Every fucking time, oh my God. I’m like, I’m gonna be fine this time. It’s just fictional people listen, then the whole city comes to lift. I’m like, oh my God.
Bex: See, if you’re telling a story
Alice: such a community,
Bex: you need to connect to everybody. And if you’re only connecting to the people who can actually literally relate to what’s happening on the screen, you have failed as a storyteller.
Ellen: Look, I’m just trying to stick up for Lindsay. All right?
Bex: Nah, fuck Lindsay in this episode, which is, [01:08:00] which is a pity because I think the last episode that we saw from Lindsay was the, um, although interesting, I think it was “Rage”, which was like,
Alice: no, she also did “Powerless”.
Bex: Okay. But see, they’re not so bad.
Alice: Do you remember “Powerless”?
Bex: I remember being hit over the head with everyone being powerless, but you know, in the grand scale of powerless versus like calm as a bitch, it, it wasn’t horrible.
Alice: Um, Rage was also very bash you over the head with, yeah.
Bex: Okay. So she’s not subtle,
Alice: but at least, or entertaining. Anyway. Uh,
Ellen: sorry Lindsay.
Alice: Sorry Lindsay into this. Just be a little bit more entertaining please. Just like something we are just bored and we’re very tired. Oh. Um, my original, like, I’d, I’d like to blame this on the fact that we’ve all had a really tough week.
But I went back ’cause I was like, there’s gotta be something I liked about this [01:09:00] episode. Like I, I, and I wrote notes the first time I watched the episodes through, I wrote notes so that I wouldn’t be like, so I knew when I was surprised and like, you know, so like the episode where Bobby went into the tunnel and it was radioactive and like all the stuff happened.
The first time I watched that I was really tense. The second time I did not care, um, because I knew what happened. But the first time I was like, oh my God. Like I was so tense. It was great. And so I had the original notes where I was like, oh, I did actually care about this the first time. I went back to look at the notes for this episode and I had two notes written.
Bex: Yeah. And one of them, you can’t even remember what the note is for.
Alice: Can’t even remember what the note was for. Um, normally I have like a page of notes. This had two sentences. Yeah. And one of them was just, “what the fuck? Maternity leave in America is two months.” that was it.
Ellen: Anyway, this, uh, okay, so we didn’t quite hit the mark with a lot of the emotional beats in this episode, but [01:10:00] let’s keep going, shall we?
Bex: Let’s see if it gets any better. Spoiler alert. It’s not, but let’s keep going. Um,
Alice: so we’re at the Bathena residence. We don’t even get any cute Bobby Athena moments. Um,
Bex: oh, this, this, like, this Bobby Athena moment is so weird ’cause you’ve got Athena sitting on the, like the bench, like the patio bench.
And then Bobby drags a chair over and sits like three feet away from her opposite her on the chair. And I’m like, dude, if you’re, if you’re trying to comfort her, why aren’t you sitting next to her? That’s your wife.
Alice: They’re like coworkers rather than what? Like, yeah, literally
Bex: he’s treating her
Alice: like, give her a hug. Like you were there, you knew her when this happened. Like, yes, you weren’t there, but you knew her when like May was going through all this shit. Like, I’m sure she’s spoken to you about it. Like give her some comfort, like sit next to her, be like, yeah, I don’t know. It’s weird. Everyone in this episode just acts like roommates.
Bex: The [01:11:00] point of the scene is that Athena is desperately trying to get in touch with May, and May keeps sending her to voicemail. So Bobby comes out to talk to her. Um, the other issue that I have with this scene is that Bobby is trying to like, reassure Athena that, you know, May is, uh, all grown up and that the behavior that she was exhibiting at the time, like three whole years ago, four years, I can’t even remember.
There were so many time jumps in this series, um, is on par for a teenager. And the whole time, this is gonna sound terrible, the whole time I’m thinking, Bobby, what do you know about teenagers? Your kids died before they got there,
Alice: oh, no.
Bex: Like, you’ve never raised a teenager. How do you know how teenagers act? And it’s horrible. But that’s literally what I’m thinking.
Ellen: Oh, that is horrible. But he also, she, he also tells her that you don’t have to, like, [01:12:00] you don’t agree with May’s decisions very often, but she’s grown up now. So you don’t have to like what she does, but you like, you know they’re her choices.
Alice: I don’t know. It was, it was weird. The only good part of this entire, like they, they have this like 30 minute conversation in a 42 minute episode. Like I, I know how they had the time. No, the rest of it was the montage of the dead mother and
Ellen: yeah, I feel like they just didn’t have enough content for this episode, so they just made all the scenes way longer than they needed to be.
Alice: Yeah. Anyway, um, but the only good part is that Bobby at the end, um, so Athena says that, you know, she thought it was because of her and Michael splitting up, but it was something that she had absolutely no clue about. And Bobby’s like, “Yeah, you have to forgive yourself. Do you know how many suicide calls I’ve been on when no one had any idea? You can’t take on that kind of blame.”
Ellen: Yeah, that’s hard. Yeah.
Alice: And like that’s the only, like, I’m just like, yeah, like that. It’s true. Like people are really good at hiding it.
Bex: Yeah. But then, but then they ruin that message because then Athena goes, “no, but I’m her mother. [01:13:00] I should have known I missed it.”
Alice: Yeah. I ignored that because Athena,
Bex: you’ve just completely negated Bobby’s message.
