9-1-1 Boss Teases What Eddie’s Journey Looks Like as He Starts Dealing with His ‘Issues Upon Issues’

[Warning: The following contains spoilers from Monday’s episode of 9-1-1. Read at your own risk!]

Ready or not, 9-1-1 is back with another round of death-defying emergencies, set against the backdrop of an increasingly fractured dynamic between the firefighters of the 118.

Monday’s premiere picks up three months after the events of the winter finale, in which Eddie (Ryan Guzman) revealed that he was leaving the 118 after his son Christopher (Gavin McHugh) expressed his fears over the dangers of his job. As a compromise, Eddie began working as a public liaison for the Los Angeles Fire Department—answering press inquiries and managing public relations from behind a desk—but quickly discovered that the monotony of working a 9-to-5 job left him feeling unfulfilled.

But after Christopher notices that Eddie misses being out in the field, insisting that he can be brave just like his father, Eddie’s request to transfer back to the 118 is turned down by Bobby (Peter Krause), who effectively tells him that he needs to address his years of unresolved trauma. The decision stuns Eddie, who lashes out at Bobby: “When [the department] was coming for you and they were trying to fire you, I had your back. I supported you. And now you’re trying to turn on me? You’re going to stand there with 100-something bodies on you, and tell me I’m not fit for duty? Go to hell, Bobby!”

Meanwhile, in an homage to the Oscar-winning film Speed, the hour’s biggest emergency came when Buck (Oliver Stark) and Lucy (Arielle Kebbel), a firefighter at the 147, rescued a family whose pick-up truck was rigged with a pipe bomb which would detonate if the vehicle slowed under 55 miles an hour. While celebrating at a bar later that night, Lucy kissed Buck, who kissed her back, despite being in a good place with his girlfriend Taylor (Megan West). Consumed with guilt, Buck opts to not tell Taylor the truth and, instead, asks her to move in with him, insisting that he is ready to take that next step. But his plans are quickly foiled when Bobby announces that Lucy is one of the two firefighters who has been tapped to replace Eddie and Chimney (Kenneth Choi), who is still searching for his girlfriend Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt). (The other is a firefighter-paramedic named Jonah, played by Brad Durfee.)

TV Guide spoke with co-showrunner Kristen Reidel about the respective challenges that lie ahead for Buck and Eddie, the imminent reunion of Chimney and Maddie, and how the show will regroup after a “wonky” first half of the season.

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You recently became a co-showrunner of 9-1-1 with Tim Minear. Is there a reason that he chose to divide up the responsibility in an official capacity? And does he still get the final say about the arcs of the characters, or would you say you now have a bigger say in terms of creative decisions?

Kristen Reidel: Well, look, this show is hard to make. One 9-1-1 feels like a Herculean task, and trying to do two of them is kind of impossible, and we don’t want Tim to die, so he just felt like it would be better to hand me more of the day-to-day [responsibilities] so that he wasn’t spread so thin. At the end of the day, it is Tim’s show, and he gets final say, but also he has been very open to my ideas. I think, to people on the outside, this seems like a sudden decision. But it’s actually sort of been slowly happening over the course of the last few seasons where just as Lone Star has come up, I’ve had more responsibility, so this was sort of the next step of that.

For both the fans and actors alike, Season 5A felt like a completely different show with a revolving door of actors. Did you also notice a shift in the writers’ room, and how did you ultimately go about solving the numerous challenges that were presented to you in the first half of the season?

Reidel: Yeah, so I’ll just be honest: The first half of the season, we had some challenges, and those challenges started from the beginning. There was a plan that we had had of how we were going to start the season, and we were not able to do that plan. Then we had scheduling issues, there are, of course, always COVID issues in this world now, and a lot of the first half of the season was us scrambling to kind of keep the train running. And a classic example is when we did “Ghost Stories.” We went into prep with an entirely different script, and over the course of seven days, everything fell apart, and you just have to pivot because you gotta keep the show shooting and you gotta make air dates. And sometimes those pivots come out really well, but sometimes people at home can kind of see [when it doesn’t]. I wish that hadn’t happened, but I feel like in the back half of the season, we kind of got our mojo back and we went back to the 9-1-1 that I love, and I hope America loves, and hopefully people just forget about maybe some of the wonkiness of the first half.

There was also a very intentional attempt to integrate Taylor into this world of first responders, and the reaction to her return to the show has been polarized. Why did you and the writers want to flesh out her backstory in particular?

Reidel: We always wanted to do a little bit more with Taylor, and we always kind of wanted to explain where she came from. But part of it was also Megan was very kind to us and helped us fill in when we didn’t have actors to shoot with for various scheduling reasons. So some of the Taylor stuff was intentional and some of it was just… not. I understand that not everybody loves Taylor, but I actually think he’s a very interesting character, and I think that her backstory actually explains a little bit about why she is who she is.

In the premiere, Eddie is trying to convince himself that he enjoys his new job, but he also jumped in during the bomb rescue and stepped on Josh’s (Bryan Safi) toes in the call center. What do you think that ultimately says about Eddie’s innate call of duty?
Reidel: I think Eddie has always been a person who is more comfortable acting than talking. He likes to just get in there and do things, and that’s great when you’re a firefighter and you’re on a scene. It’s a little harder when you’re at a desk, and I think he made this choice thinking it would be better for him, but now he’s kind of struggling with, Who am I? Because when you’re out there and you’re doing crazy stuff and the adrenaline is going, it’s a little bit easier to pretend you don’t have problems. But when you’re at home at night and it’s quiet, that’s when I think the voices kind of come in and say terrible things to you.

