3.04: Triggers

Welcome back to That Wee Woo Show, a podcast where we watch and discuss episodes of the ABC show, 9-1-1. I'm Ellen.

I'm Alice.

And I'm Bex.

Welcome back to season three. Uh, we had a bit of a break over the holidays and we're back for episode four, which is called "Triggers". Thanks for sticking with us through our little break here. Um, actually as we're recording this episode there is some devastating fires going on in the real life LA at the moment. So we just wanted to send our love and support to the real life heroes who are battling those fires over there and to all the people who have lost homes. I'm so sorry.

Yeah, so last week? Month? Year? last time on 9-1-1! After having his leg crushed by the ladder truck, Buck was sidelined from the 118 thanks to a nasty clot in his lungs, putting him on blood thinners. To stop Buck's moping, Eddie told him to take Christopher out and get some fresh air, resulting in the two of them being caught in a tsunami on the Santa Monica Pier.

This week, uh, as Ellen said, we are going to discuss episode four of season three called "Triggers", which first aired on the 14th of October, 2019, and the official summary says that the first responders race to save workers in a high rise during a fire drill, a mother and her son's involved in a perilous car accident and squabbling siblings fighting over a family heirloom. Meanwhile, Buck delivers surprising news to Bobby. Eddie helps Christopher cope with the trauma of the tsunami.

Yeah, I still can't remember what that is.

I think it's like a brief mention when Chim is talking.

Okay.

So Chim was talking about he got triggered when Maddie got triggered.

Right. Yes. Okay.

And it took him back to his childhood with his mother.

Yeah, Chim and Maddie have the discussion about it.

This episode was written by David Fury, who is a little favorite of mine from Buffy the Vampire Slayer times. So it's written by David Fury, Christopher Monfett, and Tonya Kong. Christopher, this is his third episode as a writer. He was previously producer for season two. He wrote "Merry Ex-mas" and "Bobby Begins Again", which are excellent episodes. Um, this is Tonya's first episode as a writer. And directed by Joaquin Cedillo, which is his first episode as a director for 9-1-1.

Cool, okay. I, it makes sense because this episode had a slightly different feel to previous ones, maybe? It could be just because I hadn't watched any of it for a little while and I'd forgotten what it was like, but

No, stylistically, stylistically it looked very different, yeah. See, this is why I like tracking, who's directed what, because when things, when you know it's somebody different, you can sort of look and go, oh yes, now I understand. Or when something seems very familiar, you can go, oh it's written by this person or directed by that person, that's why it seems so familiar.

Yeah, okay, so where do we begin with this episode? We've got the ladder truck and ambulance are racing through the streets with the lights and sirens on.

They are heading to what Chim calls the biggest damn fire he's never seen.

It's a, it's a fire drill, which everyone loves. I was, I was glad actually, I used to work in like a 30 story building and we only moved in there just before COVID. So we actually moved in and then we had to leave again like five months later and we didn't have to do a fire drill. So. Because apparently, uh, when you do the fire drill, you have to go down, even if it's a drill, you still have to go down the emergency escape, like the fire escape, in the, the stairs.

I can confirm that when, um, when I worked in Sydney, I worked in one of the large sort of skyscrapers in CBD and we had a fire drill and we were up on like the 20 something floor. So we had to walk Down all those stairs. I was also, I think, eight months pregnant and in high heels.

No.

So, apparently, afterwards, somebody, I can't remember who it was, maybe it was one of the EAs, came and found me and said, "You should have waited, we would have taken you down in the elevator." And I sort of looked at her and went, "No, But what happens if it had been an actual fire? Should I have just sat around and waited for someone to come get me?"

Yeah, well, they say that you're supposed to wait in the stairwell, right? Because it's fire rated, well, in mod, in new buildings, the fire stairs are the safest place. If you can't get down, you wait inside the fire stairs and you, you're safe ish. And someone will come and rescue you from in there. But, um,

Well, I didn't know that at the time. So yes, I went down all of those stairs.

Oh my God.

Thankfully we were allowed to take the elevator back up though. We weren't forced to climb the stairs back up because that would have been an absolute no go.

When I, I was, um, working in, it was just a three story building, I think we had, um, like we'd do a fire drill occasionally, which was fine. But then we went through a spat of like two months where the fire alarm would just trigger for like no reason. And so we'd have to like go all the way down and out and wait for the fire department to come and clear it and be like, "Yep, it's false again."

Ah, the Eiffel Tower is fun. Anyway, this, at least this building is not that many stories high. It's

I think we see, um, we see What's His Face come in on the 10th floor. And there were still people coming down onto the 10th floor. So it's over 10 stories high.

Okay. Yeah, there are a lot of light, of uh, stairs, like you, you know, going around in a big spiral. As we see, yes, a bit later.

I find it interesting that, um, I guess I never really thought about the fact that if it's a fire drill for the building, the firefighters have to respond to it and it's a drill for them as well.

Yep.

Never connected that in my head before.

Yeah.

So. Yeah, they're making sure they can get there in their allotted time.

Yes, which apparently the 118 did not do. Yep. Yep. They got to the site four minutes over there, a lot of response time. And, uh, they all look very apprehensive about the fact that someone is going to have to explain that to the new fire marshal. I love that. It's like, Chim looks at Hen, Hen looks at Eddie, Eddie looks at Bobby, who's just like, ah, shit. This is why they pay me the big bucks. So he goes to explain why they were late. to the new Fire Marshal, who is Fire Marshal Buckley.

It's first, the first time we see Clipboard Buck.

It's the birth of Clipboard Buck.

It is the birth of Clipboard Buck.

He looks so excited to be there. But he, he's very, uh, business like in his short sleeved white shirt. And is he wearing a tie? I'm trying to remember what he's wearing.

Yes, he's got his tie on.

He's and he looks very dapper, um, but apparently the 144 were there in, you know, a full 17 minutes ahead of the 118.

Yeah, much faster.

Which, Bobby explains that the, the 144 is like five blocks away from that site. They could have walked there. Whereas, I don't know where the 118 is stationed in relation to this site.

Oh, it sounds like it's a fair bit further away. But anyway, yes, he's got, like, he wants to help. He wants to be impartial, but he's got to do his job properly. And Bobby's just like, that's okay. I'm proud of you.

I love that he kind of, he's, he's being really snarky at Bobby. He's like, you know, if, if I'm going to do this light duty, I'm going to do it properly. I'm going to take it seriously. You made me do this job, so you do not get to complain.

You made your bed, just, you have to lie in it.

Now lie in it. Yes. He's just, He's taking a little bit of pleasure in this.

Buck is so pocket sized in this episode too, like in the shirt. I just want to take him home.

I couldn't work out whether it was just because I'm used to seeing like 2024 Oliver. Compared to 2019 Oliver, but they really have just shrunk him for this episode, he is so tiny in this episode, and so young.

So young, and such a little shit.

Yeah. He also tells Bobby that the one thing that he learned from his ordeal through the tsunami is that he is a fighter. He doesn't quit. He fights and he's going to keep on fighting until he gets back to where he belongs with his team, putting out fake fires. So we've got a little bit of foreshadowing there.

Fake fires like this one.

Yes.

Oh, and then he says, be careful not to log jam at the stairwells.

Also a little bit of foreshadowing.

There is a lot of people in that stairwell. And they're all trying to get down.

Yeah, we get a cut of all of the workers from the building entering the stairwell and slowly, very slowly making their way. They don't seem to be going very fast.

No, they know it's a drill, don't they? So they're just like, Okay, here we go, down the stairs.

And we meet Alan on the 10th floor who walks into the stairwell, uh, looks at the flashing emergency lights and immediately whips out a pair of sunglasses, much to the mocking of his colleague, but turns out there's a good reason why Alan needs those sunglasses.

Yes, uh, he's not doing great. There's a flashing light going on in the stairwell. He sort of leans over the railing to look below and the sunglasses just fall off his face and fall, you know, all the way down.

Yeah, it's the weirdest, it's the weirdest stairwell because it's not an enclosed stairwell like you would think. It's one of those circular ones where you can literally like see down the middle.

Yeah, it's not a, it doesn't seem to be a sort of fire escape like I would expect it to be. It's like a, just a big spiral staircase going all the way down, right? But like, with a hole in the middle.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know how fire safe that is, but I'm not an architect.

No, probably not very. But yeah, no. Not an expert, but it doesn't look very safe. Um, especially once people start dropping stuff down the middle of it.

Yes! I was fully expecting I

actually thought that he was about to throw himself over the over the railing for a moment.

The way he, like, he tried to bear hug the sunglasses. I seriously thought first time around that he was going to topple over the sunglasses topple over the railing after the sunglasses, and we just see him plummeting ten floors down to the bottom. But that's not what happens. The sunglasses drop. Alan does not fall, but he does fall down the actual stairs, when he starts seizing, uh, which his colleague helpfully points out to everybody, yet does absolutely nothing to help Alan.

No, he just falls over like a log, like just, you know, straight over.

Yeah, he gets absolutely rigid, and then he falls forward into the person in front of him, who falls into the person in front of them, and it's like dominoes just down the stairs. All the way down we're led to believe, because then the next thing we see is the people Um, right at the bottom near the lobby, just come tumbling down into the, into the lobby, which looks, looks hilarious. Don't know how realistic that is.

It could happen. There's a lot of people in the stairwell.

It's just hilarious. Like it's full on dominoes. It's great.

Yeah, outside of a three stooges skit, I don't know if it would actually happen.

Um, Alan seems to be the only one who was injured, thank goodness. I mean, maybe the others were, but he's the one who's taken out on a stretcher to it, to the ambulance. And "epileptic seizures can be triggered by, even sounds can trigger them," Hen helpfully explains. Uh, I'm sure Alan knows about that, considering he is the epileptic, but

Didn't he put the sunglasses on to stop the strobe lights from triggering a seizure? Yes. So, and he's just I think that one was for the audience.

Audience splaining. But

Exposition paramedic.

Yep. But they're going to get him to the hospital and he's going to be fine, so off he goes.

But first Yep. He's going to be chased to the ambulance. Oh my god. It's an ambulance chaser named Chase. I just put the dots together.