Alice: Sh I like Bobby more. It’s fine. Yeah. So, but yeah, so, uh, then we go back to the Wilson household.
Bex: Oh good lord.
Alice: Um, where Karen has like, despite being the voice of reason, the last like three episodes, um, hired a PI, she’s like to find Nia’s birth mother.
Ellen: She goes, “I think I did a bad thing.” And I’m like, oh shit, here we go. What has she done?
Bex: She’s like, ultimate, ultimately good, but still bad. No, not ultimately Good.
Alice: No, it’s, it’s just bad. What?
Ellen: It’s not a good idea.
Alice: Just, and like Karen was the voice of reason. This whole, I just, fucking God
Ellen: let the fucking department do their job.
Alice: So they go to the… they go to a nursing home. Um, so yeah, so Karen says they, that she found Nia’s, she hired a PI, she found Nia’s birth mother. Um, they go to a nursing home and stalk [01:14:00] her.
Bex: Yes,
Alice: she works. So she works at the nursing home as a nurse’s aide. Even Hen’s just like, “How did you find her?” It’s like you just drove from your house to the thing and that never came up. Like did you sit in silence the whole time? Yeah. Um,
Bex: oh my god.
Ellen: Awkward,
Alice: but oh, it’s so dumb. Like, so dumb.
Bex: So Karen’s logic was that the not knowing whether Nia was safe or not was killing her. And it was quite clearly killing Hen. So she had to know that Nia was okay. And here’s the thing, if you’re going to go into, if you’re going to enter the foster system as foster parents, and you’ve got Diedra telling you that everything is okay, you have to trust.
You have to trust them. Yes. You have to trust that DCFS is doing the right thing. I know that outside of 9-1-1 DCFS fuck up all the time and that kids get returned to situations that they should not be returned to. But that is not [01:15:00] what is going on in this episode. And that is not the message that you wanna be sending people.
Alice: Yeah, no, not at all. Um, so basically they also absolutely glamorize Mia’s mother.
Um, so she was a single mom. She struggled to make ends meet, she got evicted, she was living in her car. Um, people saw her, they called child services who placed her with Hen and Karen temporarily. That was January. And then the pandemic hit. Um, so she couldn’t get her life back together until recently.
Bex: And so they’ve decided that have, after finding out about Nia’s backstory and then stalking Nia’s, birth mother, and learning that she a good conscientious worker and that everybody loves her and that she goes to eat.
Alice: She never had any problems. She just got evicted, goes like, this is a single. She goes, okay, sure.
Bex: They there, there’s a daycare down the street from the, the facility that she works at. She goes every lunch hour to eat with Nia. They decide [01:16:00] that Nia is going to be okay and that they’re not going to do anything else. And I just kept thinking. What if,
Ellen: what were you going to do? Like what, what were you willing to do?
Bex: Yeah. I know the storyline that they were telling in this episode is like, this is the storyline and they were never gonna go the other way.
But I just kept thinking of the what if, what if you decided after doing all this investigation, that you didn’t agree and that you still thought, like, what if they went, oh, she’s in daycare five days a week. We would never put her in daycare. We kept her at home. She always had somebody at home. We don’t think that that’s good enough for Nia, so we are gonna launch legal action to get her back.
Like, what the fuck?
Ellen: Yeah. It’s very weird storyline.
Alice: It’s fucking, it’s, it’s fucking stupid. I’m mad at the, I’m mad at this whole storyline. A lot of people are mad at the whole storyline like this. It’s,
Bex: and also just to like make matters worse. Like you said, Karen has been the [01:17:00] voice of reason the entire time.
So why did they make her jump off the deep end in this episode? Yeah. It would make sense if Hen had gone like completely over the top Yeah. And hired the private investigator. Yeah, because like, she’s already spiraling, so it would just like add another level to her spiral. But now she’s dragged Karen into her spiraling.
Ellen: She probably just would’ve asked Bobby to do it.
Bex: Bobby and Michael. Bobby and Michael would’ve found her.
Ellen: Bobby and Michael would’ve worked out. He just looked through his telescope.
Alice: Um, but yeah, and also because she’s just, she’s just a normal person who fell on hard time. Like that makes her worthy of having her baby back. Like,
Bex: yes.
Alice: Oh my thought. There’s so much that I could be like, Ugh.
Bex: And then because they deemed that this was a good resolution, that this woman like truly deserved to have her, you know, her child back. They’ve gone, okay, maybe we can continue to foster.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: Like, no,
Ellen: that’s, that is not a good decision absolutely
Alice: no, [01:18:00] because addict like addiction happens, shit like that happens. That’s like. Ugh. It just makes me so mad.
Ellen: Imagine if Diedra had found out that they’d done this. Like,
Bex: oh, if Diedra found out, they would’ve immediately been scrubbed from the program. Yeah. They would not be allowed near any,
Alice: they probably would’ve also been like, yeah charged or something. Surely.
Bex: Oh, stalking. Well, they probably would’ve gone to the, um, to Evangeline and gone
Alice: Also, I just, I just don’t know, like, I could be wrong, but like, I know that CPS, like, obviously there’s not enough foster homes for the amount of kids that they have. Right. And reunification is the, like the main goal. Generally, as long as the kid is fed and clothed, like if they’re living in their car and someone called CPS, CPS will usually be like, okay, we’ll try and get you [01:19:00] into a shelter or a home.
