911 – The Last Alarm

Spoilers ahead!

Okay. These last two weeks lasted an eternity, right? Robert Nash died, the media announced Peter Krause was leaving the show, the internet crashed out, and people were furious, heartbroken, and devastated in ways never seen before… If you know, you know. It’s worth mentioning this is not only a fandom matter — people from all across the globe and with various degrees of connection with the show were in denial, confused, mad… Given what happened, I think people had a reasonable reaction.

This is not the first show I watch, by the way, nor my first main character’s death, and I’m certain many people online share this with me: that’s not our first dance. So if you’ve been crashing out these last two weeks because of this very questionable move that happened in an episode of very questionable quality, this is a valid feeling. Yes, it’s just a show, but sometimes even escapism can be that serious, and that’s okay. I hope you had your time to grieve, theorize, find some fun in the process, or just suffer collectively with everyone else.

In a way, I think many people are eager to know how the show goes on from this: if Bobby is truly dead, how does 9-1-1 move on? Is that even possible? Knowing this show, there’s another possibility: is Bobby really dead? And if he is, would resurrection be out of the table? The Last Alarm, this week’s 9-1-1, has some of the answers!

The episode starts two weeks after the lab incident. Athena is postponing the final arrangements of it all, meanwhile, everyone is grieving Bobby on their own terms — Chimney, especially, is having a particularly bad time. But that was expected. The surprise of this episode is that it’s centered on Athena helping a grieving mother with a case that started 8 years ago during a fire fought by the old 118. The mother is in jail now because she tried to abduct another woman’s child — that’s because, according to her, the kid has the same birthmark, the same age, and similar physical characteristics as her (supposedly dead) son, which could indicate that the other woman set her family’s house on fire so she could cover up the abduction of the child.

Crazy thing, right? Don’t look too much into it, that’s just the way the writers decided to address the overall feeling that Bobby might be alive: just like the grieving mother, and just like Athena investigating the case, this episode focuses a lot on crazy theories, the crazy hopes, the denial phase of it all. At some point, Athena is turning down calls, not answering her children, not talking to anyone, just to solve this case with the help of Bobby, the ghost haunting her. Athena, just like the audience, can’t accept Bobby is gone, and this grieving mother case is just a way to address it.

The episode isn’t the worst thing ever produced on TV, but honestly? It’s very far from their best. This whole arc, starting with the episode where Bobby died, then going on to this “study on grief”, is filled with questionable, lazy choices. This Athena storyline, for start, is so distasteful. Athena has no reason to doubt Bobby is dead. That is a viewer thing — because the Hozier song that played during Athena and Bobby’s goodbye said “No grave can hold my body down. I’ll crawl back to her.”, because fake leaked scripts said that Bobby was buried alive, but mostly because 9-1-1 has always been unrealistic, over the top, exaggerated, comic, and full of inconsistencies in the writing. So of course, Bobby could be dead and still come back, this show never cared about realism. It still doesn’t, by the way — if Chimney couldn’t perform surgery on Hen because he was infected, why the also infected Bobby did it? The disease destroyed Chimney as fast as it could, but Bobby showed no symptoms until it was convenient, all for the sake of a sad, twisted ending. Anyway, the viewers had good reasons to believe this could be a fake-out, and most of them were given by the show itself. So half of this episode is spent on a half-baked storyline about how grief makes us imagine things and how death is a part of life — sometimes you start your day with your wife talking about your new house and you just don’t come back home — and that storyline is supposed to help us to move on with the characters.

Well. Death in real life is one thing — it can happen anytime with anyone, yes. It can be messy, ugly, weird, and uncomfortable, and some of the best works of fiction find a way to depict all these feelings in complex, reflective, and interesting ways. But death in fiction can also be a cheap, lazy way to continue your story. Do you feel like your story doesn’t go forward? Do you feel like your show doesn’t have stakes anymore? Killing someone is the fastest way to stir a reaction from the audience. You don’t even have to plan out the said death, you don’t need to plot the details, it doesn’t even need to make sense (you can say that’s just how life goes and move on). You will have your audience shocked, your characters moved (your cast will do the heavy work), and luckily you will have your show trending online because people will talk about it, and you can have all of that without putting much effort into this. The death itself can feel unplanned, half-baked, like a last-minute addition to a tasteless, senseless story. And hey, that’s okay, your work is done, and you have a good moving story without overthinking it too much. People will watch your show and think about life and they will be cool with it, right? Easy like that.