Is his name actually Chase? Oh, Jesus.

His name is actually Chase. He introduces himself, Chase McKay.

Amazing. That's, yeah, okay.

So yeah, so as they are wheeling him towards the ambulance, Chase McKay comes chasing after him to tell Alan that he saw everything because he works in that building, he's up on the 10th floor, and he, this, he says that there are several legal options that Alan could consider and hands Alan his business card, to which Hen says that he might want to wait until they're in the ambulance before he starts chasing it.

Yeah. Well, having a flashing light probably wasn't very helpful.

Did we mention this episode is called Trigger?

Yeah.

We'll see how many people are triggered in this episode. So Alan's the first one that gets triggered. Literally.

Yes. There's not, I noticed it about the sibling thing, because there's not only is there the trigger thing, but there's also,

There's like five different storylines going on in this episode.

It's quite complicated.

Yeah, yeah, we definitely have to go through it at the end and try and tease out all the different things that are going on. Yeah. Um, I also discovered that ambulance chasing is illegal in California.

Oh, very interesting.

You cannot do what this guy is doing.

Yeah. So. Buck is in full, like, fire marshal mode now. He's like, "Oh, it's a good thing this wasn't an actual fire."

I do love that when, um, the people come dominoing down the bottom of the stairs, Eddie, Chim, and Han go rushing to help them, and Bobby just immediately looks at Buck. He's got a, ah, really, sort of look on his face. and starts making frantic notes on his clipboard. And Bobby's just like, oh my god. He's absolutely in his element. Yeah. I love it.

And he's like, "oh, it doesn't help that you're a man down. I'll be make sure I mention that in my report." Bobby's like, thanks.

He's such a little shit.

But, but what's great is that he does not pick up that Bobby's being sarcastic. His response, the, the line reading, the reaction that Oliver gives is that Buck truly thinks that Bobby is thanking him for putting that concession into his report.

Either that or he's just like lapping it up and loving it because he's got a huge smile on his face in this bit. So after the title card, we're going to head straight into these squabbling siblings. Um, well, except they're not really siblings, but you know, they sound like it at the moment. Um, we're at, we're at Athena and Bobby's house. We are watching Denny and Harry fighting over a handheld game device of some kind. Harry's trying to have a turn.

This scene was like my personal trigger. Yes.

Hit a bit too close to home?

Oh yeah. So it turns out that the Wilsons are over hanging out with Athena Uh, To update her on their, um, fertility journey. They are, they're going, they are still full steam ahead on the baby making train.

They're going to, you know, induce ovulation, the egg retrieval, the doctor's hoping to grab 15. And Athena is pretty shocked at this. She's like, "15 eggs? I thought you two wanted a baby, not a baseball team." Um, they, they have to take that many just in case they lose, they lose some. They're expecting to lose some, so they hope they get two or three viable.

Yeah, they're expecting to lose half at every stage. Yeah, so hopefully by implantation, they'll get two or three.

Yeah, it's a rough old journey, this, um, IVF stuff, but yes, Karen says that she's always been an overachiever, so she's going to have a baseball team. Then there's some more arguing, and Athena puts on her mum voice, or her police sergeant voice, and says, "Kids!"

Literally, she says "Kids!", and they're just like, oh shit.

It's similar to the teacher voice that, um, yes, I've heard people have, um, But, yeah.

But what's extra hilarious is that she doesn't blink, she's just like, she's sipping her coffee, she lowers the coffee mug just enough so she can yell at the kids and then she just keeps on drinking her coffee as if nothing's happened. Meanwhile, Hen is halfway out of her chair, ready to go and adjudicate. And both she and Karen are absolutely shocked when there's just silence from the living room. Yeah.

Yeah, it's like, you need to teach us how to do that. Yeah. Yep.

And then we get a discussion about life with siblings. In this part of the episode, we learn that, um, Karen had, I think she had brothers, or maybe that's just my headcanon that she had brothers, but she had siblings.

Yeah, no, Karen had brothers. Yeah.

Um, whereas, Hen and Athena were both only children. Yep. Sorry. Yep. So Karen is adamant that growing up with siblings makes you a better person, because it basically teaches you life lessons very, very early on. Whereas Hen and Athene are going, well, we were only children and we turned out just fine.

Yeah. Hen says that their little one is struggling with the concept of sharing is caring.

Ugh.

You don't like sharing is caring?

Sorry, no. That, I hate that concept of sharing is caring. Yeah. Because it basically means that in order to be considered a good person, you need to give up your own possessions to somebody else, whether you want to or not, otherwise you're labelled as a bad person.

Right.

I never, we never used that phrase in our house and in fact, anytime somebody said sharing is caring, you immediately got, um, sharing is not getting what you want when you want it.

Right.

Because the only person who ever said sharing is caring is the person who wanted what you had.

Right, yeah, okay. Yeah, true.

Like, it was something that somebody forced upon you, like, sharing is caring, it means you have to give me what I want, otherwise I'm gonna tell everyone that you're a bad person. Like, fuck you, no. You never see, you never see adults, like, walking up to another adult going, I want that, sharing is caring.

Yeah,

it reminds me of that, did you ever read that, yeah, see that kid's book that, called the Rainbow Fish ? Which, oh no, it was banned in our house. . Ellen: Yeah, we got it. I think we got it for a Christmas or something. We, we ended up with a copy of it and I read it to my kids one time and I was horrified. I'm like, this fish had this great thing that was his own thing and he, he was forced to give it to everyone and then

literally forced yeah.

And then everyone had it and it was like,

and then he was left with nothing, so, yeah. No.

Well, he had like. Yeah, the same as everyone else.

You shouldn't have to belittle yourself in order to fit in with everybody else. Yes, exactly. So no, never came into the house. If anybody is worried, my children are lovely children who are both very empathetic and who, I think that because they were never forced to share when they do decide to share something, it is actually an honest, legitimate from the heart, not just something that they've learned by rote to do.

Yeah, I have dogs. They don't know what, um

Dogs will eat whatever you give them.

They do not know what sharing is. They, uh, they just want food all the time.

Same as kids now.

Pretty much, yeah. But the moral of the story that we get out of, um, Athena and Han and Karen's conversation is that Denny would love having a brother, eventually. And I do love the, this segue. So we get, Denny will love having a brother, and then we get Chim screaming, "Your brother is driving me crazy."

Perfect segue.

Yeah, Chim is um, not enjoying having a, not quite brother-in-law, but

Close enough. Close enough. He's complaining about Fire Marshal Buck.

He's complaining about Fire, Fire Marshal Buckley.

Which Maddie points out the hypocrisy of interim Captain Han complaining about Fire Marshal Buck.

Ah yes, a little bit of power, he went mad.

Chim's like, Captain Chimney is safely behind us.

So while Maddie is talking, she like gets, clears up the table kind of thing, but she, while Chim's apparently still eating. I didn't notice that. She got up to clear her plate at least, but she

Because he was still shoveling food into his mouth while she's getting up.

She's like, no, we're done.

Are you in a hurry to be somewhere? Like, what's the rush? Um, but yeah, she drops one of the plates on the, on the floor and it shatters everywhere. And she just starts having this like flashback to doing this and getting hit. And then Chim sort of comes over and goes, are you okay? And she like nearly, you know, knocks his hand away, like gets, uh, very defensive. Um, and Chim's like, "it's okay. I'm not him" kind of thing. But she says, "no, I'm sorry. I've, I've got to go."

Poor Maddie. She got triggered.

She got triggered. Oh, poor Maddie. But I am in, like, I'm, this is awful to say, but I'm glad that they're actually doing this because it means that they haven't just swept the whole thing under the rug, you know? Like, it's like a, I believe it's a realistic interpretation of PTSD. Like if something is going to trigger you and, and you're going to have this kind of fight or flight reaction, you know?

I think that this particular moment is, It's accurate and good and yes, this show does have a horrible, um, habit of traumatizing the characters and then dropping the storyline like a hot potato when it stops being interesting. Um, I don't think the next part for Maddie, I don't like the next part of Maddie, I don't like the next storyline that Maddie goes through.

Yeah.

This part I can understand. You, you break a plate. If you're used to having your husband abuse you for breaking plates, then yes, you breaking a plate, you would automatically go into that freeze mode expecting that you were going to get hit and, you know, doesn't matter that it's Chim and he's just coming to check that you're okay. You're going to react defensively. They probably could have just. stayed with that storyline for Triggered. They didn't have to move on to the next, the next one.

Well, before we get to that, we're going to go to the actual station house.

Yes, Chim is explaining what happened to an exhausted looking Eddie.

Yeah, he's, he just yawns in the middle of Chim explaining and Chim's like, is my crisis boring you? And um, but Eddie reveals that Chris has been having nightmares since the tsunami. So I don't know how long after the tsunami this is. Like we don't really see a lot of beach type shots in this, right? Like we don't, I just assume everything's cleared up now.

Yeah, like Buck's in a new role, um, he's not, you know, covered in scratches and stuff, but I guess it's still pretty fresh.

Well, I'd say because Bosco is still there, that it hasn't been that long, because you'd think that if it had been a significant amount of time, they would have, um, fixed up her firehouse, got them a new captain, and she would be reassigned back to whence she came from. But she's still with the 118.

Yeah.

Yeah. And in fact, Bobby said she's there temporarily, so temporarily for me would be short term.

But yeah, Christopher's been having nightmares, um, he's waking up screaming and crying, and he won't talk to Eddie about it. And then Hen pokes her head around as they're walking out and goes, "Careful guys, the hall monitor's here."

And it's Buck.

And it's Buck. Fire Marshal Buck has decided to drop off his report on the fire drill in person.

Um, I love that Buck's just like, "Oh, did you guys paint? Why does this place look smaller?" And Chim just goes, "I think your head just got bigger."

Apparently Buck, he's bumped up the numbers. Um, so that they actually passed.

He got fancy with the math and Eddie's like, "You don't know math."

It's like, ow, Jesus, Eddie. Shut up.

I know it does, it does sound really harsh, but there's something about the way he says it, that Buck does not take offense. Like clearly

Eddie and Buck's relationship have not, has not been shaken. Like they're, they're clearly still close at this point.