Ellen: Yeah. The best place is still with their parent. If their parent is not abusing them, basically.
Alice: Because, because especially like a toddler, it’s so traumatic to take them away from their parent and it’s also really bad for the parent. Yeah. And so they would try and keep them together. And so it just,
Bex: I don’t know enough about, uh, how DCFS operates in California. ’cause I’m guessing it’s going to differ what, depending on what resources
Alice: Oh, true. The state Yeah. Are available. Um, but yeah, ’cause I’m like, honestly, I’m basing this off what I’ve seen from Teen Mom. Um, but so many of those kids, like are, you know, not in great places and they get child protective services called on them, and they’re like, well, they’re fed and go like, and clothed so
Bex: yeah. There’s there’s a level of privilege that’s been brought in here where they’re like, oh, you’re living out of your car. That’s not acceptable.
Alice: Yeah. But instead of finding her [01:20:00] somewhere to live, they were just like, oh, well we’re gonna take your baby away because you got evicted. It’s like, that’s not right.
Bex: Yeah. Uh, like I said, I don’t know how it works in California or whether that is something that the system does in California. Um, if you know how the system works in California, I don’t actually care. Don’t tell me.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Look, I hate this storyline, and I don’t.
Alice: We just think that Nia should have been with her mother, like, help her mother out. Don’t just leave her for dead and take her baby away. Jesus Christ. And Karen, why the fuck are you hiring a PA to find a toddler?
Bex: A PI?
Ellen: A pi,
Alice: A pi.
Bex: They’ve got a PA that’s Toni
Alice: personal assistant. Why are you hiring a PI to find this poor child who you’ve known like, oh my God, it just shits me.
Bex: Yeah.
Alice: Ugh. Um, now we get to May who’s bitching to her dad as much as we’re bitching about this episode.
Ellen: [01:21:00] Yes.
Bex: Yes.
Alice: Um, so yeah, so we’re back at Michael’s house. Bex, did you wanna talk about your note or are you just skipping over? ’cause you don’t care?
Ellen: I just saw the note. I’m like, wow.
Alice: Yeah, I’m like waiting for you to jump in. And I was like, I don’t think she cares.
Ellen: I did notice the hotel writing on the side, but, but I think caps,
Alice: I was like waiting for her to jump in.,
Bex: I mean, if anybody is interested, like, I, I don’t care at this point, but, um, when you look through the windows of Michael’s apartment, you can see the signs for the Hotel Cecil, which has a very sordid history in, um, Californian history.
It is not called the Hotel Cecil anymore. It’s called the Stay on Main. It’s now, uh, low income housing. Um, not a hotel anymore, but, um, and it’s now apparently like a heritage listed. Um. Hmm. I think for the architecture, not for the fact that a serial killer, uh, or possibly multiple serial killers lived on the premises, operated at the premises.
And, um, the most [01:22:00] recent sort of infamous part of the, the history of the Hotel Cecil, is the disappearance and subsequent death of Elisa Lamb on the premises, which brought the “elevator game” internet legend into the general consciousness.
Alice: Oh, the elevator game? Is there. I just, I just wish I could learn more about the elevator game.
Ellen: Is there not a story about that?
Alice: By reading a, a choose your own adventure fan fiction with Dean Winchester and Castiel the angel. I just wish
Ellen: Sure. Surely there must exist. It must, must some story like that
Alice: if only someone would write that. Um,
Bex: if only, if only.
Alice: So yeah, if you wanna know more about the elevator game, um, go to Archive of Our Own and um, find the choose your own adventure Destiel fic by one, uh, Bex, who also hosts this podcast.
Ellen: Um, yes, indeed. And wouldn’t that have been a different, um, episode the other week if Michael had stumbled [01:23:00] onto a serial killer instead of a, or,
Alice: or the elevator game in, or the other alternate dimension with Dean and Cas making out? ’cause you know, um,
Ellen: who wouldn’t wanna do that?
Alice: Yeah, so May’s bitching at Michael about her mother. Um, they, she’s tired of always fighting with her. Michael’s just like, mm-hmm. Yep, sure. Uhhuh. Um, he’s basically taking as much interest in this storyline as we are. Um, yeah. Michael says that he doesn’t blame her, uh, doesn’t blame Athena. May’s like “You didn’t act like a lunatic.”
And Michael’s like, “Well, I wasn’t the one that found you.” Like, basically Athena thought May was dead. Um, they were scared. Yeah. ‘
Bex: cause the line from Michael is that, um, you know, “By the time I got there at the hospital, you were alive,” and May’s like “Exactly. That’s exactly my point. Thank you.” And Michael goes, “Except when Athena found you, you weren’t alive.
Alice: Yeah. You were dead. Like you weren’t breathing.
Bex: “You weren’t breathing. [01:24:00] She thought you were dead and you were dead from her pills, which I told her to throw out.” And May’s like, “Wait, you blamed Mom as well?”
Alice: Michael says he didn’t blame her, but he, like, they both said a lot of things because they were scared. Um, they are past it now, but like, Athena’s not made of steel.
Bex: Yeah.
Alice: And he also, then he says. You know, “I’ll never know what she went through when she found you. And I’m kind of grateful that I never will.” So naturally May goes to work and it’s like, oh, I wonder what Mom went through when I died.
Bex: Yep. And so she pulls up the archive record of Athena’s 9-1-1 call.
