[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 16 “The Last Alarm.”]
“Everything about this is wrong,” Hen (Aisha Hinds) says at one point during the first episode after 9-1-1 killed off the show’s heart, Captain Bobby Nash (Peter Krause), and she’s right.
It’s been two weeks since Bobby’s death, and no one’s doing well. (They have that in common with the fans, we’re sure.) The good: The calls are minimal, as they need to be, with everyone dealing with their grief. The not-so-good: Bobby’s wife Athena (Angela Bassett) gets wrapped up in helping a woman who lost her baby in a fire eight years prior but is convinced he’s alive. That fire? Bobby and the 118 responded to it, as we see in a flashback.
The flashbacks for that storyline are great, but the rest of it drags out a bit, using up time that would have been better off spent on the 118 and Bobby’s loved ones and their five stages of grief. Bassett is, of course, outstanding as Athena tries to avoid facing her loss and then accepts it. Kenneth Choi is the second clear standout of the episode, delivering one of his best performances of the show as Chimney grapples with survivor’s guilt (Bobby gave him the only dose of the anti-viral, not revealing to anyone he was infected until it was too late). Athena and Chimney’s grief is so painful, it’s almost tangible.
Oliver Stark plays a stoic Buck who seems to be trying to hold it together for everyone else, which makes sense after Bobby’s last words to him, that the others will need him. Ryan Guzman, in his brief moments onscreen, does a great job of showing how this loss affects Bobby, but we unfortunately don’t get to see him learn about Bobby’s death or have more than a couple sentences to begin to address how he feels. Hinds’ Hen gives into her sorrow in a touching moment with her wife, Karen (Tracie Thoms), that says it all. Even Brian Thompson‘s Gerrard is visibly affected by the loss, as seen in how he speaks to the 118, especially how he approaches Chimney. However, that feels more like the actor’s feelings about the character of Bobby and what not having Peter Krause on the show anymore means than how the captain would really feel, even after he helped him earlier this season.
The episode opens up with a flashback to eight years ago, and the house fire that resulted in the heartbreaking death of a baby; the crib falls into the flames just as Bobby bursts into the room. In the present day, the mother’s brother comes into the 118 to talk to Bobby after his sister is arrested; she’s convinced that another boy is her son and his mother set the fire to steal him. Athena throws herself into the work, but in the end, the boy isn’t the woman’s.
Disney / Christopher Willard
As aforementioned, too much of the episode is spent on this storyline. What is great is seeing, in a way, Bobby and Athena working one last case together side-by-side, even if the former is just a hallucination of the latter’s. Athena begins seeing and hearing Bobby as she gathers all the pieces of the case at their unfinished house and talks it through with him. “If you are not going to be helpful, go haunt someone else. I’m busy,” she says at one point. “Bobby” remarks that she’s supposed to be planning his funeral, but she says it’s a hero’s burial, so there’s a template to follow. He also comments on the missed calls and texts on her phone. “You’re the one who locked himself in a lab to die. You don’t get to tell me how to spend my time,” she snaps at him. “Ouch,” he replies. But Athena’s trying to help this woman because she knows that Bobby would have and now he can’t. How can she know that, he wonders. “I know you,” she says. ‘You knew me, past tense,” “Bobby” corrects her. Krause and Bassett are so good together that this scene is a painful reminder of what we’ve lost.
Also great? The flashback to Bobby visiting the woman in the hospital immediately after the fire to give his condolences. He tells her he knows how enormous the pain of losing a child can be, and while she doubts that, he then reveals he lost two. How did he keep going, she wonders. “I live in the belief that one day I will see them again,” he tells her. “With all my heart, I do” believe that. Peter Krause is so good in these scenes, it’s just another indication of how wrong it feels for the show to have lost him.
As Athena struggles with her grief, she refuses to select a burial place for Bobby, then, angry, confronts Chimney when she learns that he complained about it taking so long to release his body. It’s not his place to interfere, she insists, but he just wanted to help. She thinks that he just wants to move on and stop thinking about how he died, but Chimney assures her that no one, especially him, will forget what Bobby did. It’s, of course, with Hen that Athena does eventually break down and give in to the sorrow, turning their conversation (and Hen’s concern) about the investigation into how she’s really feeling. Of the woman’s husband and brother deciding not to tell her there were no remains to bury of her baby, Athena asks, “Who does that? If you love someone, you’re honest with them, you respect them, you trust that they can make the hard decisions. You don’t just blindside them and then take off! You don’t leave them to deal with the mess alone! He’s not supposed to be dead, Hen. He stood here, in this kitchen, that morning, planning our future, and he just left. He left me.” Hen assures her he didn’t want to, but “he did anyway,” Athena sobs in her friend’s arms. This episode really is giving Bassett the chance for a strong bid for an Emmy nomination.