Yeah. Cause Buck says, you don't know math and Buck goes, which will be my excuse. Yeah. If anybody calls me out on it. But yeah, anybody else saying that, I think Buck would have taken that very, very differently. But because it came from Eddie, he seemed to be okay with that. Because he's apparently, yes, he's not good at math.

But yeah, Buck also says that he got a call from the lawyer, the ambulance chaser, um, who wants to talk to Buck about the building violations.

Who's passing out cards like candy.

Yeah. And then Bosco interrupts by calling for Eddie. Well, actually she calls him Diaz, which is interesting because when Eddie started, he was just like, if they want me to answer, people don't call me Diaz.

I wonder if it's because

she's temporarily there.

No, I was going to say, I wonder if it's a military thing, but Lena served, right?

Okay. No, her captain did, I think.

Her captain's served. That's right.

But yeah, so she calls out, "Hey Diaz, I need a spot over here." And, Eddie's just like, "Yep, got you. Good to see you." And, like, bounces off. And Buck's just like, Who the fuck is that? Who's talking to my man without me?

And once again, Hen and Chim just throw Bobby under the bus. They just immediately slink off, leaving Bobbie to explain that, like we said, um, "This is Lena." Um, as we know, but Buck was kind of busy at this point, um, her station was smack in the middle of the impact zone of the tsunami and her crew has been temporarily reassigned. So Bobbie, I guess, decided to adopt her for a little while.

Yeah, I'm sure Eddie would have, um, like, vouched for her too. Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Buck is, like, scandalised. But Buck's just like, "you replaced me?" Bobby's like, no.

It doesn't help that he looks over at his locker and Lena has put, I'm assuming it was Lena, has put masking tape over Buck's name and written her own name on the locker that was his.

My favourite part though, so Like, they haven't just put Bosco over the Buckley.

No, it's Osco.

Yeah, they've put Osco and left the B, so they've just covered like half of it.

And Bobby reassures him, he's like, "No, no, no, you're still gonna, like, your place will still be here when you're ready to come back." And Buck's like, "No, I'm, I'm ready now." And, um, but then they get interrupted by the alarm and they all have to run.

Yeah, so Buck's still not happy about being sidelined, um, as much fun as he's having being Fire Marshal, Fire Marshal Buckley. Um, he just wants to get back out there.

I think he was okay playing Fire Marshal Buckley when it was clear that he was just playing Fire Marshal Buckley, but there was still a spot for him on the 118 when he was done playing. Yeah. But having Lena in his spot, literally, has like, the RSD has kicked in and he is now convinced that there is no spot for him on the 118 anymore. That he's going to be destined to be Fire Marshal Buckley for the rest of his life.

Like, Lena's taken his man, taken his locker, and taken his place in the 118 and Buck is not happy about it. And I can't blame him.

He's taking it hard.

Everybody leaves to answer this call. Buck goes straight over to his locker and rips the masking tape off, reclaiming his locker.

Yeah, he's like, fuck this.

Poor Lena's gonna get back for it, because like, she's not involved in this at all, like, she's never even met Buck. No. She's gonna get back and be like, who the fuck ripped my name off? Like, what, what is going on here?

She's gonna think somebody in the 118 has got it in for her.

Yeah.

Which, I mean, she's not wrong there, yeah.

Alright, it's time to go check in with Eddie and Chris.

Poor Christopher.

Eddie's having a nice sleep, although it does, I think it does appear at the start of this, like, Eddie is the one having the nightmare. But he sort of shifts around and then he hears Chris calling him and he jolts awake and Sort of goes into check on him.

I think it's that thing where the sounds from reality invade your dreams. So whatever he was dreaming about, he can hear that, he can hear Christopher.

Yeah.

And then it's like a couple of seconds he thinks he's dreaming, but then he actually realises what's going on and snaps awake. And Christopher is just sitting up in his bed just repeating over and over, "She was drowning, she was drowning, she was drowning, she was drowning."

Poor Chris. Like he has had a rough couple months. Yeah.

Yeah. But give it up for, um, for Eddie putting him into therapy.

Yeah, Eddie won't go into therapy himself, but at least he's doing right with his kid.

Yes.

Yeah, he and Eddie are, he and the, and the doctor are talking about, you know, whether he's spoken about it at all, and it just says that he's spoken about being at the pier with Buck, but That's not the reason he's having the, like, the nightmares. Like, the doctor says he's still processing the trauma.

He's working his way through it. It looks like he's working, part of it is through dreams, but also he's doing a little bit of self art therapy. He's drawing out his feelings. Yeah, he's drawing a lot. And I have to tell you, um, I spent way too much time trying to figure out what the Fireman Sam figures were. I don't know. Which sets they were from. Because we get a shot of Chris in the therapy room drawing and next to him are these little firefighter figures and they're Fireman Sam.

I didn't even realise they were Fireman Sam.

What on earth is Fireman Sam?

Fireman Sam was a British TV show.

You don't know Fireman Sam?

She doesn't have kids. She wouldn't know Fireman Sam if she doesn't have human kids.

But didn't you watch it when you were little? Wasn't Fireman Sam around when we were small?

Yeah, because it was puppet, it was like marionettes, puppets, like, um, that weird, um, stop motion.

Oh, stop motion type thing, yeah, yeah.

Oh, like Postman Pat.

Yeah, yeah, it's the same, the same thing.

I pretty much just, I think it's the same village, it's like a small Welsh town that has, and Fireman Sam is like the only firefighter in this town. Um.

And like there's that one guy, like, Norman. Is like a total psychopath and just sets all the fires because basically he's in the middle of everything that happens.

So the figures that they've got on the, on the, um, the table with Chris is you've got, um, Fireman Sam in an O2 mask. You've got Sam in, uh, an orange jumpsuit, which was the one I couldn't find, but I think it's from when he goes up in Wallaby. Wallaby 1 or Wallaby 2, which is like the rescue helicopter.

Oh, yeah.

And then it's got Penny, who is one of the other firefighters, and, um, she's got a very masc looking appearance to her. Um, and she's smaller than the two Sam figures, so I guess she's supposed to be the, the, the child, um, Um, stand in when they're doing sort of role play, uh, but they completely missed the opportunity to have a Norman figurine because Norman's got this like messy red hair and these big glasses.

I'm like looking at images. I've never seen Fireman Sam. I don't think.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Well, there you go.

But like, it looks like, I'm assuming these images are all from like the new

Yeah. They, they did. Cause they've like CGI'd And then they did, um, animation, and now it's like, computer animation.

Now it's like a 3D animation, yeah. Yeah, it's not the best.

My kids sort of were into the We showed the original Fireman Sam, but I think they liked the second gen Fireman Sam the best.

See, I watched Postman Pat a lot, but Fireman's never, no idea.

Okay. So I need to know though, in America, do you, do I, like, I could look this up, but I just, I will just ask the audience. Um, do you get Fireman Sam with an American accent? Like is Fireman Sam set in America?

He's always Welsh.

Or is he Welsh?

I swear he's always Welsh.

Because you can't, like, I don't see how you can have Fireman Sam without that great accent. But, you never know, he might come from somewhere up in the coast of Maine or somewhere, I don't know, they have like seaside villages up there like that, right?

Oh, he has to be Welsh! But yes, if any of our American listeners, like, have children, and they have watched Fireman Sam, do they dub over Sam's accent? Or do you get him in all of his glory? Because it's a wonderful accent. I do love the Welsh accent.

Yes, the Welsh accent is amazing.

But like I said, I spent way too much time being fixated on these little figures.

Yeah.

Um, and probably not enough time on what Christopher was actually drawing. Um, which The Shrink does show Eddie some other examples of Christopher's current pieces of artwork, and they were all about people drowning in the tsunami.

Well, specifically, It seems to be about a woman drowning in the tsunami.

Yes. One of the pictures is, um, a woman in a red dress, brown hair, with these giant waves sort of looming over her. The words help me written above her head.

Yeah. So as, when I saw this part, um, I don't normally join all of the dots in ahead of time. Um, I don't know why I just. Maybe I don't pay enough attention to TV while I'm watching it to join the dots. But in this case, I did actually look at it and go, oh, is that his mum? Because he just lost his mum as well.

Yeah, like, Eddie seems so forgotten about Shannon. And I'm just like, oh my god, he thinks his mum died. Like, he's, he's thinking about his mum drowning in the tsunami. Yeah, and then, and he's just like, oh, there's a random woman. How strange.

Yeah, and he's like, oh, I don't know what he saw when he was with Buck.

Lucky he hasn't lost any other women anywhere around here. Um, yeah.

I mean, I can, I can understand cause like, For Eddie, he saw what happened to Shannon, at least he saw the aftermath of what happened to Shannon. So Shannon's death is very definitely car accident. All Chris knows is that his mother died.

Yeah, his mum just didn't come home.

So he's got a dead mother floating around in his subconscious. Then he's got this tsunami where he saw dead people. And so his poor little, like

And he would have heard, like, I'm sure Eddie couldn't have, sheltered him from all the news where they would have spoken about you know how many people died and

yeah so his poor little what is he 10 yet 10 11 somewhere around there his subconscious has just put these two things together and gone dead mother tsunami we're going to dream about your mother dying in the tsunami

yeah

oh poor Chris

But yeah Eddie's a little bit too too literal at this point. Yeah, I mean, I guess about who has drowned.

If he hasn't mentioned mum at all, then I guess that makes sense that he wouldn't think of it. But yeah, anyway, the doctor encourages him to just keep on loving him and love him. And it'll he'll work through it. Okay, time for Maddie to do some sleuthing.

Oh, I hate this storyline. Yes, so. Maddie gets a 9-1-1 call, which is just silence. And every time Maddie speaks, she does not get a response until I think the third or fourth time, when she finally hears a woman's voice on the other end.

Yeah, Maddie looks very shaken with this one.

Because I'm certain that she has made that phone call many, many times herself. So she thinks she knows what's going on. And she, uh, She searches the number in the system that they use in 9-1-1 and discover that that phone number has called 9-1-1 five other times. And of those five calls, dispatch got no response from the caller and the call was terminated at the caller's end. So naturally, Maddie does, do, what everybody would do, would be call the number back.