Ellen: Oh, this is just awful to listen to.
Bex: And,
Ellen: and it goes on and on forever. It goes on and on.
Alice: It’s different to the one that we heard as well, which is interesting.
Bex: It’s far longer and they’ve made changes to it. I considered for a second going back and finding that episode to comparing what we heard in that episode to what [01:25:00] this 9-1-1 call, um, consists of, could not find it, could not care to dig harder. So, yes.
Alice: Oh, there you go. It has been four years. ’cause she was 14. Okay. And she’s now 18 ish.
Ellen: But she goes through all of this, um, chat, like telling the 9-1-1, like just. Talking about, “oh, her heart’s beating. I feel there’s no, she’s not breathing, blah, blah.” And then after all of that, the nine, the dispatcher actually says, “Where’s your location?”
You know, after like several minutes it feels like it just, it’s just a weird call. It’s in general,
Bex: it’s, it’s not a good 9-1-1 call.
Ellen: No.
Alice: Yeah. And considering Athena’s, like I know especially in season one, I know they were showing the difference between like on duty Athena versus mother Athena.
Bex: And I think we discussed that the fact that this was Athena, the mother freaking out, not Sergeant Athena being professional.
Alice: Yeah. Um, but it’s [01:26:00] still like, I don’t know, it’s still weird. Like maybe I’m just the type of person that can com compartmentalize. Um, ’cause like I, um, just before New Year’s, I had to call the ambulance on my mum who wasn’t breathing.
Ellen: Mm-hmm.
Alice: And like she was barely breathing, I should say. Um, and I was just like, yep, cool. This is my address. This is what’s happening. Um, I’ll stay on the line till the ambulance came. And I was like, “Mum, like, get it together. Just breathe. What are you doing?” Um, and then as soon as she was like in, as soon as I got home and like I’m texting my friends like, oh my fucking God.
Then as soon as I got home I broke down and I was just like, oh my fucking God. But like there was no point doing that in the moment ’cause I had to get through it.
Bex: Yeah. But that doesn’t make good television and I think
Alice: Exactly, yeah.
Bex: The point I am pretty certain that the point of that episode was showing the difference between on duty and off duty.
Alice: Yeah.
Bex: Because that was the end of the episode with Abby.
Alice: To be fair, when the first time my [01:27:00] dog had a seizure, I did panic and call, um, his breeder immediately. But I also don’t have training in what to do, when it’s a seizure.
Bex: But I guess the point of this, like overly dramatic. Nine one one call from May’s perspective is that, as you said, she can hear what her mother went through.
Alice: Yeah. And can hear that she didn’t just go into cop mode and go, oh, we’re doing the thing. Um, which wouldn’t have had the effects that
Bex: Yeah. May’s constantly like increasing the volume of the call so that she can hear Athena not talking into the phone, but talking to 14-year-old May, and like begging May to wake up to stay with her, that she’s with, that Athena is with her and she will get you through it. Just don’t leave.
Ellen: Mm-hmm.
Bex: And as May is listening
Alice: Athena’s begging. She’s literally like, “Please, please don’t leave me.”
Bex: As May’s listening to this, as she’s realizing what she put her mother through, she’s like crying at her station. Funnily enough, neither Josh nor Sue [01:28:00] realize what is going on. And those usually have a radar for like weird drama shit going on.
Alice: They’re like, oh, the teenager’s crying again. Leave her alone.
I just gotta say too, like I love May as a character. Love her, like wasn’t so keen and know when she was 14 and angsty, but like, love May as a character, like adore her, love every episode, like love when she’s in episodes.
So the fact that I didn’t care about this storyline says something because I just did not care. I was just like, yeah, cool. She died. Like she’s not. She’s fine now. She got better. It’s all good.
Ellen: It’s just mother daughter drama.
Bex: She got better?
Alice: She got exactly. Thank you. I’m glad
Bex: I’m better now. I got better.
Alice: I got better. Um, Anyway, so we go back to the Madney apartment like it’s. I wanna care about Madney. I just like, I like the fact that they’re parents, I don’t think it’s done.
Ellen: I thought this bit was funny though.
Bex: Oh, this is cute. Because Maddie comes [01:29:00] home and Chimney is standing by the, um, the changing table. And Maddie thinks that’s adorable. Like, “oh, you’re changing her. How cute is that?” And Chim just doesn’t respond.
Alice: But like, also, what does he, did he, did she think he just wasn’t gonna change her for the 12 hours she was at work?
Bex: Who knows? I don’t know. But when Chim doesn’t respond, she walks over to check on him. And the, um, the changing table is right next to a, uh, like a, a support wall.
A support beam or something like this weird, like partial wall in the middle of the living room. And uh, Chim is propped up against it, fast asleep be,
Ellen: yeah, the baby’s just lying there on the table, staring at him.
Alice: Oh, I have to like, literally, oh my God.
Ellen: How long has he been asleep for?
Alice: I don’t know exact ages. I don’t know exact ages, but when do babies learn to roll?
Ellen: No, no, that’s not for a while.
Bex: She’s not gonna roll yet,
Ellen: but, but still, like, she would’ve,
Bex: she’s fine.
Alice: It’s still dangerous, right? Surely you can’t just leave a baby on a change table. Like what if, oh [01:30:00] my God. It just, it freaked me out. It freaked me. I’m not even a mother I’m just like No!
