Alright, I need to rant about the episode a little. Spoilers for 9.17 under the cut.
Let me preface this by saying, I don’t like that they decided to bring back the donor kid for this, and if they wanted to drop a kid on Buck suddenly, there were much simpler ways to do it that wouldn’t require killing off his friends and spoiling the whole “donor, not dad” message from S6, but that’s not what I want to talk about.
What I actually want to talk about is ADHD, how the show walked right up to the line of saying that’s what’s going on with Theo, and Buck, and how they presented this in the narrative.
We meet Theo at a birthday party where he can’t sit still, is easily distracted, and impulsively follows an escaped balloon up a high voltage electrical tower. He argues with Buck that he needs his balloon before he’ll agree to come with Buck down off of the tower. Then at the station after his rescue, he’s similarly high energy, running around, getting into things while Buck chases after him. Later, when his parents Kameron and Connor come over to dinner at Buck’s house, Theo immediately breaks a vase, blows bubbles in his milk (and at Buck), grabs at the flowers on the table, and nearly burns down the kitchen by putting his coloring book in the oven when the adults weren’t looking.
Buck was initially worried that they asked to speak with him to ask if he’d be willing to donate sperm again, but they’re extremely quick to assure him that no, one kid is more than enough for them. Kameron and Connor say that they’ve taken Theo to three different specialists, trying to figure out if maybe their son needs a “diagnosis” and suggest that maybe they should have asked more questions before choosing Buck as their donor. They tell Buck that this behavior definitely didn’t come from Kameron’s side of the gene pool, and begin grilling Buck on his own history with impulsivity, recklessness, and injury. It’s a long history.
After this dinner, Buck is obviously upset, and with some prodding, tells Chimney he feels guilty for unleashing a “demon spawn” on his friends who will inevitably grow up to become a “monster” like his biological father, Buck. Chimney thankfully assures him that this isn’t true (ymmv on how good of a job he does reassuring him), but holy shit, what are we doing here?
Theo’s behavior seems like pretty textbook presentation of ADHD symptoms in a kid his age, and we’re supposed to believe this stumped three specialists?? In 2026? Nobody handed this kid the obvious diagnosis?
I’m not going to pretend that raising a kid with ADHD is easy, but I don’t really think any four year old is easy to parent a lot of the time. (I may not be a parent myself but many of my friends are and I remember being a kid with undiagnosed ADHD.) That said, it really felt like the writing went out of its way to paint Theo as exhausting and a burden for his parents, even if they love him. There’s a pretty pointed implication that Connor and Kameron regret choosing Buck as their donor and would have reconsidered if they’d known about his own history and symptoms beforehand. Intentional or not, they managed to make Buck feel terrible about himself, for traits that he didn’t choose any more than Theo did!
Now, I assume the point of all this was to give Buck a stronger connection with this kid and reason to feel more responsible for him before the narrative brutally killed his parents, but I feel like they could have accomplished that without leaning so hard into the idea that there’s something seriously wrong with Theo (and Buck). It really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