Eddie certainly had a right to be upset with Bobby not approving his request to return, but Eddie using Bobby’s painful history felt like a bit of a low blow.

Reidel: Bobby has an immediate reaction to that that’s gonna kind of force Eddie to start dealing with some of his issues. But unfortunately, Eddie’s issues are issues upon issues, so it’s gonna take a little bit of time to unpack all of that.

Why was now the right time to tackle that hefty subject matter with Eddie’s character?

Reidel: Well, we’ve seen Eddie experience a lot of trauma in the time that you’ve known him, and obviously there was trauma even before we met him at the 118, and we have touched on it before—back in season three, where Eddie’s response to Shannon’s death was to lash out. He’s not interested in talking about his feelings, he’s just interested in hitting something, but you don’t want to do that again. So now he’s just trying to keep everything bottled up, which I think we saw at the beginning of the season with his panic attacks and his relationship with Ana (Gabrielle Walsh). He’s very tightly coiled, and he has been for a long time, and I feel like we finally reached the moment where we’re ready to light the match.

Will Eddie lean on people who were once part of his chosen family, or will he choose to be headstrong and tackle this on his own?

Reidel: I think what you’re gonna see is there are other people from the 118 that are involved in his path forward. He finally reaches the point where he has to not only admit he needs help, but he has to be willing to accept it and to embrace it, and that will definitely be part of his journey.

While Buck struggles to understand why Eddie would want to leave the 118 permanently, there’s a big wrench that is thrown into his relationship with Taylor in the form of Lucy Donato. What do you think Buck and Lucy really see in each other, and how will their spur-of-the-moment kiss affect Buck’s relationship with Taylor?
Reidel:
For Lucy, I think it really was just, “This is a cute guy. He seems like fun. We’ve had a few drinks.” And then she kisses him. So for her, it’s not a big thing. And she realized, “Oh, he has a girlfriend.” And that’s kind of the end of it for her. But for Buck, with Lucy, he sees a spark that he hasn’t seen with anybody in a while, and it causes him to do things like ask Taylor to move in. But I think it also kind of opens up this sort of question for him of, “Am I settling?” Because a big part of the front half of the season was that some of the people that Buck loves the most in the world weren’t there—they had left, and Buck doesn’t deal well with people leaving. But Taylor was there and he really appreciated that, and the question for Buck in the back half of the season is, “Am I in this relationship for the right reasons?”

Throughout the episode, Hen (Aisha Hinds) doesn’t want to accept Jonah as a member of the 118—not because he’s unqualified, but because he’s not Chimney. How would you say she is reconciling this feeling of being abandoned in a way by Chimney with the reality that he had to leave to find his own family?

Reidel: I don’t feel like Hen does feel abandoned by Chimney. She encouraged him to go and she understands why he’s doing it, because I think that if the roles had been flipped, Hen would have gotten in a car and driven off to find Karen (Tracie Thoms) in a second. She wouldn’t even have thought twice about it, so she understands it. She just misses him a lot, and I think that when Chimney does eventually come back, for Hen, it’s more like, “Oh, finally the world is back the way it should be.”

In the next episode, “Boston,” the synopsis reads “Chimney is determined to find a missing Maddie amongst the chaos of St. Patrick’s Day.” What can you preview about their reunion and their romantic future? There are a ton of unresolved issues that will have to be addressed between them.

Reidel: Correct. So in “Boston,” we’re gonna kind of see where Maddie went after she left L.A. and what she’s been doing. And then on Chimney’s side, it’s kind of a similar thing, because he’s been in Boston for probably five, six months now. They’re gonna find each other again in an interesting way—a way that maybe neither of them expected to. So there will be this great reunion, but then that’s where the work starts for the two of them going forward past that episode. They’ve both been through a lot, they’ve been apart a very long time—and not just apart, but not in communication with each other—and I don’t think it’s gonna be as easy as we have a happy ending and we forget about those six months. It’s gonna take some time for them to rebuild their relationship.

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When Chimney found out that Buck had been in contact with Maddie after her disappearance, he punched him in the face. Will incidents like that also be addressed, or is that water under the bridge as far as they are concerned?

Reidel: I think that when Buck called Chimney to say, “I think Maddie’s in Boston,” we didn’t see that conversation, but I feel like the two of them worked it out. Chimney’s not a bad guy. He did a really awful thing, but also he was under duress. I think Buck is always very willing to forgive, so I don’t see that popping up again going forward.

What can you tease about the other storylines in 5B? How much will we see of Lucy, Jonah, Ravi (Anirudh Pisharody) and Albert (John Harlan Kim), and how would things work if Chimney and Eddie were to return?

Reidel: Well, Ravi’s definitely part of the team, and we will see him as time allows. The blessing and the curse of this season is we have a lot of really talented actors and a lot of other people wanna work with them as well. So occasionally, sometimes, we can’t have somebody in an episode because they’re just not available to us, but we do have some stuff coming up with Ravi being out on cases and things like that. We definitely will see Albert, and Albert is gonna have a bit of a story of his own in the back half. And then Lucy’s gonna be at the 118, I think, probably through the end of the season, and we’ve got some fun stuff with her. And then as for Jonah, he won’t remain at the 118, but because we do have some large-scale emergencies coming up, we will find him [every] now and then.

Will there be more mini-crossovers beyond this week?

Reidel: I don’t know. There’s always a chance that maybe we could do one more mini crossover, but that’s a little TBD. Unfortunately, there’s no way to do a full-scale crossover this season, but if we can find the opportunity to do something fun like we did with Angela, we would certainly love to do it.

9-1-1 airs Mondays at 8/7c on FOX. Episodes are available to stream the next day on FOX Now or Hulu.

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