Ellen: she’s fine. But the more to the point is how long is the baby gonna lie there for without making a noise? Like, without crying and waking him up?
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: Like how long is it being asleep for?
Bex: I’m really, I’m, I’m assuming that it’s a micro nap that like he’s
Ellen: Yeah, it must be
Bex: He’s literally just fallen asleep.
Alice: Yeah. Maddie says that yesterday she fell asleep while holding the baby on the toilet. Um, so that is kind of funny. Yeah. Yeah. Um, this is why I prefer puppies. When you go to the toilet, you put them in a crate, you go to the toilet, then you come back and you’re like, oh, good. Just still in the crate.
Bex: I mean, you can kind of do that with babies too. You put them in their crib or you put ’em in a bouncer.
Alice: Yeah, there you go.
Bex: I mean, you can even drag the bouncer into the bathroom with you if you need to, but. Yeah, but the point is that they finally realized that their schedule is unsustainable and they might need some help. Although, interestingly of all of the different ways to get help, their choice is to kick Albert out.
Ellen: Yeah, I thought, I originally thought they were gonna ask [01:31:00] Anne to stay with them as well. I’m like, okay, I know you’ve got in a small apartment, but you know, having her over to help would be fine. But no, they’ve kicked Albert out to go and live with Mr. And Mrs. Um, Lee.
Bex: Mr. And Mrs. Lee. Lee. Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah. And Chim’s like, “Oh, thanks. I know it’s a lot to ask,” but she’s like, “Albert can stay with us as long as he likes,” like, wow.
Bex: Like I know that having Albert there is an extra quote unquote burden on them because it’s an extra person they have to take care of, but for the most part, it’s Jee-Yun that they need help with. Yeah. Not Albert.
Alice: Yeah, because like, they can’t. Like, so Chimney does 24 hour shifts. Maddie does 12 hour shifts when Chim gets home from the 24, he needs to sleep. When Maddie gets home from the 12, she needs to sleep. But they’re doing back to like opposite shifts. Yeah. So neither of them are sleeping.
Bex: Yep. It would make more sense for Anne to come in and like cover that first 12 [01:32:00] hours when Maddie’s at work so that when Maddie comes home, like Chim has slept, the house is a little bit tidied, um, and she can rest while Chim then takes over for the baby.
It just makes no sense for Albert to be the the
Ellen: no.
Alice: But anyway, Albert’s a burden. They’re kicking him out. Yep. Um, but John’s kind of excited because life’s pretty boring when you’re retired.
Ellen: So, so that’s what you need another kid in the house
Alice: and then
Ellen: after you’ve just got rid of them.
Alice: Yeah. So Chim goes to grab Albert’s medications and um, hands Jee-Yun to Mrs. Lee and he goes. “Okay, Grandma’s gonna hold you while Daddy goes to pack,” and Mrs. Lee like “I’m not, uh, I mean like your mother,” and Chim’s just like, “yep. We’d be so grateful to you that you took in her kid after she was gone. Loved him, loved me. You finished the job she started and I’m not sure if I ever said thank you for that.”
Um, and was literally just like, [01:33:00] yeet! Have the baby. Bye
Ellen: You’re grandma now. But she’s Yep, she’s happy.
Bex: You’re grandma now.
Ellen: She goes, “Don’t worry, grandma’s got you.” It’s cute.
Alice: Yes, it’s sweet. ’cause like obviously she doesn’t have a son, like a her son anymore for that. Yes. So now it’s just like, well, you’ve got a family now sucked in Mrs. Lee.
Ellen: Congratulations.
Bex: But that like, that’s sweet. That’s the sweet, sweet part.
Alice: I like this whole, that scene is the only good part about this episode. Yes. So then we, that’s that whole episode could have been that scene and I would’ve been happy. Mm-hmm.
Bex: We’ve gotta get through the final montage though. Sorry. We’re gonna get a montage talking about parenthood and being a parent. Apparently the whole theme of this episode is letting go, uh, because that’s,
I’m
Alice: pretty sure it’s parenthood but sure,
Bex: because that’s what Hen says with her opening monologue is, uh, “Being a parent is a process of letting go.” As we get the monologue and all of the different montage of the different parents that we’ve [01:34:00] met throughout the episode um, our needle drop is going to be “Salisbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel, which according to Wikipedia is a song about letting go.
Ellen: Mm-hmm.
Alice: Who’d have thought. Even the music director had signed out of this episode and literally just Googled songs about letting go. I was like, that’ll fucking do.
Bex: What are the songs that are going to target everyone’s heartstrings? Oh, I know Fleetwood Mac and Peter Gabriel. Let’s go. Um,
Alice: yeah, so I just googled like I was curious and just Googled songs about letting go, and I love that the second suggestion is “Since You’ve Been Gone” by Kelly Clarkson, I just don’t think it would’ve hit the same.
Ellen: No, probably not. Oh yeah. I can breathe for the first time. Yeah. Okay. That’s not really,
Alice: also, we are never ever getting back together, which I, I also just don’t, don’t know if it would’ve, um,
Ellen: not quite the right tone.
Alice: It wouldn’t have hit the same. Yeah.
Bex: No.
Ellen: But anyway, har Karen, I just did it now, Haren and Ken
Bex: see?
