911 – Season 9B – Review: Why This Show Feels so Different Nowadays, a Trip Down Memory Lane

It’s 2024 on Halloween. Kids are visiting Station 118. The firefighters are all dressed up for the occasion: Hen is a mad scientist, Chimney is Jason Voorhees, Buck is a cowboy, Eddie is a werewolf, and Bobby is a vampire. You probably remember this moment, but if you don’t, I’m talking about Masks, the fifth episode of season eight. It’s a weird thing, but this feels like it belongs to a different show that aired ages ago and has little to do with what’s currently airing. It’s not just Masks; the more I think about what this show used to be, the more I look to season 9 with curiosity and some slightly morbid fascination. So I decided this review would be the perfect moment to dissect my feelings about the most recent episodes of 9-1-1 (Family History, Secrets, War, Fighting Back, and Handle with Care) while taking a trip down memory lane and reflecting on what fundamentally changed on this show.

“Fighting Back” – 9-1-1. Pictured: Oliver Stark as Buck, Kenneth Choi as Chimney, Aisha Hinds as Hen, Ryan Guzman as Eddie, Anirudh Pisharody as Ravi. Photo: Christopher Willard/ABC © 2026 Disney. All rights reserved.

Let’s start with a quick recap of how 9A ended and what happened on 9B so far: Harry is training to become a firefighter and gets some help from Buck in the process; Athena works on a cyberbullying case that triggers some bad memories about past experiences with May; Hen discovers a chronic illness and hides it from everyone, leading to conflict with Chimney, who as her Captain has to fire her; as “9-1-1: Civil War” unfolds, Athena intervenes to find a way to unite their found family; meanwhile, Buck gets involved with a man and a woman to later discover they are a non-monogamous couple, Maddie deals with the dispatcher AI-assistant Sara, and a past patient becomes weirdly interested in Eddie’s personal life… All while some creative emergencies happen, like a family reunion where they tear their fingers apart after a game of tug of war, a man trapped in a chastity belt, and a collective seizure at a drive-thru (the highlights to me).

Hen’s illness exposes the cracks between the 118. This storyline opens the possibility that another of them will die, as Bobby did months ago, which understandably makes everyone act a little insane. So Hen lies to her friends and family and passes out after an emergency, Chimney calls her out while she’s at the hospital, and they end up having a brief argument that ends with Hen fired. All of this leads to War, an episode filled with conflict between the team, with Athena trying to bring peace to all with a dinner during which Chimney says, “Hen lied to all of us, which is why she was fired.” Hen answers with “I was trying to protect you all.” To which Chimney replies, “You really think, after losing Bobby, we were ready to see another firefighter go down?” After this, Hen says the line I kept thinking about after the episode ended:

“What do you think I was trying to protect you from? Losing Bobby broke us all into pieces. Individually and as a team. We couldn’t take another hit. So I kept it to myself. Just until I knew what it was.”

“War” – 9-1-1. Pictured: Tracie Thoms as Karen, Aisha Hinds as Hen, and Aimee Teegarden as Alex. Photo: Christopher Willard/ABC © 2026 Disney. All rights reserved.There it is. For most of the time, there’s something off about season nine. The 118 is broken; they are not acting as we think they should, they are not even acting as they think they should. There’s this occasional melancholy, these awkward silences, those strange scenes that make me wonder what happened to the show we used to know and love. It’s not just Bobby — it’s mainly his absence, yes, but there’s more to it.

First of all, Hen hasn’t been part of the team for most of the season: she was in space during the opening emergency, and as soon as she came back, she found out she was sick and had to leave. Then there’s Ravi — he’s there for most of the time, but they are not doing much to him in terms of character development. And sometimes he vanishes without explanation, his absence definitely felt during the War episode, which featured the 118 as just Chimney, Buck, and Eddie (the house has never felt this empty). But this doesn’t last much, because Harry joins the 118 soon after this, and once again, the 118 feels like something entirely new. The firefighters from 9-1-1, once this fixed group that always featured Bobby, Hen, Chimney, Buck, and Eddie, are a different beast almost for each week of season 9.

Looking to the show’s past, it’s hard not to recall season 5, which had the 118 divided with Chimney looking for Maddie and Eddie joining dispatch, Jonah and Lucy joining the team later in the season — except that for that case, we knew (or at least had the feeling at the time) that the separation was temporary and all of the 118 we know and love would come together by the finale. There’s no such certainty now. What used to be normal is destroyed, and attempts to reconstruct the team into a new normal are constantly interrupted because the team is continually changing. I have the feeling that Hen will come back to the 118 soon, and we’ll finally have the whole house with Chimney, Hen, Buck, Eddie, Ravi, and Harry working together. Then, after a few episodes with this new team, maybe we can have some sense of the new normal — but as of now, there’s only this unsettling feeling.

“Fighting Back” – 9-1-1. Pictured: Elijah M. Cooper as Harry, Corinne Massiah as May. Photo: Christopher Willard/ABC © 2026 Disney. All rights reserved.

There are other reasons why this show feels different from how it used to. At its earliest, 9-1-1 was a collection of multiple insane, shocking, and urgent emergencies that somehow reflected the first responders’ personal lives. They used to be special, truly unforgettable, mainly because the victims used to die.

