#911 critical

[robbuckys]

911 official instagram reposted Connor's and Kameron's bridge car accident death scene.......Theo is definitely going to be a permanent addition in Buck's life. Wonder how they'll make Theo's aunt a bad person or have her give up/lose custody or whatever relative battling for custody. This season is just going to be another cluster fuck of storylines that doesn't make sense.

I almost commented "damn did nothing else happen this season or what" lmao

[robbuckys]

I'll never forgive Tim for making one of Maddie's storylines this season being upset cause her parents were getting a divorce?????? It didn't even lead to anything.

Maddie went through her own divorce??? SHE KILL HER HUSBAND.

The news should've warranted an 'aw man' reaction at BEST

[skodasforge]

Are we ever going to address how apparently gay people aren’t allowed promotions in the 911verse even if they’ve spent years training for the position?

[hereghostslive]

sorry sorry sorry but isn’t it crazy that in a post season interview tim said he’s giving Buck a child as a way to replace his romantic relationships on screen because he can’t make any fan happy and in the same season Buck says that tommy was the last thing that felt real and that he’d be with tommy if he could

[fakemouthstaticpilot]

May I ask why Aisha decided it was a good idea to use an AI video to wish Angela a happy birthday?

[allthethingsisaid]

I will forever think Tim Minear is a weirdo for choosing to cater to the most toxic group of fans, especially since he does so at the expense of character development and good storytelling.

[skodasforge]

This seems like a safe place so here I go. Also keep in mind I didn't watch any episodes after bobby died aside from the ones that buck gets kidnapped and then developed an addiction

I get Eddie was stressed but my guy no one asked you to pack up and move to Texas and then renovate a home there

I can’t be too mad at Eddie because the whole thing felt so disjointed that I started to think it might have been a contract negotiation tactic. In my mind, in the real world and abiding by real world rules, Eddie would have not have even dreamed of moving or purchasing a house until that job in El Paso was secured, even if it meant living with his parents (and Chris! The whole point of this was meeting Chris where he was at!) until he had searched for a wheelchair accessible house somewhere in the suburbs instead of buying a house he hadn’t seen until he moved in.

We’re led to believe he puts an offer in on the house ON HOMES DOT COM (Download the App now says the product placement team!) without a realtor, without an inspection, without seeing it in person, without telling his boss that they should start looking for a replacement, without lining up as subletter so he doesn’t have to pay both rent and a mortgage at the same time, without knowing he’ll have stable employment when he gets there. Hell, we don’t even know if he told Chris! The same Eddie that looks down on Buck as a second child he has to deal with according to Ryan Guzman, making the impulsive decision to buy A WHOLE HOUSE with none of the t’s crossed or i’s dotted. No fallback plan, no arrangements for the lease on the house in LA, hadn’t even started thinking about that until after the offer was put in. Meanwhile Buck lived with Maddie for months while he and his realtor looked at homes. It’s inconsistent even by the standards of the show itself!

So I can only assume it was all in service of two things, one in the narrative and one outside of it. 1) show how devoted a parent Eddie is that he would buy a Whole House and a PS5 in order to win his son’s forgiveness with Large Purchases 2) Use the permanence of that mortgage to trick the audience and potentially (anything I say about contracts is purely speculation I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes) Guzman himself into thinking the move would become permanent only to reverse it last minute to avoid shaking the cast up too much.