Alice: [01:35:00] Ken and Haren,
Ellen: um, Karen and Hen ask Denny,
Bex: should we just call them Henren? Let’s just,
Ellen: Henren. They decide that they’re gonna ask, uh, Denny what he wants to do. They’re gonna delegate their decision making to their son. And
Bex: maybe they should have done that before they started fostering.
Ellen: Maybe they did and, and I don’t know. Who knows? Anyway,
Alice: I don’t know. He was a year younger then too. It’s like forever in children years
Ellen: and then May gets home and Athena goes to apologize, but May just gives her a big hug.
Bex: Oh, yeah. Your body tackles her. Yeah. She’s like, “I’m so sorry I put you through all that!”
Ellen: And, um, so they’re, they’re okay now
Alice: then we go to, go back to Bryson in the hospital with his mother, who I completely, I I’d forgotten about her at this point. Yeah, we’ve, we haven’t even been talking that long and I totally forgot that Bryson and his and super Supermom Beth existed.
Bex: I think the only reason that they get that is the line of the monologue that, uh, Hen is giving [01:36:00] is that we struggle to see them quote unquote kids, um, as their own person instead of just as an extension of ourselves.
I think that ties into Beth who was like putting her and her, um, her content creation’s needs over Bryson’s. I don’t care. Nobody cares. Um,
Alice: yeah, no one cares.
Bex: So we cut back to, uh, the Madney apartment where Jee-Yun and has finally gone down for the night. Chim is unpacking, um, takeout because he is going to surprise Maddie with dinner and a movie like it’s like date night, but you know, new parent style ’cause it’s gonna happen on the couch.
And he very graciously lets Maddie pick what they’re going to watch for their dinner in the movie. Um, and she’s very excited. And then we cut to like maybe 30 minutes later, it’s not gonna be that long. Um, they are both wiped out, asleep on the couch and we see the movie still playing on the TV screen in front of them, which is the feed from the baby monitor.[01:37:00]
Alice: It’s very cute.
Ellen: That’s cute.
Alice: And also that scene also was very cute.
Ellen: Like really sad that they decided to watch the baby monitor. It’s like no.
Bex: Yeah.
Ellen: On your date night.
Alice: I mean, they’re still in the new parent thing. Their kid’s still cute or has just turned cute at two months old. I don’t know. They’re not an alien anymore. It’s cute.
Bex: Um, then we get a rare Christopher sighting because, a random Christopher sighting.
Ellen: Yeah.
Bex: I wonder if there was extra storyline for the Diaz’s that got cut in favor for the David Wallaceing, um, storyline. But, um, Ana and Eddie are on the couch watching a movie, not the baby feed monitor. Not like baby monitor feed.
Alice: They’re also watching Jee-Yun’s baby monitor, just like this is really boring.
Bex: Or it could have been worse. They could have been watching Christopher sleep, um, which wouldn’t have worked because Christopher can’t sleep and he’s come out to ask if he can watch TV with them. Eddie looks a little [01:38:00] bit like, oh dude, like you’re, you’re harshing, you’re crashing.
You know, you’re cock blocking me here. Ana is immediately like, “Get in here, bud.” Um, which is interesting. So then Chris gets to pick what they watch.
Alice: Eddie says that. Yeah, Eddie says he is gotta pick something good for them to watch
Ellen: because apparently they don’t like,
Bex: Just not Jee-Yun’s baby monitor.
Ellen: They don’t like the kung fu movie that they were watching before.
Alice: The voiceover Hen says, “Sometimes dedication isn’t always a good thing. We put our kids first for so long we can lose sight of ourselves.” That’s where we go back to, uh, Connor, who broke his legs.
Bex: Yes, he broke his legs,
Alice: but his mother is feeding him chocolate pudding
Bex: and not just feeding him. She’s literally doing the, here comes the airplane. Um, which is when I completely changed my opinion of her and her husband. And I’m now fully on Harv’s side.
Alice: I don’t, Ellen, I mean Bex also took out it, I just read, um, [01:39:00] Ellen, ’cause that’s the name of the dead woman in the next scene. Um, Bex also took out a restraining order on Trish and Connor and this scene, um, is it, it’s not even possible ’cause they’re fictional, but she just went to the judge showed them the scene. It was like, “oh, fuck yeah. Stamp that.”
Bex: Like, I, I don’t, I don’t agree that he should have, you know, um, tampered with the trellis and put Connor’s life in danger. But
Alice: yeah, like he could have killed this kid. That’s probably not okay.
Bex: But if this is the level of coddling that she was doing to Connor, then yeah, no, get him away from me.
Alice: Yeah. Um, yeah, then we go back to, um, Julia staring at the empty bedroom and picks up, um, her mother’s locket. Uh, it just that we already did that whole thing with fucking Abby and her mom.
Ellen: Yeah, it’s true. Been, I don’t, it’s been about doing it again since then, but anyway, yeah. All right. It’s a very quick scene anyway, but we’re going back to very quick scene dispatch.
Bex: She’s, that’s, that’s the [01:40:00] part of her mother that she’s taking with her and moving on with, I guess. Well,
Alice: it’s the locket that has apparently nothing in it because they don’t even show it. It’s not even significant enough to open.
Bex: Well, you know, maybe lock, she’s got like, maybe she’s literally got her mother in it now. Maybe she put the ashes in it.