I don't think this is part of the 9-1-1 playbook actually. Um, I think you're not supposed to do that.

No, it is not. Once again, it is Maddie completely overstepping her bounds.

Yeah.

At least this time she did it using the 9-1-1 system and not calling it from her personal cell phone. Like she did last time.

Yeah, that's right.

Uh, but she calls and a man picks up, I believe that it's the same man who we heard earlier, and she pretends to be a telemarketer. And the man immediately cuts her off and hangs up.

Well she, oh, I mean at least she goes and tells Josh about it. It could be, like, it could have been worse, she could have just gone off and done some stuff, but

She should have told Sue though, she should have gone to Sue about it.

Yeah. I mean, because

Josh does not give her the best advice.

He's not helpful.

I blame Josh for everything that happens next. This is all Josh's fault.

Josh honestly has the worst advice. We love Josh, but what the hell, Josh? His basic answer is, eh, whatcha gonna do?

He's like, "We'll just send someone to do a welfare check. It'll be fine."

Maddie's like, "no, no, no, that's going to make everything worse." And Josh is like, "I, you want to help her. I get it. But if she's not ready to accept that help," there's Maddie agrees. Yes. There's nothing we can do because once again, she has been in that situation.

Oh. Yeah.

Which is why I blame Josh for everything that happens next. Yes. Because if he had not said that, he has planted the seed in Maddie's head.

Damn it, Josh.

Alright, so Buck has agreed to speak to this ambulance chaser lawyer guy.

Chase the ambulance chaser.

Yep.

And his report that he put together for Bobby has come back to bite him in the ass. because he was very gleeful and telling Bobby that, you know, you guys exceeded the, um, the time requirement for responding to an alarm and Chase is using that as negligence on the LAFD's side. And Buck is now having to backtrack and go, "Well, I know that I put that in the report, but you know, it's, it's actually, they did a really good job."

Yeah. It's actually a pretty decent time.

But then it, then it comes to light that the, the lawyer isn't actually going after the people who own the building about the, the problems with the building, it's actually the fire department. They, they're suing the city.

Yeah, 42, 42 injured people, uh, um, going into a class action against the city.

And we discovered that Chase has targeted Buck in particular because in his experience disgruntled employees often make the best witnesses. Buck's like, "I'm not disgruntled." And Chase is like, "no, but I know about you. I know all about the accident. I know that you've been fighting with the LAFD to get back to full duty." Um, and then once again, Buck is on the back foot because He has been pushing to try and get back. And now he's having to defend the LAFD against Chase.

But the, the lawyer does what lawyers do and talks him into it. It's like, "Who's protecting you?"

He, he plants that seed. As well.

Yep.

Maybe this episode should be called planting seeds rather than crickets. Yes.

But, uh, yeah, Buck says he can take care of himself and gets up to leave.

Yeah, he has this big speech, big speech about how, um, the, the LAFD and the, specifically the 118 are family and there's nothing stronger than family. And then we cut to a family.

There are some interesting segues here.

I, the segues are so good in this episode. So we have a family road trip, which seems to be going swimmingly because the two kids in the back seat, um, are calling each other scuzzbag. Well, actually the eldest is calling the youngest scuzzbag.

They're sitting right next to each other. I don't know if it's like a really small car. It's not a small car because it's big. It's like an SUV, right?

It's so weird. So you've got the eldest brother is sitting the passenger side of the car window. Um, and then the younger brother, Jesse, is sitting in that middle seat.

Yeah.

Which, just for those scenes though, because then there's another shot where he's sitting on where he should be on the other window. Right. But I guess maybe

it's for filming purposes, just don't question it.

I'm going to assume it was because the way they had the camera set up, if they had Camden and Jesse on either side of the car, they couldn't get the shots that they wanted of the two of them over the shoulder of mum driving.

Yeah, if you notice, um, whenever there's people in the back seat in TV shows, like their person's always in the middle. It's for framing.

Yeah, so I'm assuming that they had to move Jesse into the middle so that he would always be, they could have like one shot and have all of the, um, all of the actors in shot together. But it just, it looks weird.

Hmm.

It does look weird. It's like, oh, these kids are fighting. Let's just shove them right next to each other.

Yeah. And they're driving around the side of the hills and mum keeps turning around to shout at them, like, you know, you settle down, whatever, and they're all giving each other wet willies and stuff.

But she'll never do, like, there's, there's a mirror, like, just Don't turn around while you're driving the car.

Yeah, she ends up swerving around, especially when you're on, like, a windy mountain road, like, I feel like that's probably the best, the worst time to do that, but anyway.

It's a, it's a, it's a red herring though, because the way that she's swerving and the way that The, um, she keeps turning around to look into the backseat. You assume that the car accident is going to be, like, an actual car accident. Especially when they have the fuel tanker coming up the hill toward them.

Yeah, right?

You assume that there's going to be some kind of collision that ends with, like, a fiery ball of flames. And they get close. Yeah. Because Camden starts hitting Jesse. And the mother turns around, completely turns around to yell at her son, swerves into oncoming traffic, which is the tanker. And it's only when her kid starts screaming at her that she turns around, realizes that they're about to become a pancake, and swerves back into their own lane.

Yeah, she should. The boys just start laughing at her. I'm like, oh my god. Like, "you should have seen your face!" I'm like, oh, she, you guys nearly died.

You guys have no idea how close you came to being crispy critters. Yeah.

But then she sees the funny side apparently and starts laughing too. But, um,

I think she's just happy that they're suddenly on the same side. Oh, yeah, the relief, yeah. For something that they're not fighting anymore. And if, if they're laughing together at her, she will take that.

Yeah. Um, but then they are going to drive off again, uh, when the ground underneath the car breaks away. And the car falls and they all scream. And the next 9-1-1 call is one of the boys. I don't know whether they have a phone in the back there, or are they calling on the mum's phone? Either way, um

I'm going to assume that they had devices back there. I'm pretty sure one of them had an iPad or something.

Yeah.

It's something that they have, they can make a phone call on.

Yeah, somehow the older brother makes a 9-1-1 call. Yeah. And the dispatcher's like, okay, what road are you on? And he's like, we're, we're not on a road.

Yeah, and then we get the visual of this car just bouncing on the, on his, like, they're basically off the edge of the cliff, just barely hanging on.

Yeah, they've, they've dropped the cliff and then there's a, a, little sticky outy bits halfway down the cliff that they've landed on, and that's just holding them in position.

Yeah.

But Camden, we're assuming that it's Camden, is um, talking very, very quietly because he doesn't want to risk, if he speaks too loudly, that will upset the balance and send the car tumbling over. So the 118 get dispatched, hopefully they arrived within their allotted, um, arrival time.

Yeah. They, they meet an LAPD officer who gives them the lowdown. They tumbled a bit before they cat before catching on the brush, so they've got something there that's hanging onto them a little bit, but um, Bobby tells everyone their jobs, like, set up the winch, you guys get down there, like, Eddie and Lena apparently are the chaos duo to repel down the cliff and or the abseil.

No, Eddie's Eddie's manning the winch.

Oh, that's right. It's Chim. Chim goes down. Yeah. Okay.

Lena goes down, and Chim volunteers himself to also go down because he's worried about, um, Judith, who is the mother, because LAPD have told them in their, uh, sitrep that she is non responsive. So, Eddie sets up the winch, and interestingly, it's not He sets up, like, the tripod winch? Which, the last time we saw them do rappelling over a cliff was when they went after the bouncy house.

Oh, okay.

And they've actually got it set up so the cable is coming off the ladder truck, through this tripod, down the cliff. So it's a really weird setup.

Yeah, I mean at first they're trying to, like they're, not only are they lowering the guys down so that they can bring them back up again, um, in the basket thing. But they're also trying to anchor the car so it doesn't fall any further. So they must have like multiple, uh, you know, cables.

Yeah, because Lena, Lena takes a cable down and connects it to something on the car to secure it. That's the first thing she does before she starts talking to the boys. Um, it's just interesting.

Yeah. They don't, they don't go into super detail to show us how it all works,

but I wish they would.

The, yeah, the logistics are interesting.

That's just my brain. My brain will get caught on like one tiny little detail. I'm like, yes, yes, yes, boys in peril. Yes, I know. Very interesting. Tell me about the winch.

But the, uh, the tension in this scene is amazing. Like I was just getting so scared for these poor boys. They were terrified and the mum's just still unconscious the whole time. So she, they're just, they're just, and they don't even know if she's alive. Like when Chim first gets down there and he checks on her and then the older son's like, "Is she dead?" And Chim's like, "No, she's not dead. She's, she's okay."

Yeah. Like Bobby's like, "How are the kids?" And Chim very quietly goes, "Terrified."

Oh God,

rightly so.

These um, actors have done a brilliant job actually at being completely terrified. So,

yeah, the kids are actually really awesome. And like, sometimes you get kid actors and it's just like, uh, Like, it's clearly a kid actor, but these kids, like, they do a really good job of being siblings and being, like, off the side of a cliff. They're doing really well.

It doesn't help that while Lena and Chim are down there, um, the ground gives way again and the car drops another 20 feet and both Chim and Lena have to swing out of the way so that the car doesn't take them down. And it's only because Lena has clipped. the cable onto the car that the car doesn't go tumbling all the way down to the bottom.

Yeah. I like the engine trucks also having issues because the ground's way too soft.

And then, uh, so they have to move everything back so that they don't all end up going off the cliffside, which is a good move. Um, but so they start getting the, the kids out. They take the mom first in the basket. because she's, you know, still unconscious. And then the big brother has to convince the little brother to go first, which is so sweet because after they've been having their big argument, he's like, Jesse, listen to me. You need to go first. I'll be right behind you.

Yeah. And when Camden and Chim are having their discussion about the mother, um, And Chim is reassuring him that their mother is still alive. Camden's response is, "Good, cause Jesse's only nine, he's too little not to have a mum."

Yeah. And Chim's like, "well, if you do exactly what I tell you, I'm getting both of you out of here and no one's losing their mum today."

Yeah, so they get Jesse out.

Is this where Chim's having his little flashback moment?

Camden, yeah,

Chim has his little flashback moment. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm trying to remember whether we actually see anything about his mum or if he's just looking like he's feeling it.

