9-1-1 season 8 episode 18 finale recap: ‘Let Buddie kiss already’
9-1-1 season 8 came to a head this week with the highly-anticipated finale, “Seismic Shifts”, and we have to ask: are these ‘seismic shifts’ in the room with us now?
After an extremely eventful season 8 of 9-1-1 – hello, serial killers, cross-country moves, and an actual major character death – the finale had a lot riding on it. The absolutely wild and confusing decision to kill off Captain Bobby Nash (Peter Krause) in episode 15 for the sake of moving the story forward left many fans somewhere between sceptical and livid. Last week’s episode, “Don’t Drink The Water”, started to showcase the payoff, with many praising the returning focus on family and complex character dynamics.
Everything might just be okay if the finale successfully stuck the landing.
But, reader, it did not.
In “Seismic Shifts”, we join the first responders almost where we left them last week when the high rise apartment building Athena (Angela Bassett) was investigating began crumbling to the ground. The mood is sombre at the 118 firehouse, as the gang throws a depressing little goodbye party for Eddie (Ryan Guzman), Hen (Aisha Hinds) reveals she turned down the captain job offer, and Buck (Ryan Guzman) confesses that he put in for a transfer because the 118 has felt like “just a number” since Bobby died.
When the laundry room explodes at the high rise, Athena rushes in to assist and orders dispatch to send in the big guns to help evacuate the 255 apartments and administer emergency care. The 118 are obviously one of the first on the scene, while Eddie goes back to Buck’s place to Chris and Tia Pepa.
Some gross medical stuff happens, some more walls come down, and various interesting combinations of characters get trapped together in the building. Buck and Ravi (Anirudh Pisharody) are trapped on some of the higher floors, Athena and Chim – who had beef in the previous episode – are trapped in the basement with a couple of tenants at death’s door, and Hen and Gerard (Brian Thompson) – who is suddenly nice now, by the way – are on the outside trying to get everyone out safe and sound.
One of the big punch-the-air moments of the episode is when Eddie sees his colleagues/family trapped on the news, dons his turnouts that were gifted to him at his goodbye party, and swoops onto the scene to help. Dramatic music builds, sunlight shines off his frankly perfect hair and face and we get a full action-hero-cum-romantic-lead close-up. His return to firefighting climaxes with a heart-racing rescue in which he shoots a line gun over to Buck, Ravi and the old man, and the three of them zipline to safety as the building crumbles behind them. It’s pretty cool as far as rescues go.
They then join the rest of the gang to help get Athena and Chim out, everyone lives (of course), Athena and Chim have a nice moment, Chim gives a stirring speech back at the firehouse that both convinces everyone to stay with the 118 and also fully props open the door to potential Captain Han for season 9, and then they all go home.
We also jump forward a little and see where we’re leaving everyone before the hiatus: Eddie and Chris have moved back into their LA house, Buck, now technically homeless, is looking for somewhere else to live, Hen and Karen (Tracie Thoms) finally officially adopt Mara after a two-seasons-long saga, Athena puts the house she and Bobby built on the market, and the whole gang meets Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Chim’s new baby, little Robert Nash Han. Athena welcomes him with an emotional ‘hello, Bobby’ before cutting to black. End scene.
“Seismic Shifts” isn’t a bad episode, per se. It just doesn’t feel like a finale, and certainly not a finale for the whiplash-inducing season of 9-1-1 we just witnessed. With a finale, you ideally want some closure and a couple of open-ended tidbits to chew on until the next season’s premiere comes around. The only real closure “Seismic Shifts” delivered was through Athena and Chim’s emotional reconciliation.
Everything else? Left dead in a ditch. (No offense, Bobby.)
Firstly, why the hell are we pulling out a huge emergency that eats up most of the episode’s runtime in the finale for a season with so many character threads? Not to be dramatic, but watching the end of the episode play out, knowing there were only five minutes left and there was still so much to address, had me feeling sick to my stomach.
Athena’s open house leaves somewhere to go next season. Maybe she’ll move, maybe she won’t. But the fact that Bobby, her biggest connection to the 118, is now gone for good (WELP!) has some wondering if she’ll be taking a bit of a step back for season 9, instead being used as more of a guest star than part of the main ensemble. Maybe she’ll take Cart Cop Graeme under her wing and he’ll join the main gang in her place. Fans are sweating even more intensely with the knowledge that Angela Bassett herself has even said before that she wouldn’t want to do the show without Peter Krause.