Alice: Like, it could have been like a cute bit of engraved jewelry or like her wedding ring on a lock or on a necklace or something. But no, it’s just like,
Bex: or a locket where we saw the photos on the inside, but
Alice: yeah. Um, like, could have been a family photo, could have been a photo of those two as like when she was younger and No, it’s just a naked locket.
Bex: No, it’s just a, it’s just a, a random piece of jewelry that they found somewhere in like wardrobe, in costumes.
Alice: Yeah. Um, then, uh, Hen says, “We live our lives for our children. Every single thing we do for is for them. Even the things that are hard for them to understand,”
Bex: which is the killing yourself to set your child free, I guess is is why we, we get Julia at that point then we’re gonna cut to 9-1-1 dispatch [01:41:00] where Josh is completely inappropriate, um, because he and Sue are going over the roster trying to work out how they can get all the shifts field considering that everybody is leaving to go on leave to take care of children or because they’re newly pregnant and will need leave later on.
And he turns to Sue and says, “How come you never had kids?”
Ellen: Yeah. Damn.
Alice: Yeah. “How come you and Don never had kids? Oh, sorry. None of my business.”
Bex: Which you recognize that it’s none of your business and yet you had to ask it. And I know it’s for this next line and I know it’s for the next episode. Um, but. Yeah, because the Sue’s response is, “I don’t, I have kids, I have a floor full of them.”
Alice: But like, you just, you maybe get a life, honey, but you don’t ask people that!
Ellen: It’s found family. No, you don’t ask, [01:42:00] don’t ask people that. But this is bringing in the found family aspect, which we, we, we hardly ever have, um, found family acknowledged or like, like we have, obviously it’s in the show a lot, but they never actually call it out.
They’re usually saying that like, blood family is number one, but at least in this one they actually say a fam, sometimes a family is what you make it.
Bex: And then we cut and then we cut back to, um, Hen ren who for some reason had been given more kids to foster, despite the fact that they’re clearly unfit to be foster parents. Like for emotional reasons.
Alice: Yeah,
Bex: yeah.
Alice: Like they just threw a tantrum a couple days ago and. Then we’re just like, oh, actually our 8-year-old son has decided it’s all G if we foster.
Bex: Exactly.
Ellen: I I hope this is like a little while later though. Yes.
Bex: I don’t know. Timey wimey in this episode.
Alice: But yeah, so they um, Diedra’s like, “yeah, it’ll [01:43:00] just be a few days.” There’s two kids who have like a suitcase each and Hen tells Denny to take, uh, the kids to their room. Apparently their aunt’s driving down for them in a couple days.
Bex: Yeah. So this literally will just be a few days because there is biological family coming to claim them.
Alice: And Denny’s like, “cool, I’ll show you all the good toys. You’re gonna like it here. My moms are awesome.” Like, that’s cute. Danny’s cute. And yeah. Then Hen says, “if you’re doing this whole parenthood,” take a shot. Yeah. Oh wow. Um, “If you’re doing this whole parenthood thing right, it’s your kid who’s teaching you the life lessons, not the other way around.”
Bex: No,
Alice: like I’m pretty sure you should be teaching your kids some lessons.
Bex: I think that’s, I think if you learn a few lessons on the way, that’s probably like bonus. But no, you should be teaching your kid. Yeah. It’s like May, I’ll accept two way street, but it’s definitely not one way. Like the kid to you.
Alice: Yeah, no. Um, yeah, so season four definitely my favorite season still. But like Jesus [01:44:00] Christ, some of them are, some of them are episodes. Um, can’t have bangers every week, unfortunately.
Ellen: Yeah. This one just didn’t really hit did, it
Alice: just didn’t hit.
Bex: And I think the reason it didn’t hit was that it was trying so hard to hit. It was trying so hard.
Alice: Yeah. It, it had like, it was throwing the emotions at us and we’re just like, we don’t, like we’re, we have emotional.
We we’re still not over the emotions of last week. That was literally just a week ago and was a much better episode and so much shit happened.
Bex: Yes.
Alice: That they should have just done like a more comic relief one this week.
Bex: Yes.
Alice: But instead they were like, oh, let’s make it real sad. And we’re like, we don’t care. Albert almost died. We are real sad still that Albert’s sad.
Bex: Yes.
Ellen: Mm-hmm.
Bex: They’re trying to get us, like, if, which they’re trying to get us to care about stuff. We just unfortunately don’t care about. We’re trying to get us to care about characters that we literally met two seconds ago. And like David Wallace it, and that never works for me anyway.
Alice: I care about David Wallace [01:45:00] more than the mother and daughter on this show for this episode.
Bex: I think because David Wallace was the first time we saw it.
Alice: And, and also because it was David Wallace, like, I cared about him from The Office. I didn’t care about him from 9-1-1. Now we, I was like, whatcha doing with my cfo?
Bex: But now we recognize the pattern and we see when it’s coming and we’re like, oh, I see what you’re doing,
Ellen: no, they’re trying to make me care about this person.
Bex: Yeah, but so we’re trying, they’re trying to make us care about characters that we’ve never met. They’re trying to make us care about something that happened four years ago.
Alice: It might, yeah, that too. Um, like it might’ve, I was gonna say it might’ve hit a bit better if we didn’t have such a big episode last week, but I don’t think it would’ve,
Bex: no, I don’t think it would.
Alice: I wish they just… parenthood absolutely fine to do, um, if they wanna do fucking Hen and like Henren be dickheads. But the rest of it should have been very lighthearted
Bex: there. Yeah. There was definitely different ways they could have covered parenthood.
