The thing about Mother’s Boy that bothers me so much is how disconnected from the entire season it is, both leading up to it, but also the effects after it. Its sole purpose was to give Buck a drug dependency, which would’ve been a good avenue to get him there in a show that was not about first responder and not featuring a guy who has nearly died on duty or a guy who hasn’t already sustained bodily injury, again, on duty. What’s the point of centring a show around people who risk their lives every day to save other people if you can just throw them in the desert with a serial killer for absolutely no reason.
And if that wasn’t bad enough (it is bad enough considering the opening emergencies for the past 3 years have been about off-duty catastrophes), nothing that happened in the episode had any lingering effect on Buck or Eddie. Buck didn’t revisit how he feels about being a replacement son or his parents’ divorce. Eddie didn’t question what Buck means to him or the idea that a town assumed he was queer and/or in a relationship with Buck. Buck was willing to sacrifice himself to keep Eddie and Chris together, a thing we’ve been given concrete evidence of for years. Eddie wasn’t more willing to use a gun on someone than he did in the military, than he was willing to fight Mitchell and co to escape their other kidnapping.
So what did we get, exactly, that couldn’t have been done via an emergency?? Anyone can write coincidence, and coincidence is going to happen now and again, but that entire episode is only coincidence, and then ties to nothing after it. What I’m saying is the same thing I said at the start of season 9: the glaring thing that has felt off about 911 in recent seasons versus the initial seasons is that they keep saving the high risk, life or death moments for the off-duty days, where instead of first responders risking their lives, the mains’ lives are put at risk and they become the emergency while just happening to be first responders.