It's just, yeah, when, um, Camden says Jesse's only nine, he's too little to not have a mum. Chim, like, you see his expression sort of falter.

Yeah. Yeah, at first I thought he was just, um, you know, having a, an emotional moment, uh, you know, feeling that. But then later he does explain to Maddy that. What was going through his mind at that point.

Yeah, it's because he was a little kid who didn't have his mum.

Yeah. Um, but yeah, just as they get, uh, as Tim gets him free, they have to cut the car free and it tumbles down to the bottom of the cliff.

And they, they literally cut it free, like Eddie pulls out a pocket knife and just slices through the cable that's holding the car up and I assumed that that cable was metal.

Yeah, I would have... yes

something that would be strong enough to connect to the winch in the firetruck and down to the car and you wouldn't have to worry about it coming unthreaded from the stress of holding up these vehicles on this road. Uh, terrain.

Yeah.

But no, apparently it is cord and not only is it cord, but it's cord that's easy enough to cut with a pocket knife very quickly.

Eddie just has like a Vibranium pocket knife. I don't know.

I guess so. Cause he very, it's just like a quick slice through the cable and then the car plummets down and thank you to the special effects team from 9-1-1 for not having the car explode on impact the way that they always seem to do in movies.

They don't normally do that.

Well, why would they?

The car's not running. So.

Which is what I mean,

there's no flame, there's no explosions going on in the car.

Yes. Unless there's any, I mean, you need some kind of spark to ignite the fuel. So why, yeah. Why do they always explode when they hit the bottom of a canyon?

Because of Roadrunner. I don't know.

Like I said, there's just something that seems to be like stereotypical, a car falls and then boom, flames. So I'm just very glad that they did not do that in this instance.

But yeah, so the car goes tumbling down and Chim appears at the top with the older brother and they're safe and sound. And Bobby's like, "geez, you were cutting it kind of close there." And Chim goes, "I wanted to make an entrance."

Can we also note that there is no safety harness that's being used for the boys?

Yeah, they just grabbed them out of there.

Yeah, but that's not, they should have a safety harness on them, because what happens if Chim suddenly, for some reason, lost his grip? He would literally drop the child, that's why they have that orange safety harness, if they loop around their waist and tuck under their arms. Yes, they should have had a safety harness for the boys.

yeah,

the mother and her son, they sent Buck down and they had to, or with Lena up in the, um, in the Ferris wheel, they put the safety harness around the guy so they could get him down. Um, off the ferris wheels. Why are they suddenly not using a safety harness here?

They ran out. They're all in the tsunami.

Apparently.

Yes.

They've lost them all?

They've just got, what is it, duct tape and chewing gum?

Yes. And they don't hold, hold kids down very well. Well, they could have duct taped them. Anyway, we've got um

Speaking of the boys.

The boys. So this is another siblings thing, like a

Yes.

Another plot line that we've got going on.

Yes, because the mother, um, they've got her strapped to a harness and Hen administers the smelling salts which brings her back to consciousness and her first concern is she can't go to hospital because she's got boys. And Hen looks up to see that Camden has noticed that, no, Jesse has noticed that Camden has been rescued and he races over and the two brothers are just embracing on the cliffside and Hen is touched by this brotherly love. She says that they're, they're taking care of each other.

In case we get into a car accident, they can cuddle each other. Tick.

They, they can take care of each other.

Yeah, they can't have a sibling in case of emergency, it's like break the glass. Yeah.

I think, I think it's, like, she saw, I was about to say. um, Henny and Den, but she saw Harry and Denny, um, fighting. She's like, ooh, no, no, no, I don't want siblings who are like that. But then she sees these loving siblings and she's like, oh, but imagine if that was our kids.

Yeah, she didn't see them 20 minutes ago when they were in the car.

And the mum's just like, yeah, they were literally, yeah. You didn't see them. I had Fight Club in the back of my car. That's what caused this shit, like. Yep.

Yep. All right, so Maddie has now pulled Athena into her schemes.

I'm sorry, anytime we talk about Maddie's storyline, I'm just gonna go, ugh.

We love Maddie, but this is not a great writing choice.

9-1-1 do something with Maddie that does not involve domestic abuse challenge, please.

So Athena is aiding her in, um, stalking this guy. She's looking him up.

She's looked him up. She's got his file. Yeah. So, I'm not sure that that's legal, Athena. But, you know, cops, gotta be cops.

And, you know, she's buddies with Maddy, so it's fine. Um, she's got just a couple of D& Ds, and then she explains that that's drunken disorderly. It's like, thanks, thanks for that. Um, but he He's only got one speeding violation, he's fine. Like, Maddie sort of prods him, like, no, no, prods her, "no arrests for assaults or anything violent?" She's like, no.

Nothing that's made it to his record.

No, Maddie's like, "Oh, maybe I'm just chasing shadows, but thank you for your help." And then it turns out that she is sitting in a car, like, like,

outside somebody's house.

Yeah. Staking out the address she has discovered.

Mind you, Maddie says that she feels like she's maybe chasing shadows and I immediately start singing "Cardigan" by Taylor Swift.

Of course you do.

Don't sully Taylor Swift with this storyline. Chasing shadows in the grocery line. It's a very interesting spin on the, uh, the teenage love triangle, if you bring in that implication.

So Maddie goes into incognito mode by pulling her hoodie up. And a man gets out of the car, a car just pulled up and that's why we could see her because the headlights shone in her face. The car's

also blasting metal music because we all know that domestic abusers blast metal music from their car speakers. Apparently. Just to make sure everyone knows that they're a bad guy.

He yells out. Somehow? That we can hear him from inside Maddie's car? I, I don't know.

Like, he goes inside the house and yet even though he's inside the house and Maddie is inside her car, she can hear him clearly say, "I'm back, what's for dinner?"

Yeah, he's very loud and demanding of dinner, apparently. And

has left the door

wide open. Yeah. You'd think he'd shut the door so she can't escape, but sure.

But a different guy is cooking some green flag, greens. Um,

But see the segue, like Vincent's gone, "What's for dinner?" And apparently we're having sweet potato and collard greens at the Grants' household. Yeah. How beautiful. 10 out of 10. No notes on these segues. They're hilarious.

They're quite seamless.

Um, so yeah, so we're having candied yams for dinner. Bobby is not happy at Athena because she invited "him" without talking to Bobby first.

Him being Buck. Yeah, but they don't She's invited Buck.

We don't know that yet.

We don't know until he walks in, until we see him having dinner. It was a bit confusing.

But yeah, Athena wanted, wanted him to know no matter what he's still family and she thought dinner would give the two time to work things out and Bobby's like, "But I didn't tell him." And Athena's like, "I thought you said he came by the firehouse," and Bobby's like, "Yeah, he did. But then we had to go on a call. And so I didn't get to tell him."

At which point I'm going, but wait, at what point were you going to talk to him? And then I realized it was that, that one sentence when Buck was spiraling about Lena, Bobby goes, but listen, and apparently that was going to be his segue into talking about what he was going to talk about.

Yeah. Like, that's Well, to be fair, like, he didn't expect him to come by the firehouse.

Yeah. But if this, if he was going to tell him then that it was him that was stopping him, hadn't he already told him that before? Like, back in the hospital, like, in the last episode, he already told him that it was the painkillers that were

The way that they framed it in that episode in "Kids Today", it was that the LAFD had ruled that Buck couldn't come back because of the blood thinners. So Bobby was trying to blame, like, it was the nameless, faceless overlords of the LAFD. Like, it's not me, I'd love to have you come back, but you know, the higher ups have deemed that it's a safety risk for you to be out. And I just, I just have to follow these orders. But now Bucky's going to learn the truth behind that situation.

Yeah, Buck's, like, basically hassling Bobby, going, Oh, well, if you say that, I'm fine. Um. So yeah, so we cut to dinner. Oh, I do love that Athena's, like, Athena's reaction to, like, I didn't tell him, "I'll get the wine." She's like, oh, I'm fucking done with these idiots.

She's like, oh, this is not going to go well. I'll get wine.

Wine and popcorn, but I don't know if the popcorn's going to go with the collard greens and candied yams.

Um, but yeah, Buck's very proud of himself that he told the lawyer off big time. Um, he's like, "I said, you're not going to get me to sign any affidavit that blames the 118 for anything." And Bobby's like, "yeah, I appreciate that." And Buck just keeps going. "The nerve of that guy to think I'd turn on my friends."

Yeah, the nerve of that guy, huh?

Um, and then he says that he, he missed Cap's cooking, and Bobby goes, "I missed your eating." Um, but then Athena offers him some collard greens, and Buck goes, "Nope, not for me, can't eat those while I'm on the blood thinners, there's too much vitamin K."

But there's, there's this split second where Athena looks mortally offended that he's not having the collard greens. And it's only when he explains that it's for medicinal reasons that she kind of relents and goes, well, okay, I guess that's okay then. You don't have to eat them now.

Sounds like you're taking your health very seriously. Um, Mum, so my mum, I'm pretty sure we mentioned the last blood thinner episode that my mom's on blood thinners. Um, she's like, "I also can't have pomegranate." And I was just like, cool. Thanks. Yep. Good. Um, then Dad heard pomegranate and went out and bought pomegranate juice. And Mum's like, "No, I said, I can't." So apparently we now have pomegranate juice. Yeah. I just love that Mum's like, "Oh yeah, I can't have pomegranate."

Oh, that's sweet of him to go and do that though.

Oh dear. Um, anyway. Yeah. So Athena is very proud that he's taking your health very seriously. Buck says the better he manages it, the sooner he can go back to work. And Athena's like, that's very mature of you, Buck. And

Thanks, Mum.

Yeah, Bobby's just sitting there, like, head in his hands, just like, shut the fuck up. Like, shut the fuck up. Shut the fu we've discussed this. Athena, shut the fuck up. Um, and Buck's like, "hey, that lawyer got me thinking. There's strength in strength in numbers. Maybe I could get everyone to sign a statement of support and show the higher ups that, like, you guys don't think I'm a liability. then they'd have to listen." And Bobby's just trying to interrupt him this whole time.