Alice: Yeah. Showed how like Chimney and Maddie was struggling because like it was their first time back at work. Why throw [01:46:00] emotions down our throat when last week was so emotionally taxing and then we had a weird time jump in in a week.
We had a two month time jump. We could have had a week of chimney and Maddie being on maternity leave.
Bex: I dunno,
Alice: like, I don’t know why they rushed through that.
Ellen: Well, they needed, they needed Maddie to go back to work. And you can’t do that in a week,
Alice: but why?
Bex: Because that was their struggle of parenthood is like trying to be a parent and work at the same time and have two working parents.
Alice: Yeah. Which I get, but they could have done that. Like, I don’t know. It was stupid. We needed something lighthearted. I’m still tired from Albert. Like, just give me a minute to have a break?
Bex: Yeah. Well, you’re not gonna get a break next week, so unfortunately.
Ellen: Oh Lord. All right. Tell us what’s happening next week.
Bex: Well, you already know what’s happening next.
Ellen: I already know what’s happening ’cause I’ve seen it.
Bex: If anybody else, if anybody else,
Ellen: remind me what happened in the next episode.
Bex: So next week, the members of the one, a team rushed to the side of a hit and run that leaves a [01:47:00] familiar facing critical condition. Meanwhile, with Buck’s help, Athena investigates the case of a missing woman last seen in a casino, and Josh begins.
Actually it’s Josh recalls an emergency in 2006 that led him to become a 9-1-1 operator. But it’s literally Josh begins,
Ellen: it’s, it’s, Josh Begins. I was so excited to see this.
Alice: You, it’s, you know, I was talking about my notes, um, the notes that I wrote in my first watch through. Mm-hmm.
Ellen: Yeah.
Alice: Uh, my notes from this actually say like, just check the episode title to see if it was actually Josh Begins.
Bex: Uh, yeah. Uh, so triggers for next week, we have, um, car accident, car versus person. But person does not win. Car wins. Um, generic trigger for cops. Um, discussion of missing Black persons and treatment thereof. By whom? I’m not entirely sure. Possibly by the cops. Um,
Alice: cops, yeah.
Bex: [01:48:00] Hit and run, which reflects back to the car accident, kidnapping. Um. Roofies and threat of gun violence.
Alice: Yay. Another real lighthearted episode.
Bex: No, but I,
Alice: this the next episode I actually did like, but
Ellen: well, Josh is definitely the star of the next episode
Bex: because it’s Josh Begins.
Alice: Yeah, it is. Josh begins, we should just call it Josh Begins,
Bex: it’s actually called “First Responders”. I dunno why No. AKA Josh begins.
Ellen: All right. So I, I know we’ve given this episode a real panning, um, and we can only apologize for not liking it, but you know. Join us in our hatred. Let us know what you thought
Bex: or disagree with us completely. Oh, if you this, this is your favorite episode, please come fight us.
Alice: Please. No, please explain some redeeming qualities of this episode.
Ellen: No fighting. Just tell us that what, what it was that you liked about it. That will be fine.
Bex: We are not gonna fight. I know. We’re, we’re not fight, we’re not gonna fight you.
Ellen: We’re [01:49:00] just interested. Yeah.
Alice: Bare knuckle boxing outside.
Bex: We’ll take you down to like Eddie’s rage cage and we’ll duke it out
Ellen: Rage cage. Uh, you can leave us a comment on this episode’s post on thatweewooshow.com or in Spotify or on YouTube or on via social media. All the different ways that you can do that are on thatweewooshow.com and make sure you’re subscribed so you get notified of when new episodes are going up.
Bex: Yes, please don’t trust the social media ’cause I suck at updating our social media. Rely on your subscriptions.
Ellen: Subscriptions will tell you. Trust the robots. Um, thank you very much for listening this week, and we will talk to you next time about episode 11, which is called “First Responders”.
See you then.
Bex: AKA Josh begins.
Ellen: Josh Begins. See you then.
Bex: Bye.
Alice: Bye.
Ellen: 9-1-1 is a [01:50:00] fictional show, but many of the situations portrayed happen in the real world too. If any of the topics we’ve discussed in this episode have affected you, please know you are not alone. You can call or text numbers in your country for help. Just Google crisis support in your location to find out the number.
If you enjoy our podcast, you can help us out by leaving us a review on Spotify or your preferred listening app and by sharing our social media posts. Find out more at thatweewooshow.com.
[outtake]
Bex: Races out of the house as the ambulance gets there and screams his name. And it turns out
Alice: Which is totally what you do to a burglar. You know? You
Bex: a what?
Alice: I don’t know. I’m very tired.
Ellen: Burglar?
Alice: Burglar?
Bex: I’m just gonna make you say burglar. Burglar.
Alice: Burglar,
Bex: burglar.
Alice: Look, this is all I’ve been hearing for half an hour. Oh, now she’s, yeah, there we go.
Ellen: She’s very barky, isn’t she? Is it the [01:51:00] possum again?
Alice: I can, I’ve got a camera out facing where the possum, like where the possum hole is. ’cause we’re waiting for it to leave and it hasn’t left. And I let her, like, I literally left before, took her outside, showed her that there was nothing. She was like, okay. Came back inside and now she’s going off again.
Ellen: Oh.
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