We’d be presented to one or more characters, we’d know their backstories, their goals, we’d see them in a situation that was about to become messy quickly, the air would be full of suspense (Who was going to hit who? Would the situation become too ugly, too gory? How would the first responders save the day?). Then an accident would happen, and sometimes the efforts of the first responders would not be enough.

How can one forget about the heartbreaking time that an injured police horse had to be put down (2×7 – Haunted)? Or that one emergency in which there’s this whole montage dedicated to this elderly gay couple, which also ends in an emotional, sad — but ultimately lovely — death (2×8 – Buck, Actually)? Or when a man tries to be brave enough to propose to his girlfriend until he is devoured by a defective mall escalator to surprise her, ending up dead (2×4 – Stuck)? Those are all examples taken from season two episodes, but there’s that one time in season three when a young cellist had the 118 ambulance crash into her car by Hen (3×8 – Malfunction). We get to see the cellist’s backstory in this powerful montage; we get to care for her, and by the time the brutal event happens and she dies, it’s impossible to feel indifferent.

“Handle with Care” – 9-1-1. Pictured: Angela Bassett as Athena. Photo: Christopher Willard/ABC © 2026 Disney. All rights reserved.

What I’m saying is that it takes some challenging work to create those sympathetic characters, plot these creative situations, and explain their backstories using a few minutes — sometimes even less — so that their accidents (and sometimes deaths) can hit us harder. This type of emergency doesn’t happen anymore. Season 9 has some really good emergencies — the best of their days on ABC when it comes to “regular” cases, I’d say, especially in 9×01, 9×05, and 9×06 — but for a show that killed its main character for stakes, it’s mesmerizing how little the stakes are nowadays for one of the most important things: the people in danger.

This isn’t exclusively a problem of season nine; even before Bobby died, the trend of lighter emergencies with somewhat lower stakes existed. It’s something that came from their final season at FOX, amplified by the move to ABC. There is an evident shift: the most memorable stuff about season 7 and 8, the 9-1-1 on ABC seasons, are the main character arcs and the shocking things that happened to them or the opening disasters, but the regular stuff, the daily bread that actually makes the show what it is, eh… Season nine delivers better accidents, sometimes getting really creative with them. However, it still refuses to let the viewer emotionally engage with the emergencies as it used to, and I think this is a problem.

Another reason this show has been feeling weird — and this is something that has going on since the move to ABC — is how sidelined dispatch has been. I know, I know, every episode has at least one scene of Maddie taking a call, sometimes we even see Josh, Linda, or Sue taking calls too. But there was a time we’d have whole storylines developed in multiple episodes about the dispatch as a workplace, about the people working there going through changes, like when Maddie trained a new dispatcher in the first five episodes of season six (the man was revealed to be a criminal in the end, but it took many episodes to get there). Or when May joined dispatch in season five and went through the pains of her first job (including having problems with a coworker explored in various episodes), while at the same time Eddie joined the team and also went through some interesting development, and both storylines wrapped in the fantastic May Day episode (5×16).

“War” – 9-1-1. Pictured: Jennifer Love Hewitt as Maddie, Bryan Safi as Josh. Photo: Christopher Willard/ABC © 2026 Disney. All rights reserved.

Let’s also bring to the table the season 3 arc that saw Josh tricked into a date just to be beaten up (3×12 – Fools), a storyline that led to the brilliant masterpiece that is The Taking of Dispatch 9-1-1 (3×14). There was also an episode in season 4 (4×11 – First Responders) that had a hit-and-run leaving Sue in critical condition, with Josh and Maddie supporting each other as they tried to keep it together and get the work done (eventually, this work would lead to a kidnapping plot that would also reveal who attempted to murder Sue).

Anyway, the point is that the dispatchers used to matter in this show; they had multi-episode arcs, intense episodes that mostly took place in dispatch, and moments of hardship, change, and growth from their everyday jobs. Since season 7, however, the dispatch is mostly Maddie talking to the phone for a scene or two, and that’s it, which is sad because the point of the show used to be the connection between people in deadly situations and the first responders, which are firefighters, police, and the glue to all of them: the dispatchers. If anything, what makes 9-1-1 different or even unique when compared to other procedurals is how vital the dispatchers are (or used to be). Season 9 even tries to change that by bringing the AI-assistant storyline, which is an effort I appreciate. Still, so much more would have to be done to get the show back to its richer, stronger roots. Long story short: dispatch is an essential, defining part of 9-1-1, and the way it’s been downplayed is hurting the show.

Anyway, change is inevitable in life and in television. And 9-1-1 has clearly changed into something new over the years. Not all of it is bad: most of the emergencies this season are strong, even if I wanted to care more about the people in danger. I still love the characters (that opening montage in Fighting Back with everyone helping Hen is one for the ages, nailing the found-family aspect). By the way, have I mentioned that Handle with Care ends with Christopher seemingly kidnapped, setting up something similar to the Sob Stories/Voices arc, this time with Eddie and Athena joining forces instead of Athena and Chimney? There are lots of interesting things in this new world, so not all is lost. However, sometimes I remember of the Masks episode, which did not have iconic emergencies on the level of earlier seasons, nor dispatch hugely involved, but had lightness and fun in ways that this show will hardly return to, and I know that if things continue at this pace, the remembrance of season nine in the years to come will always have a bittersweet taste.