Yeah, he's just going on and on about like, they'd have to listen if you told them that I was ready. Um, and I mean, they'd have

These dumb asses.

The dumb, they would have no right to keep me. And Bobby just breaks in and just like, "I'm the dumb ass." "I'm sorry, what?"

Um, and Bobby says, you're not ready. That's what I told them when, that's what I told them when they asked. And Athena's just like, "Would anyone like any cornbread?"

And Bobby takes some! He's like, "oh yes, I'd love some cornbread, thank you." And Bucky's just sitting there with his mouth open going, what? So then that cuts, that sort of loops back to that scene in "Kids Today" when, that I didn't, when we were talking about that episode and Bobby gets the phone call as they're leaving the retirement home. And I couldn't understand why they'd kind of put that scene in and how it related to him going to the hospital and telling Buck that he's benched.

Yeah. But yeah, but Buck looks like someone's kicked his puppy.

It's like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy aren't real, and then they've kicked his puppy on the way out.

Yeah, like he, he looks so devastated. And he, as I mentioned, he looks so pocket sized in this episode. Like he looks tiny. And he just looks so young and so like such a baby and he is like, what "You are, the reason that they won't let me back?"

This is his, the betrayal.

Like Bobby is his father figure.

Yeah.

And his dad has just said, you can't come back to your family. Like, we've kicked you outta the house. And obviously we know that's not what happened. Um, you know,

but the RSD is strong with Buck.

Oh yeah. And Bobby says the medication's the reason. Athena says that Bobby's just worried about you, we're all worried about you. And Buck just goes, I thought you were on my side. I thought you were my friend. And Bobby's like, "I am your friend, but I'm also the captain of almost 20 other firefighters whose lives and safety depend on the decisions I make, and I can't put them at risk." And if you're not operating...

and let's be clear, when he says 20 other firefighters, he actually means like four other firefighters. He could give a shit about the other 16. It's just those four that he's worried about.

Um, and Buck, Buck gets angry now. "Like, I am at 100%, maybe even more. I've never felt so good." Um, like, he bashes his hand on the table, which Athena won't like. And Bobby's like, "I know you went through a lot in that tsunami, and maybe you feel like you can survive anything." And Buck's like, "Anything like a knife in my back." And then he just stands up and he's like, "Athena, so much for inviting me. Like, this was lovely, but I'm going."

Teenage petulance is the first thing that's...

Like we get, we, we, we're straight back to Buck 1. 0 here. Yup.

Really? He's very upset though. Like, I can understand wanting to get out of there as quickly as he could, but yeah, he's not very, he's not at all willing to discuss anything at this point. He's just like, no, you betrayed me...

Yeah, he just, he just wants to run.

I'm out.

His fight or flight gets activated and he is flying.

He's out. Yeah.

Because he knows better, at least now, than to throw a punch at Bobby.

Mm hmm. Yes. Although, what is he going to do, fire him? I mean, officially he's still on light duty, so yeah, he can fire him.

Yes, he could fire him. He could kick him out completely.

Yes. Yes. Um, so yeah, at least there's some, like, thoughts in his head. They're all just sad. Yeah, poor Buck. Betrayed. Then we cut back to the other Buckley, who's also making terrible choices.

They're all in the middle of it today.

Uh, so apparently, uh, Maddie's stereo hearing is still kicked in.

Yeah, I was gonna say, she's got some, she's bugged the place or something. She can't hear what's happening. I don't know.

She's got that weird little, like, sonar thing that you can point at places and you can pick up, like they have in, like, spy movies, where you can, like, means the sound and you can hear it clearly.

We have one of them. They're not too hard to get.

Oh. Oh. Okay. Well, okay then. Um, but yeah, so Maddie is hearing what she thinks from her life experience is the sound of abuse. She hears arguing, she hears stuff breaking, um, and then the man that she saw going into the house, which I guess will, is Vincent. I mean, the subtitles say that he's Vincent, we're assuming that he is Vincent, considering that that's the name that we were given from the file that Athena was reading from.

Yeah, I feel like Maddie just sees him and like, you know, the red mist comes down and she just goes, yeah, into vigilante mode. Like, I don't, I don't know. It's a weird decision.

The killer in Maddie sparks back up.

Yeah, I mean, she's already killed one guy.

I was about to say, you could understand her doing that if she had been in this situation, and she had not had the opportunity to get revenge on her abuser, but she killed her abuser.

Yeah.

Maybe not in the circumstances, perhaps, that she, that this Red Mist would want her to, but, Yeah, so she gets very, very close to Vincent before the mist clears and she swerves, thankfully does not hit him, and then speeds off into the distance.

Yeah, looking extremely shaky and, you know, just broken up.

Yeah, what the fuck did I almost just do?

Does this storyline get resolved this episode? Because I don't remember the rest, like, I think I just stopped paying attention. I'll find out later, but,

I, yeah, I, after I think the second time of my watch through, I stopped paying attention to the storyline.

Uh, I don't know if it got resolved, but there's definitely more of it.

There is more of it, it goes over several, I mean, spoiler alert, it goes over several episodes.

Okay, cool. I'm not just, I, I was seriously like, did I forget, like.

No, no, we haven't got there yet.

Okay, good. Yeah.

Oh, okay. There's more,

I guess. Um, yeah, this season definitely has a lot more overarching storylines than the previous. Two.

Yeah, okay.

So we had, uh, one Buckley chasing people down, and now we've gone back to the Ambulance Chaser. Who is enabling Bucks

Cross Buck.

One angry Buckley to another angry Buckley, both of them making very bad decisions. Yeah.

Um. And Chase says "If you don't win, not only will you never work as a firefighter in LA again. I doubt any department in the country will hire you."

Yes, because in Buck's anger, he's put all of the dots in that are currently in his head together and decided that suing the city is how he is going to get his job back. And he's not listening when Chase is, as he is required to by law, telling him that it is not a done deal. "Like you could lose. You could lose this, and if you do lose it, you may be done as a firefighter." And Buck is just focused, hyper focused, laser focused on, but if I win I'll get my job back.

Chase also tells him that during this process it's best to have no contact with anyone from or connected to the station house. Yeah. So no texting, no calling, nothing.

He decides he doesn't care, he's alone in this fight, so Ugh, so dramatic, um, yeah.

And then we get another one of these amazing segues, where Buck has said, "I'm alone in this fight," and then we cut to Eddie, who's fighting. It's like a punching bag, but he's still, he's punching shit.

Yeah, but he's not alone.

No, but he's not alone, he has Lena. Um, very quickly, before we get on to, um, Eddie and Lena, there is a tumblr thread that we're going to come back to, well, that I'm going to bring up as this lawsuit progresses, because it is an employment law, is an employment law firm out of California who did a thought experiment on if Buck had come to them as a client saying, I want to sue the city, what would they have done? And how would it have actually played out in reality?

Right.

Yeah, it was a really good read.

So I think that'll be interesting to go through.

I hope it doesn't go for very long because this just sounds like a lot of drama for no reason. Yeah, I don't know. The lawsuit arc? Maybe I'm just like

Oh no, I love the lawsuit arc.

The lawsuit arc's great.

Okay, all right, okay. I'll look forward to it then instead of dreading it

No, but I think, I think it'd be interesting to see sort of... At the end of this episode, I want to ask you about how your reactions to Buck in this episode, and then we can go through and specifically like how you're reacting to the lawsuit era because, um, my reaction first time through and then my reaction like second time and third time through, like, I, I see this very differently than I did the first time I went through. So, and I've, it's been a while.

And their negative sexual tension.

I saw an, it's, I was reading an interview with Tim Minear from this time, and he specifically said that they were not intending to do anything romantic between Lena and Eddie, but that was like, that was an interview in relation to episode five. So I'm really wondering whether they, they did intend for them to be something, but by the time they put Rhonda and, uh, Ryan together on set, they just realized it wasn't going to work. So they had to like switch gears.

But yeah, Lena's not impressed about the therapist that Chris has been going to.

It doesn't sound like she, um, she had a very good experience with therapy. I do love this little moment. Eddie is training. He's got, like, one of his, um, gloves is tucked under his arm to sort of force him to keep his guard up. And he's punching with the other, the hand and he's, he keeps pausing to talk. And Lena just slaps him. "You're not paying attention. Get your hands up."

What are they training for here? I don't know. Like, do they often get, like, people, like, punching them on scenes?

I was actually really confused when she just hit him out of the blue. I'm like, what the hell was that for?

Because he dropped his hand. He dropped his guard.

Yeah. I don't know. It just seemed, like, really weird. I'm like, why is she hitting him?

I guess if you've got an MMA fighter as an actress, you need to have her doing something MMA related. Yeah. Yeah, so she's decided she's going to train Eddie

It makes sense now that you explain it, but at the time I was like, what the hell? Why is she? It's just their relationship, like this sibling kind of relationship. She just randomly hits him.

Oh, 100 percent if they had not been, if, Like, it took me a while to figure out what Eddie was doing, but if he had just been, you know, sparring with the punching bag, and she's just slapping him for no reason, I was doing 100 percent would have bought that. And it's just this very Lena of her to do.

Yeah. Yeah. But she's just like, "I don't, I don't buy it. Like this touchy feely crap."

Um, yeah, we find out that her dad died when she was a kid and she was sent to a therapist. The lady had hand puppets. And Lena made her cry, and then told her mum that she didn't want to go back.

Eddie's like, "Oh, I feel encouraged, thanks."

She does give Eddie some good advice, though. She says that what worked for her was when her mum told her how she, the mother, was feeling. Um, and that she was sad, and that it was okay to be sad. And that however they felt, she and Lena were in it together no matter what. And that resonates with Eddie. I think because that's something that he can do. Like the shrink saying, you know, love him anyway, or whatever combination of words it was. That's not proactive.

Yeah, like Eddie's from the military and is now a firefighter, like he's used to being told what to do and he does the thing.

Yes, he might not follow orders anymore, but he still can when he wants to.

Because yeah, like he's a completely single father now. Like he's, Chris doesn't have a mum that's magically going to come home anymore.

Speaking of mums.

It's not like his parents are, um. Oh my god, I didn't, I didn't even, I didn't even notice that segue, but yeah, we've got she's a good mum, and then we cut to a dead mother.