I hate the Texas arc for so many reasons but more than anything I hate that it had no real point because Chris basically has one nice talk with Eddie that doesn’t address anything about why he moved and all but begs Eddie to take him home instead of actually making him apologize for anything and it’s all good and great and we’re back in LA in time for Eddie to use Chris as a buffer so Buck can’t yell at him for his passive aggressive “went to the airport” note, and I hate that it COULD have been a good arc for Eddie to explore taking responsibility for his screwups by meeting Chris halfway by moving back to Texas permanently and put LA and the hardships they experienced there behind them and for Eddie and his parents to mend fences together and for Eddie to admit he could use the extra help with Chris or that he doesn’t always know what to do with Chris or what’s best for him (they sort of touched on that in season 7 with Chris’s player era and Eddie leaning on Buck then and then again after the Kim Incident, but the Texas arc really plays it like Chris had to be saved from Eddie’s parents because thought they knew best for him but Eddie really knew what was best for him, and Chris’s feelings on the matter are sort of handwaved away in a single line [“so you’ll be my dad again?”] rather than the more compelling storyline that it could have been: Eddie—who in the setup for this very arc acknowledges he knows he fucked up and was going to Texas to fix things with his son—listening to Chris’s wants and needs and respecting him as a person who he had wronged with the Kim situation, something he really only reckons with in the form of a movie homage and being told to choose Joy, when that was never really the issue. Instead Eddie gets a big hero moment of leaving his dad in nowhere Texas with a bus ticket home and berating him mom for them being too overbearing extracurricular activities (ballroom for Eddie, Chess for Chris) and then taking his son back to his fixerupper house then to California without once mentioning the whole, well, cheating on his girlfriend with a clone of his dead wife, allowing that clone into his house while dressed even more like his dead wife for some therapy and then embracing her in front of his girlfriend and son, who had all of his trauma essentially blasted in his face by a stranger he would come to know his dad had been dating for months behind his back and who he, for the briefest of moments, thought was his actual mother returned from the dead.

The refusal of the show ever have Eddie apologize for this, or for what would go on to happen in the rest of the season and onward sank my relationship with the character (who I have to stress was my favorite in the Reidel era, even eclipsing Buck, precisely because he could be allowed to be flawed in a way the show would reckon with and resolve in satisfying ways.) Eddie’s temper remains the same if not worse after Bobby’s death and when he lashes out at Buck, it doesn’t resolve in him really apologizing. “You do matter to me” sort of resolved the whole “nothing tying me here” think before he left for Texas, but it is notable that the Dia de Meurtos episode has Eddie snap at Buck for his version of spiritualism and then ends with him embarrassing his own spiritualism without ever actually addressing the thing with Buck because Ravi takes care of it instead. And yeah, it’s a silly inconsequential thing, but when it’s combined with the earlier thing with Eddie using Chris and Pepa as buffers and not really apologizing for implying that he could have somehow saved Bobby and that Buck wasn’t enough or didn’t do everything and with Eddie not having to apologize or change anything about his relationship with his son in the Texas arc, it forms a pattern that the show will acknowledge Eddie’s character flaws, but it won’t let him acknowledge his character flaws or do anything about them. He constantly uses Buck as a punching bag, a safe outlet for his temper and his stress, but he doesn’t do much more than acknowledge “some jerk was mean” before moving on.

And of course there’s a reason for this: Between seasons 7 and 8, Tim Minear shared a video on Facebook entitled “Characters should not change.” This can—and, in the wake of the past 3 seasons since his return—should be taken as his thesis statement. All characters are static, no characters evolve, all conflict must be resolved in 43 minutes and if there are loose ends, they are to be swept under the rug. Characters Should Not Change.

[skodasforge]

If you go back and look at it it’s really fascinating how little 911 will work to resolve conflicts if they think they can get away with a cheap montage and/or cheesy voiceover. I’m still not over the detox being breezed right past right after 1) Chris tells Buck he can’t be trusted on his own so it’s fine his family is treating him like a criminal and tearing his house apart looking for drugs after he already said that the reason he was thinking of stealing was because he got abruptly cut off without so much as a brochure to a methadone clinic 2) Maddie and Chimney agree that Buck can’t go to a real facility because… reasons? It’s never actually said if this was Buck’s decision or one made for it IIRC 3) Eddie and Hen converse about how they’re all completely blameless for not noticing something was up as if Buck wasn’t walking around the station looking like death itself and the most Eddie could muster was being worried that Chris might have food poisoning too because Addicts Be Lying and then the only person to really and truly empathize with Buck and Bobby grief of it all while the rest of them have a cookout is Athena.

You had a whole half-season of content right there and we got a montage and moved on to Surprise Baby so Buck would shut up about “being sad his pseudo-dad died” or “missing his ex boyfriend” or “wanting to feel seen by his peers” or whatever.