The Wilsons officially adopting Mara is a sweet moment, but honestly, it’s something that should have happened in 8a after their fight for custody. Please, for the love of god, give Hen something interesting to do in season 9. Or, indeed, just give her something to do, full stop. One of her very few A plot episodes this season was literally called ‘Invisible’, because she felt like no one saw her. You can’t make this stuff up.
The prospect of Chim potentially becoming captain next season is exciting, and interesting considering he’s given it a go before as interim and came to the conclusion that he was not captain material. But the way the show has been seemingly setting things up and then not following through means anything could happen.
On the subject of not following through, there’s also the Buddie of it all. After a full season of off-the-charts Buck and Eddie moments, it’s actually almost impressive how badly they managed to fumble here.
For months we’ve had romantic hints, from Buck’s ex calling Eddie ‘the competition’ and full-on suggesting he’s in love with him, to Buck moving into Eddie’s house as a subletter and Eddie flying his son in all the way from Texas after a fight just because he thought it would cheer Buck up. This has now passed the barriers of online fan shipping and fully been inserted into the show. To give us literally nothing in a season finale called “Seismic Shifts” has sucked all the joy and speculation out of it. And, honestly, it’s really starting to feel like queerbaiting now.
All the way up to episode 18, watching Buck and Eddie’s extremely interwoven storyline play out has been delicious. It’s been filled to the brim with tension, grand gestures and extraordinary levels of subtext, and dissecting, cornplating and speculating about the whole thing has been a joy. It was all building to something, and the payout was going to be so, so good.
But to do all that and then give nothing in a finale that was supposed to end all finales? It’s giving disappointment. It’s giving hoodwinked. It’s giving pink dollar. And you can’t even say it’s just the fans reading too far into things now. This whole season, and perhaps even the season before, has been sprinkling a delectable seasoning of Buddie crumbs into the mix right there on the screen with the romantic tropes and the longing glances and the actually-talking-about-them-maybe-being-in-love-with-each-other-but-leaving-it-open-ended.
Perhaps this is too cynical a view and they’re actually getting ready to continue their story in season 9 (they begged). Eddie has moved back to LA, after all, and Buck has started looking for a new place to live. Because, you know, he moved into Eddie’s house and everything. Buck’s comment to the realtor at the end of the episode about Eddie’s house not really being his could be a metaphor for Eddie himself not being Buck’s because Buck thinks he’s straight, and maybe this will kickstart a new Buddie pining era… but, then again, I needed to up the prescription on my Buddie goggles to pull that interpretation out of my ass because they really gave us nothing. The fact that the lyrics ‘this is not the end of the story’ play over the whole end montage is enough to keep the hope but, again, I’m grasping at straws here.
The only conclusions I can draw from the evidence are either 1) we actually are being queerbaited within an inch of our lives, or 2) they’re stretching it out even longer to keep the slow burn smouldering. But at this point, it’s been stretched enough. We’re going on seven years of this. Just let them kiss already, Jesus Christ. There’s only so long you can string people along until the good faith runs out and they start to feel hurt. (I fear we have passed that point already, but hey ho.)
The confusing disregard of the build-up this season also calls into question the intention behind the storytelling. Why would they do all that and then finish it off with not even dregs? Did any of the stuff that came before actually mean anything? Or did they just simply forget to finish the story? Is anything actually foreshadowing or do they spin a wheel of random writing prompts to keep the plot going and hope the audience will be satisfied? I’m willing to give 9-1-1 the benefit of the doubt: maybe this is all part of a bigger plan. But I’m definitely going to be watching the next season wondering if the arcs actually mean anything or if they’re just there for the hell of it.
And it’s not just Buddie… Is Chim actually going to have a captain arc next season or will they ‘forget’ about that too? Did they fully plan out the second half of this season, or did they kill Bobby off for shock value and then hope the chips landed in a good place?
I guess we’ll see come September, when 9-1-1 no doubt still has me and many other queer people in a chokehold as we beg for more crumbs.
9-1-1 is available to stream on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ in the UK.