Ouch.

Yeah.

Not really, but.

Not a great, uh, segue in this case, but yeah, an estate sale for a mother who has died, and well, who, she must have been elderly, I'm guessing, because these two ladies look like they're, you know, grown-ups. Um, so

they're not acting like it, but

no, they're, they're, they're getting mad at each other because they are arguing over the stuff that they're supposed to be selling and splitting the profits.

They're one of the, one of the sisters, we don't, I don't think we actually get names, so I just was calling them sister A and sister B. So one of the sisters,

B1, B2

said that we, yeah, B1 said we agreed that we were gonna sell everything and split the profits, but B2 keeps pilfering stuff like she'll see like a vase or a blender or something. and she'll take it for herself and B1 says that she's... that B2 is still just mad because she got the family heirloom ring that B2 says should be hers.

I feel like this arguing scene went on for like a really long time.

Which is why I didn't like transcribe it and I just summarized it because I got so bored.

I don't know whether they needed to fill some time or something in this episode, but it just kept going on. Then they're making margaritas and then they're like having, they're making up kind of thing.

Yeah, B2 is making margaritas and she's trying, she's using the blender to interrupt her sister, like really, really petty sibling fighting stuff.

Yeah.

Um, but B1 says that she will, she promises her sister that she'll take care of the ring to the point where she takes it off because she's wearing it and she puts it in a ring box for safekeeping. And then the two of them get sloshed on margaritas.

As you do, while fighting over stuff.

Yeah, and then fall asleep on the, on the lounge chairs by the pool.

And then sister B2 wakes up. And, uh,

Pinches the ring back.

Takes the box from her sister. And puts it on. And then we get a 9-1-1 call.

Yeah, it's a weird setup.

It is a weird setup. I think it's, it's just the excuse for another example of siblings. So, Hen's seen the lovey dovey siblings and then now she gets to see the petty fighting siblings. Because they are called because the, um, the sister has put the ring on and now her hands are covered in blisters and her finger is almost turned black.

Yeah.

And the, the only thing they can think to do is they need to get that ring off. And the sister, the B1 is like, "Can you just cut the finger off? So you don't have to cut the ring?"

I'll need to look it up to see if this is a real thing that happens, but apparently if you

phyto, phyto, phyto, phytophotodermatitis. Yes. It's a real thing.

So you have citrus on your hands and over a certain temperature and a UV light and it makes your hands swell up?

It causes a chemical reaction. So she's got chemical burns all over her hands.

I mean, remind me never to make margaritas in the sun, like, this is awful.

Yeah. So just don't make margaritas and then fall asleep in the sun without washing your hands first.

Pretty much. Yeah.

Or like eat oranges while you're playing like soccer or something like that. Anyway, um, I've never heard of it before, but now I'm just like, this happens?

This happens.

Anyway, they do decide that they need to cut the ring off and

Which freaks out Sister B1 because she has not... she's already broken her promise to keep the ring safe. She's already sold it.

Yeah.

So if they cut the ring off, she has to give the money back. And she, I think she would prefer her sister to cut her finger off than to give the money back to the buyer. Then the two of them are fighting backwards and forwards, because when sister, when B1 announces that she sold the ring, um, her sister's like, "You are without doubt the worst person I've ever known." And Hen's looking backwards and forwards going like, "Aren't you supposed to be in mourning for your deceased mother?

No, she's got some snippers. Yeah.

But where did she cut it? Because one sister's there, I think the idea is she's cut it equally in half and given each sister half a ring, but does each sister have half of the stone and half of the setting?

Yeah, I don't know.

But she's being, being petty and then she very smugly says, "Sharing is caring," and I want to slap her up the backside of the head.

But also, like, she has already, I mean, you know, destroyed their property once, But it could have been mended. Like, and now she's snipped it completely in half again. It's like

Yeah, she's punishing them for being bad siblings.

Ah, that is not your job.

No, it's not her job. But yeah, the entire point of that storyline was more sibling shit. To really make Hen question whether she wants to bring that kind of energy into her household, after she'd kind of decided after seeing the boys that yes, oh actually I know I, we do want that, that'll be great. And then she's looking at these grown women going, oh no, maybe we don't.

All right, let's quickly go through this Maddie bit because, oh my god, what is she doing? Um.

How quickly? Because I can sum it up in like a sentence.

Yeah, go ahead.

Or we can actually go through the scene.

Oh, I just, no. She goes to the gym.

She's stalking, so the woman who called 9-1-1, who she stalked back to her house, um, her name is Tara. She is apparently a personal trainer at this gym. And Maddie has just so happened, showed up during this woman's shift looking all, Oh my God, I don't know how to use this machine. Please someone help me. Oh, wait, you look like you work here. Can you help me? Oh, wait, you look like a personal trainer. Are you free right now to do a session?

So almost. running this guy down didn't scare her enough to

No, she just had to change her tactics.

Yeah.

The softly, softly approach.

So then after they do their little training session, she actually meets Vincent in person. Because they're, you know, he comes to pick Tara up and she introduces her to him. And Maddie's like, bared teeth, like, "Nice to meet you."

It's just so stupid.

Yeah, I don't know.

And it cannot end well, I don't know. No. And I know how it ends, and I'm still flabbergasted.

She goes to work after all that, um, and Chim is there. And I don't know if, I'm assuming at this point, since they have this conversation, that they haven't spoken to each other since the other day when you know, she walked off after dropping the plate.

I guess, I'm guessing it's been a day or two? And Chim did try to call her and she sent him to voicemail.

Okay.

So now he's stalking her to try and talk to her. Because, you know, words over the phone aren't working so he needs to see her in person.

Yeah, it's a little less creepy when it's your actual girlfriend that you're trying to get in touch with.

But again, how are they letting him on the floor of the dispatch?

Yeah. I mean, he's a first responder, so.

Still!

Maybe he's got clearance.

Yeah, who knows.

For the drama. It's for the drama.

Yeah.

I also think that they've redecorated the break room, because I swear there used to be lockers in there at one point, and now they've just got cubbies.

She says that the dropping the plate thing, that was nothing. Like, "You just startled me, it was nothing." And Chim's like, "no, it wasn't nothing." Uh, but then he explains to her about how he went to the car falling off the cliff call and tells her about how seeing that triggered his emotions about his mum, um, when she had cancer. And Maddie's like, "Oh, you never told me about that." And he hadn't really thought about it in years, but it, some, the memory triggered and he thought about it.

No.

Good. Okay. Mustn't be heavy enough. Sorry. Continue.

You were talking.

Oh, I was too. Maddie says there's got to be a word for that. And Chim goes, I'm sure the Germans have something. It's probably seven syllables, 17 syllables long.

And completely unpronounceable.

It's true. They do have a lot of unpronounceable words. I'm sure one of our German listeners could tell us.

They do have a lot of very apt words. We need to ask Antje.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. But whatever it is, it's part of them, who they are, and Chim just never wants Maddie to feel like she has to hide that from him.

And then Maddie crosses her fingers behind her back and says, Okay, no more hiding.

Ugh.

She doesn't do the crossing her fingers behind her back, but

yeah, I was gonna say, does she really do that? Because I can believe that , she is like, keeping heaps of stuff from him at this point.

It's just, It's just, the, what, the shit that she's doing with Tara and like, no, yeah, okay, no, no, no more hiding, no more hiding. Like, you're not gonna tell him about the fact that you're stalking someone who called 9 1

1? Yeah, maybe she's just not sure how fast she's gonna go with that yet. But anyway, she does do a very cute, um, I'm gonna call you later and he's like, I can't wait. It's like, oh, you guys are sweet. Even if you desperately need therapy. But yeah, speaking of people who kind of are a little creepy, Hen is like watching Karen while she's sleeping. I'm like, if I woke up and, like, someone was staring at me like that, I'd be like, what the fuck? Oh, bless, no, it is really sweet.

But there's a point that she's, there's a reason that she's awake and that she's either woken up early or she has not gone to bed yet and she's staying up because, um, an alarm is about to go off, which is going to be like Karen's peak ovulation time. So they need to give her some kind of shot. And it turns out that Hen has finally come to a decision after seeing all of the different siblings out in the world and encountering them. She has decided that she does want Denny to have a sibling.

Yeah, and they can commiserate about their crazy mothers, according to Karen.

They'll never be bored. Yes, they will be bored. I can guarantee you they will be.

Yeah, they will be, yeah.

Especially in school holidays, I assume.

Yes, oh my god. So we're going to cut back to the Diaz household, where it is bedtime. So I don't know which day this is, because if this is the same time as Karen and Hen's conversation, Chris is up way past his bedtime, which is probably why Eddie like body slams into the bed. Get in bed.

Get in bed. Go the fuck to sleep.

Go the fuck to sleep.

This is so cute though, this interaction.

It is, yeah.

Yes. It is. He asks Chris to show him those pearly whites to make sure that he's actually brushed and when Chris bares his teeth and he like recoils and like tries to shield his face because the teeth are so bright. It's very cute.

Yeah and then he gets all deep suddenly and goes "There's anything bothering you can talk to me, you know that right?" He's like, "I know, I know, Daddy."

He's trying It's, it's not working though.

No.

Because Chris isn't willing to talk.

Um, but as he leaves the room, he sees one of the pictures that Chris has drawn, stuck up on the, on the wall, and it says my family, and it's got three people in it, and it's got dad, mum, and me, and the light bulb goes on above Eddie's head.

Finally.

Yeah, because that, the picture of the figure marked as mum looks like. It's very, very familiar to the point where, like, Eddie races out into the living room kitchen area where he's left the file that the psychologist has given him and brings back the picture of the woman drowning and sort of holds it up against the family portrait. And you can see that the mum figure in the family portrait is the same figure as the woman drowning.

Yeah, and he actually asks if Chris "Is this mum?"

Chris doesn't answer, he just kind of looks away all guilty, because he didn't want to tell his father because he didn't want to make Eddie sad.

Oh, bless his heart.

Bless him.

Breaks my little heart.

And um, and now Eddie can tell him that there's nothing wrong with being sad, and "we've got each other, we're going to be okay." Oh, and then we all cry. It's so cute.

