SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for the Season 9 finale of ABC’s “9-1-1,” titled “Hearts and Flowers.”
“9-1-1” ended its ninth season Thursday with two big changes heading into Season 10: Athena (Angela Bassett) is finally becoming a detective — and Buck (Oliver Stark) might become a father.
In the final moments of the “9-1-1” Season 9 finale, it was revealed that Buck has taken in preschooler Theo and will be fostering him after the unexpected car-crash death of Theo’s parents (who were Buck’s good friends). Theo is technically Buck’s biological son — but Buck previously wanted as little to do with the child as possible, given that he was the sperm donor for his friends and didn’t intend to be part of Theo’s life.
So, is he stepping in now because there’s no one else — or because he’s potentially interested in actually becoming the adoptive father to his biological son?
“Like most decisions, it’s a little bit of both, right? Everything all at the same time,” Stark told Variety. “I think he probably feels some kind of duty and obligation, not necessarily because of the sperm donor aspect, but because it was his friends. And maybe even an element of not being able to save them — not that it was ever his fault. But, I could imagine him to be a character that would shoulder some kind of blame like that, regardless.”
For the upcoming Season 10 of “9-1-1,” Stark said the show now has “the opportunity to delve into why he maybe did have to step in here… Who else is in Theo’s life, and why hasn’t he been helped out further by the foster system?”
“9-1-1” co-creator and showrunner Tim Minear confirmed that Buck fostering Theo is “going to be a gold mine for story” next season on the Ryan Murphy-produced first-responder drama.
“I think it’s completely within Buck’s character to make a decision like that without thinking it through entirely,” he said. “But he absolutely wants this right now. It’s funny, because I talked to Oliver, and he kind of felt like, ‘Maybe I played the ending wrong, because I seem so happy that Theo is there, and am I thinking about the tragedy that he has to be there because his parents died?’ I don’t think he played it wrong at all. I thought he played it perfectly, but that’s really the exploration for Season 10.”
As for Athena, she survived after her fatal injury due to the police corruption case she’s been working on — and the follow-up assassination attempt that happened as she was in the hospital for the first attack. Now, the field sergeant is a field sergeant no more. Athena will be taking on the role she’s been actively doing for a few seasons now, just without the title: detective.
To get to this career choice, Athena had a heart-to-heart with her deceased former partner, Officer Brogan McCluskey (Karl Makinen), in a dream sequence. Minear said that although Athena has been grieving the death of her husband Bobby (Peter Krause) all season, “9-1-1” did not approach Krause to return for this part of the episode and be the one that helps Athena through her brush with death.
“Obviously, if I could have done something like that, that would have been great,” Minear said. “But Peter had moved on to his pilot at that point, and so McCluskey made sense to me. I didn’t just pull him out of the distant past. She had those flashback scenes in Episode 4 with McCluskey and Young Athena. And so it really was Athena’s track in this episode.
“Yes, I spent most of the season making sure that everybody got to grieve properly,” he continued. “So it was a season of dealing with Bobby’s death. But I wanted to move past that, after the Buck episode with the opioids. And so Athena’s track here is really a career track. It’s about her being a cop. It’s about the danger that she’s in, and also, is she ready to make a change? So, McCluskey made the most sense to kind of jump the hurdle into her becoming a detective.”
While Athena’s emergency is the main issue for the 118 in the “9-1-1” Season 9 finale, Eddie (Ryan Guzman) is simultaneously bleeding out in an elevator after being stabbed by the assassin coming to finish the job with Athena. Eddie, of course, is saved when he’s found after the Athena issue is resolved.
Minear explained why he added this plot for Eddie — and it wasn’t just because he didn’t have much else for Guzman’s character to do as the season came to a close.
“I wanted to at least mention the things that I was doing with the characters throughout the season, and Eddie’s was in trying to reconcile himself safe,” Minear said. “That was an important moment for me, just for Eddie’s character. But it also really landed the villain in the story. We just met this kid; we saw him in the previous episode, and then we met him a little bit in that flashback. And I really wanted to just land for the audience what the threat was. So that scene served purposes — and once Eddie gets stuck in an elevator and he’s bleeding out, it just adds another element to the story that I think makes it more suspenseful going to Athena.”
Heading into “9-1-1” Season 10, Minear is also focused on May Grant (Corinne Massiah) and her journey into nursing school. It “wasn’t such a surprise” to see in the Season 9 finale, he said, “because she’d been talking about that for episodes.” But it still marks a significant move for Athena’s daughter.
Source: variety.com