I can think of so many shows that killed characters just for shock in the dumbest possible ways until they were slowly ruined because of this mindset. It’s such a common thing to happen, it truly is the easy way out for lazy storytellers and bad showrunners — I should be surprised that it took so long for 9-1-1 to do something like this. There’s another crucial thing about this: real life doesn’t need to make sense, but fiction does. Fiction follows rules, and so does death in fiction: killing someone in Game of Thrones is different from killing someone in Friends which is different from killing someone in Grey’s Anatomy which is different from killing someone in Adventure Time.

Each work of fiction has its rules, and each TV show has its audience, willing (or not) to engage in good faith with certain things. For eight seasons and 120+ episodes of 1 hour each, 9-1-1 has gathered an audience that expects the thrills of a crazy emergency, the suspenseful feeling of an adventure, the exaggeration of a telenovela, and the comfort of a (found) family comedy. An audience that expects the fun of a thrilling show full of action combined with the lightness and grace of a story for families everywhere. It had something unique, unlike anything on TV nowadays; the best of both worlds, characters under distress with safety to the audience because everything would be okay eventually.

Until the protagonist, the backbone of the show, died at the end of a random episode part of a weak storyline that lacked better care and thought. If they wanted to kill Bobby that bad, 7×09 was a better sendoff than 8×15/8×16; the storyline was stronger, the experience was more emotional, and the overall outcome could be better. I don’t think it would be a good move back then, but if that was all the showrunner could conceive as a good idea to move the story forward, so be it. Not every showrunner is willing to do the heavy, hard work to find better material to write, and some will eventually resort to cheap thrills like this. So yes, if that was the best they could conceive, 7×09 would be a better ending to Bobby’s arc — not whatever this was.

Because let’s get this straight: you know you are about to kill the main character, the protagonist of your show. You spend some of the precious, remaining time of this character alive in a two-parter that ends up being pointless and inconsistent, poorly planned, badly written, awfully executed. You follow this with an episode that could deal with how special and important the said character is, but instead waste it with a side plot that exists mainly to send a quirky message to your audience, missing the opportunity to, I don’t know, maybe show Bobby’s mom? His brother? His team? BOBBY? This should have been Bobby’s arc, this should’ve been Bobby’s episode. They failed to write a good arc to justify Bobby’s death, and they failed to pay respect for THE main character of their show in the episode that was supposed to mourn him, to serve as a tribute to him. Instead of showing how big of an event his death was, this episode feels like mocking the audience that has been loyal to this show for years with a weak b-plot born out of insecurity, in a failed attempt to convince viewers (and themselves) that they made the right choice. What a hill to die on! I’ve been watching american television for quite the time, and it’s rare to find a show with an ability this big to destroy itself so quickly in such a disrespectful way (GoT’s final season might be the latest I can think of). It takes a special kind of talent to create a disaster this baffling — congrats to everyone involved in this series of brilliant decisions, you made history.

The Last Alarm tries hard to set a new start for the show while it deals with the aftermath of Bobby’s death. It tries to send a message to viewers, maybe trying to comfort them in a way that feels like mockery because of the writers’ insecurity regarding their decision. However, what this episode really accomplishes is showcasing how much this show is far from its golden days, now unable to “reinvent” itself without lazy tricks and cheap storylines developed just for shock. It left a sour taste in my mouth, for sure; this whole season feels now like a waste of time and energy, and the move to ABC seems worthless. Part of my goodwill towards the show died in that lab, I’m not going to lie. The old 9-1-1 was buried tonight with Bobby, and the next episodes will try to launch a new, reinvented show, but following this collection of bad choices and these many mistakes, this new 9-1-1 is born struggling already. Oh, and a spin-off is supposed to come out later this year; do you think people will tune in to watch 9-1-1: Nashville in good faith after this awful outcome of events brought by the original? Who knows. Fiction must make sense, but life certainly does not…