From one father son duo to the next one. Oh no.

Or from one daddy to another?

Oh no.

No. Not in this context. No.

Um,

anyway, Buck's at Bobby's house. It's late at night and yet Buck's shown up at Bobby's house to, um, to apologize for walking out on dinner. Athena is trying to soothe, uh, smooth things over and she's like, "no, you don't need to apologize. It's fine. I want you to come in." And Buck's like, "I can't do that. This is the last time we are going to be able to talk because I'm suing the city. The department, and you personally, Bobby, for wrongful termination," and serves him something.

It's just a card that says sorry for your loss. And then in brackets, in the, like, in the card, it just says, it's me.

I'm wondering whether it's like a notice of intent to sue or something like that, but Bobby's got like a, what the fuck expression on his face. Athena takes it and reads it for him. And then she's also like, Oh my God, I'm no, I'm done with this and walks off. Um, and the end, the end of the episode, With Buck saying that he told Bobby that he wouldn't stop fighting until he got his job back and he's not, even if it means fighting Bobby.

And that's the start of the lawsuit era!

Welcome to the lawsuit era! Gird your loins, because it's gonna get messy.

It sounds messy already, and it's only just started.

So, like I said, first time I watched this season through, I definitely had thoughts about Buck. The second or third time, fourth time, fifth time that I've watched it, my feelings about Buck in this arc have changed. So, Ellen, what are you thinking about Buck right now?

Well, I mean, I can understand that he's very angry about, like, discovering that it was Bobby who, you know, is preventing him from coming back to work personally. Um, and he did say to the, to the lawyer, like, I know why they're not letting me back because of the medication and because whatever. And then he does like this big, you know, 180 and decides that he's gonna sue. I'm not sure how much of my reaction is, you know, based in the fact that I am an extremely conflict avoidant person.

I'm just imagining this happening to Ellen and Ellen's like, Oh, that's fine.

It's fine. Like, don't worry about that. I'm fine. Yeah. No. Bobby's

like, you can't come back to work, and Ellen's like, thank you. Here's a tip.

Uh, no. I may well have go ahead with it, but I would be having anxiety attack the entire time. Uh, no. It's, yeah. I can understand, like, his reasoning, but I just don't understand how he went from, um, Like, is the lawyer this, uh, good at talking him into it? That he just went from, no, no, I know why they're not letting me back to, no, you definitely should let me back and I am going to force you to do so. Um, yeah. I'll see how it unfolds.

Yeah. I feel like he, like, I don't remember how the lawsuit arc plays out. Like, I watched it very quickly. Um, to the point that my original notes had this episode and the next episode all in one like file. And I was like, Oh, apparently it changed to episode five at some point.

You didn't even notice when it

did not even notice. Um, so like I was watching the episode and like following my original notes and I was just like, when does this happen? And then I'm like, Oh, it doesn't, it's next episode. Um, but yeah, like I feel like Buck feels backed into a corner and he's lashing out.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously hearing from Bobby that it was him that has told them that he can't come back to work is, was the last straw. You know, he was already upset about the whole thing, but now it's like, is that how you want to play this? Like, okay.

Like when he felt like it was like him and his family against, you know, the man.

Yeah. And then it turns out his family was. Yeah.

I think from memory, the first time I watched this through, I was very angry at Buck. I thought he was being very selfish. Um.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

I couldn't understand why he was taking this kind of action. I thought that this was just very, um, selfish, very petulant action to be taking, um, very over the top. But those are not my feelings anymore. Um, I think I understand now a little bit better why he's done what he's done and why he thinks he needs to do it this way.

Mm-hmm,

and they're, they're also feeling that he's overreacting and being very selfish and being very, um,

it's like,

no, there is no other word. It is.

Um, it's hard cause Buck, like Buck has no one else. Like he doesn't have, he doesn't seem to have any other friends. He doesn't have any family besides Maddie who is dating someone from the 118.

Yeah. Okay. So he's like, He's feeling extra isolated.

Yeah, so like this is his whole world has come crashing down.

But I don't think the first time through that I understood that.

Yeah.

Because a lot of my feelings about Buck now and understanding why he's doing what he's doing is being informed by what we find out like later on in the show. So there's, you know, progressions and storyline, there's other bits of information that drop and then so taking that on board and coming back and watching this, it's like, oh, okay.

I feel like you had the same reaction to the lawsuit arc as I did with Shannon's ending. Like, I was angry at Shannon and then re watching it, I was just sad. Like, and I just felt so sad for her.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting that this is one of those shows that the more you watch it, the more you pick up on things and it starts to layer and inform and you get a better understanding, which is great for a show that, um, that you have the ability to binge and watch over and over and over again. But I wonder whether...

it changes the meaning because obviously they intended for you not to find out that extra information about Buck until later.

Well, it makes you wonder how much of, like, did they know what they were going to bring up about Buck the entire time?

Yeah, must have, because it's in this season, right? Like this, that episode would have already been, if not written, at least planned.

No,

it's not until next season. Oh, okay. I thought it was later this season.

It's like, it is interesting how far in advance do they, do they plot these plot storylines and plot characters. What is in the, what is in the showbook? Like the Bible, how much is plotted about each character and do they infer, do they use that to...

Considering they don't even know, considering they don't even know how old all the characters are

Oh God, don't get into that. That's just gonna make me angry.

They don't know? Do they change their ages?

Oh, they change their ages all the time, yeah. Yeah, the, the whole time being There was a whole discourse last week in It comes up every, like, a couple weeks, honestly, but there's a whole thing about

Time being wibbly wobbly is, yeah, it's gone wibbly wobbly to, yeah.

Um, yeah, there's a whole thing about whether Buck or Eddie is older.

Oh, really?

And it comes up every couple weeks because there's evidence about both of them being older than the other.

Okay.

Yeah, I think the showrunner has, like, They've brought out something in the most recent season which indicates one direction, which is the opposite to what the fandom is insistent that it has to be.

But also, Chris's age has changed like three times.

Yeah, like time is so wibbly wobbly that it affects the characters as well. They're just, they're growing. It's Benjamin Buttons in all sorts of directions going at you and everybody.

Right.

Okay, cool, that's, that's, that is an interesting, your reaction in, And perspective on Buck is interesting, and I will be interested to see how it progresses as this arc plays out.

Okay, so we did have multiple storylines here. We had the sibling thing.

It was interesting because with the episode being called "Triggers", I kind of assumed that it was going to be one of those themed episodes. So, um, yeah. where every single storyline was going to be about people getting triggered. Um,

yeah, we did have several stories where they did get triggered.

But it's not, it's not like, um, the classic one where every single storyline you can tie it back to being triggered. So, you know, we had Maddie being triggered multiple times. We had like Alan being triggered. We had Chim being triggered. But it's They were one kind of storyline, but then you also had Hen and the sibling storyline that wasn't really trigger related going on, and then you also had Buck.

Yeah. Yeah, you're right.

And then Eddie's storyline as well, that's not real, that's just like, trauma, that's not really about Chris being triggered, that's just, you know, this poor kid trying to deal with the death of his mother and being smack bang in the middle of this natural disaster all within months of each other.

Yeah, they sure did pack a lot of stuff, didn't they?

Yeah, it's an awful lot of stuff in one episode, and the structure of it and the amount of storylines that they packed in is not what I thought I was getting into with an episode called "Triggers".

Yeah, yeah, it definitely wasn't as on the nose as previous episodes.

Yeah, maybe I need to just start trusting the writers that, you know, rather than it being a "Karma's a Bitch", or a "Stuck", or a "Trapped", it might be something like "Haunted", where they had multiple storylines about hauntings, but some of them were very subtle, and some of them had nothing to do with hauntings at all.

Did um, do we often have episodes where there are three writers? Because I'm just wondering whether they took on different bits of the story and then

Maybe

someone added the segues to stitch them all together, you know?

Perhaps someone pitched a particular storyline and when that storyline got added to this episode they've gone Yeah, this would work really well this week. So they got their name in the credits as writer because that was their baby, that little bit there. Um, even if maybe only one or two writers did the overall story.

Yeah, no, I did, like, sometimes when you have so many different storylines in one episode, it feels all over the place and feels rushed, sometimes. But in this case, it wasn't like that at all. It all kind of stitched together quite neatly.

I mean, the segues were on point.

Yeah, that's part of the reason why.

But yeah, I think that even though none of the storyline, like all of the storylines were slightly different, none of them were all, you know, specifically on one theme, you had like an A storyline, a B storyline and a C storyline because of the way they stitched them together, they flowed nicely. And so, apart from the Maddie ones, but that's just me. It was, everything, everything worked in all of them in this one episode. Yep.

Yeah, no, I thought this was a really great, um, well put together episode.

Yes.

Cool. So what do we have to look forward to next time?

Oh boy. Next week, we have episode five, which is called "Rage". Rage. Um, and for those of you who have seen the show before, uh, you know what we're in for. So, the summary says, The 118 races to help protesters at a slaughterhouse and a wife who finds herself trapped in a rage room with her husband's mistress. Meanwhile, Athena takes action after Michael, May, and Harry experience a traumatic traffic stop.

Right. So, potentially a rough one next week?

Well, the trigger warnings from the trigger doc the document that sort of sets out all of the triggers for each episode that we base our trigger warnings on, it's underlined, and it's italicized, it's in It's like there are screaming sirens around this one. It's a strong warning for racially charged police violence and discussion of that. Um, we also just have the general trigger warning for cops, police violence and racism, threat of police gun violence.

What an episode.

So yeah, next week is going to be a tough one.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode, the trigger episode. All the ways that you can tell us about what you thought of that are listed on our website, which is thatweewooshow.com. Thank you for those who have left comments on Spotify and also on our YouTube channel. So on YouTube, we don't have any video there, but we've got, um, our, just the audio for each episode.

Bye.

Bye.

9-1-1 is a fictional show, but many of the situations portrayed happen in the real world too. If any of the topics we've discussed in this episode have affected you, please know you're not alone. You can call or text numbers in your country for help. Just google Crisis Support in your location to find out the number. If you enjoy our podcast, you can help us out by leaving us a review on Spotify or your preferred listening app, and by sharing our social media posts.