#willposting willtruthing willclowning

[perlaret]

tbh under current circumstances it’s super easy to soft launch a will plot in a way that has character implications for almost the entire cast. athena gets a call that she needs to have bobby’s will read or deal with something related to life insurance. she doesn’t want the money. she talks to the other person who has had complicated emotions about “profiting” from a deceased spouse: maddie. the conversation gets maddie thinking about her kidnapping and chim in the lab and they have two kids now and aging parents and they need to update their own plans, especially with chim as captain now. chim confides in hen, who has her own mess of emotions about her job and her family after also almost dying and what councilwoman ortiz put them through over the last 2 seasons. maddie and chim approach buck about being named guardian of his niece and nephew in their new will. buck has never told anyone about eddie’s will and suddenly it’s thrown back into stark relief how unusual his relationships with eddie and chris are.

anyway i’m never getting out of this clown car

[livesbetweenpages]

Eddie having a death wish really feels like a weight bearing matter. Not only because Buck seemed frustrated and scared for the consequences, but also because internally, it means Eddie still isn’t settled after Bobby died, as if he can correct not being there by risking himself, sometimes unnecessarily. But also narratively. Eddie has almost died a bunch of times before, but each time before, he met that moment with changing something, because his biggest fear was not being there for Chris. And they’ve all happened seasons apart (s3 in Eddie begins, s4 shooting, s5 held hostage). But he’s almost died 2-3 times, if we’re counting the bridge jump, in this season alone. Which is wild, considering the earlier seasons, it always came back to Chris, yet now, and despite spending almost all of last season fighting to get Chris back, we don’t get the connection in episode. In fact, it was Buck, who made it clear, who used the fact of Chris as leverage to get Bonnie to let Eddie go. And I don’t know if this near death was what it was all building to, but it feels like there should be another moment, where Eddie acknowledges that he’s all Chris has, knowing full well how much Chris does not want to be raised by his grandparents—but also, that Chris still has Buck.

[perlaret]

you know. i do actually really want buck to acquire a kid, but only if it’s just to lose them again - ideally with a combination of the kid being taken back for reasons buck can’t control (the recency of his kidnapping and then opioid use plots are pretty significant yellow flags) but also then maybe that he chooses to drop the fight about it once a qualified family member is found who wants custody. because then i get more buck angst, and it could play off the ongoing themes this season of parent-figures who do and don’t let go vs. the child’s best interest, but also just bc i do think that would be a fascinating way to tee up the circumstances and themes inherent to a christopher custody fight contingent on a presumed deaddie plot line.

[perlaret]

so, to recap. first we have an out of control car trapped in an intersection marked by four sidewalks. they realize they can stop it by drawing lines on the pavement, and the material they have on hand to accomplish this with is sand. which you typically find in a desert. or on a beach. and then buck almost gets hit by a car, in a weird mirror of things that happened in character significant episodes in both seasons 6 and 8, but he's fine. they get the passenger out of the car. he's wearing a shirt that's eerily similar to the one buck was wearing when eddie got shot. flying shrapnel hits this guy in the head and he goes down on the pavement, eddie kneeling beside him and chim over his shoulder over the sidewalk lines. it looks posed just like shannon lying in the street but dressed like buck on the day that he once told eddie it would have been better if he'd been shot instead. which compelled eddie to finally tell him about the will.

and then. we go to the hospital. we pass patients who are afraid that they're having heart problems but they're not. eddie once saw a cardiologist for issues that were not heart attacks. we go into a hospital room. the devices that are supposed to help save lives are now endangering them. the victim is bleeding from the arm about where an IV would be. the last time we saw buck in a hospital bed there were machines taking blood out of his body and oxygenating it and putting it back in because he wasn't breathing on his own after the lightning strike. chim tells eddie to pull the plug. they had to take buck off the ventilator. "good night, sweet prince" is what horatio says to hamlet. his very good friend. as hamlet is dying in his arms. the machine comes back to life. everyone is locked out with buck in the room fighting for his life. it looks eerily similar to the room buck spent his coma in. but also like the room they had the will conversation in. but also like the lab. the others are peering through the blinds and eddie is trying to break down the door. i remember that shot of eddie with the blinds behind him in the hospital when shannon died. chim and ravi and harry work together to get buck aid. eddie wasn't in the coma dream. eddie wasn't in the lab with them. buck slams the robot with a hammer like he slammed his way out of the coma with an axe.

so anyway this was like mashed up speed-run of emergencies comparing buck and shannon and how eddie feels about them. and about losing them. did i miss anything.

[perlaret]

okay actually can we talk about this art piece hanging in buck's front doorway amidst buck spending the whole episode talking about fish recipes and why does it look like dory and nemo

which. finding nemo was last referenced.... by chris... in the tsunami episodes... and then we follow buck and harry into the kitchen and there is a pre-tsunami pic of buck+chris on buck's fridge....

anyway. will plot when???

[perlaret]

the narrative explicitly acknowledging bobby as a father figure to buck in the same episode we finally see buck with chris… the vision is visioning

[perlaret]

okay let me get this right. they cut part of the grocery store scene where eddie was holding the st. christopher medallion. which we last saw in the episode he told buck about the will. which was introduced in eddie begins. which is where we first got all of his war flashbacks and ptsd, which just got pulled forward into the episode titled “war.” eddie begins, significantly, is where eddie gets trapped in the well an makes the decision about changing his will in the first place. and they do all of this in the grocery store where he yelled at buck for not being around for christopher. while he’s in there his radio gets damaged cutting off contact like he was cut off in the well and they’re only able to talk later bc the mediator also had her phone. and all of this is fresh off of last season where eddie was desperately motivated by the concept of being there for people. and actually even without the necklace featured, a lot of this still holds up???

at this point i’m just like. if we are NOT heading toward a major plot significant eddie nde that will activate his will somehow what are we doing????

[perlaret]

i think what's most compelling about the decision to skip lingering on the team reaction to eddie in proximity to gunfire is to take it in context of the wider episode. because everyone is right - we HAVE, as an audience, been conditioned to expect buck to freak out based on how he's previously behaved in similar circumstances. chim just had the quality of his captaincy called into question and he just sent one of his close friends and subordinates into a risky situation. and a few episodes ago we just saw a flashback where athena watched a partner and friend die in the line of duty. but eddie walked into a situation, there were gunshots, and we touched on none of that???

instead, we stayed focused on eddie, and then the episode carried on. but i think what's most important is where we ended in the penultimate scene: hen telling us she hid her illness because "we couldn't take another hit" after the way bobby's death fractured them. but... we literally, earlier in the same episode, COULD have explored that? to drive home Hen's point further? and yet we didn't? it's not even shown to be something weighing on the characters' minds, but it's very striking to me as a watcher, and imo it really does feel like they are priming us for another big NDE this season that will invoke all these anxieties they're setting up, and they want to hold those big, on-screen emotional reactions for the moment it matters