Don-Dixie-Blythe Backstory Episode, LeAnn Rimes Song

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains major plot details for Thursday’s episode of ABC’s ”9-1-1: Nashville.”

It’s the moment all “9-1-1: Nashville” fans have been waiting for: the origin story of Don Hart (Chris O’Donnell), his old flame Dixie Bennings (LeAnn Rimes) and his wife Blythe Hart (Jessica Capshaw).

Titled “Don Begins,” the episode flashes between the present day in Nashville with the 113 back to when Don was a young boy who suffered through the trauma of his parents and baby sister dying during an arson at their family home. That same night, little Don meets little Dixie, who happened to live down the street from him with her grandmother. Dixie and her grandmother comfort Don and stay with him at the hospital as he waits for CPS to come and his whole life to change.

Time then skips ahead to when Don was a young adult (played by Ben Winchell) and crossed paths with Dixie (Noa Bess Solomon) once again — this time when they’re both stuck in a jail cell overnight. Once they were out and able to reconnect, their love story properly began. They moved in to a tiny apartment together, he supported her in her music career, she supported him in his firefighter training, and their life together was lovely until it started to unravel due to stress and time.

Don eventually meets and falls in love with Blythe (younger version played by Hunter King) when Dixie takes off to go on tour as a backup dancer for Faith Hill and he figures out what he wants to do with the rest of his life. When Dixie returns and wants to pick things back up, it’s too late. Don and Blythe are so close that Blythe has gotten the Nashville Police Department to reopen his family’s arson case, leading to the arrest of the killer.

The episode ends with one more flashback, this time to the night Dixie and Don slept together — conceiving their son Blue — when he was separated from his wife Blythe.

“It was so cool to know that this was coming and that people really got a glimpse into the origin story of Dixie and Don,” Rimes told Variety. “I think it gives you a different point of view on these characters from here on out. It changes the dynamic between Don and Dixie. I think people have seen Dixie in all of her manipulative ways. But I think that now, seeing young Dixie and the heart of her through Noa, who is just, she’s so brilliant. In this episode seeing her portray Dixie, this wild heart and just the heart of her before life got a hold of her and turned her into a more bitter kind of manipulative flair. It is so fun for me as an actress to play all these different layers of her.”

Rimes added: “I’ve seen so many people conflicted, ‘We love her, we hate her.’ It’s back and forth depending on the episode. And now I think they’re really going to be conflicted, because you really see the connection that Don and Dixie had.”

Another reason why the episode was a special one for Rimes, though she was only playing Dixie in the current timeline, was she wrote and performed a song as young Dixie called “Wild Things Run.” Solomon originally sang the song while shooting, but Rimes recorded the vocals two weeks ago to be used on top of the scene. And in order to do that, Rimes had to make some adjustments to the way she sings these days.

“Her voice is my voice, and I had to make myself sound 20 years younger,” Rimes said. “I took all the bottom end out of my voice, and kind of just did the whole resonating through like my nasal area. And it took me back to the ‘Coyote Ugly’ days when I had to do that for Piper Perabo’s voice.”

Rimes pitched the idea of her writing a song for the show when “9-1-1: Nashville” showrunner Rashad Raisani first told her he was plotting this origin story episode for Dixie and Don.

“I know they have so many great writers for the show, but when I heard that they were looking for a song that kicked off Dixie’s career, I was like, this is what I do,” Rimes, who co-wrote “Wild Things Run” with collaborator Darrell Brown, said. “I do write music and sing for a living. So utilize me. And I went to Rashad and said, ‘Hey, I want to take a stab at this, because I think it would be so powerful for someone who’s lived in this character to write for her.’ And he said absolutely. So he sent me the first draft of the montage scene, just to give me an idea where to jump off from. And I was laying on a massage table in Hawaii and the title ‘Wild Things Run’ came to me. And I was saying, oh, man, it’s perfect, because it felt like that was kind of these two wild hearts as youngsters running towards each other and then running away.”

By the end of the present-day timeline in the episode, Don is making a testimonial on behalf of the man who killed his family, offering forgiveness but not to forget. Blythe thanks Dixie for helping Don reach that moment of peace through an earlier conversation when they shared their memories of the night of the fire. But when Blythe and Dixie part, it’s with Dixie declaring once more that the “universe” will always bring her and Don back together.

And Rimes says Dixie isn’t just antagonizing Blythe — she means it.

“Oh, I think she knows that that’s very true,” Rimes said. “She thinks it’s really, constantly, from the very beginning they can’t seem to get away from each other. And she’s clearly always going to be in love with this man. And I mean, it’s her baby daddy. But it’s not just that. I think there is a real connection and a real pull and history that Blythe and Don don’t have. And I think maybe it’s the universe, and maybe it’s also Dixie always putting herself in the line of fire that, she always somewhat makes herself available to that, too. But I think there is this real connection; that she truly believes, no matter what, they’re going to be connected in some way.”