Meanwhile, Chimney takes up running, which his wife Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) knows helps him avoid talking to anyone, as she tells Buck when the siblings share a sweet moment and hug. “I love you, and given recent events, I feel like it’s something I should start saying more,” she tells her brother, and he responds in kind. (Also, Maddie? Very pregnant.)
At the 118, Chimney walks off when Gerrard begins offering his condolences and insisting he’s not there to take the place of the “exceptional firefighter” and “exceptional person” they lost, but instead, help them through the difficult transition. Then, during a call, when Gerrard intervenes and tries to give Chimney a chance to cool off, with both of them hurting, the firefighter yells at him, “You know, you shouldn’t even be here! What right do you have to run the 118? You are not half the man that Bobby was.” Gerrard reminds him he’s his captain, but Chimney responds, “Only because I killed our last one, so I’d be very careful if I was you.” Wow.
Disney / Christopher Willard
When Maddie tries to talk to Chimney about how he’s feeling, reminding him that they promised not to shut each other out, he insists he’s trying not to and just figuring out how to get back up on his feet. That, it turns out, means sitting on the roof of the 118, with a bottle of liquor, the day of Bobby’s funeral. Buck, off a call from his sister, finds him. They’re going to be late, he says. “To my own funeral,” Chimney says, then corrects himself with, “Oh, no, wait, not my funeral, just should have been.” No one blames him, Buck assures him, and Chimney doesn’t either. Rather, “I blame him. Bobby had no right to keep us in the dark. He just decided for everyone how things were going to go, and I kind of hate him for that,” Chimney admits, and yes, he means it. “He should have told us the truth.”
As Chimney sees it, they should have been able to find that third option. “You know, when you’re out in the field and you only have two bad options to choose from, you do not accept that. You do not let those be the only two crappy options available. You always find a third way, you know who taught us that? … And we always did that time after time after time. We never gave up. We always found a third way and we always did it together.” It feels like Chimney’s speaking to the history of the show. Chimney stabbed through the head with rebar? He survives. Eddie buried alive? He finds a way out. Buck’s leg crushed under an engine? He returns to work. Chimney’s been trying to think of that third option for this case but has come up empty. “He gave my life so I could live,” he says, emotional. “I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to do with that.” Buck tells him, “I think you’re just supposed to live.”
It’s what the 118 is supposed to somehow do now going forward. But first, they must make it through the funeral. “Of all the days, this is the one you choose to leave me to go at it alone,” Athena says to Bobby’s photo as she walks inside. Among those in attendance, besides Athena and her kids, the 118, Maddie, Karen, Gerrard, and Tommy (Lou Ferrigno Jr.) appeared to be Athena’s mother and Bobby’s mom as well.
Chief Simpson (Richard Brooks) leads the service: “On this day, we gather here to celebrate the life and legacy of Captain Robert Wade Nash, a day filled with heaviness that weighs on us all, as we gather in this sacred space. A day marked by gratitude for the life we lost and the many lives saved. As we reflect on his service, we remember the countless lives he touched, the friendships he forged, and the sacrifices he made. Captain Nash was more than a firefighter, he was a mentor, a husband, a father, and for so many of us, a beloved friend. There are many traditions in the fire service, among those traditions is the sound of a bell. It was the bell that signaled the beginning of that day’s shift. Each alarm was sounded by a bell, which summoned these brave souls to put their lives on the line for the good of others, and when that alarm had come to an end, it was a bell that signaled the completion of that call. When a firefighter fell in the line of duty, an officer would tap out a special signal, 10 bells. This signal would be heard by all station houses, notifying them of the passing of one of their own. It is customary and fitting that the final alarm be sounded for our brother, Captain Robert Wade Nash. He has completed his duties, a job well done, and is now returned home.”
With that, the emotional loved ones of Bobby say goodbye, carrying out his coffin to the 118 truck, and hanging his turnouts and helmet on the back before the funeral procession down the street.
The episode ends with Athena having found the perfect place for Bobby: buried alongside his wife and kids he lost in the fire in Minnesota. Athena takes a white rose off the top of the coffin and kneels. “Rest easy, you’re home now, baby,” she says. “You’re home.” She leans down and rests her head, then kisses the coffin before stepping back and standing with the kids.
What did you think of how 9-1-1 said goodbye to Bobby? How much did you cry? (I’ll admit it: I cried a lot.) Let us know in the comments section below.
9-1-1, Thursdays, 8/7c, ABC
