Bees! A major 118 shakeup! That’s enough to keep the first responders busy when 9-1-1 Season 8 begins, but of course, there’s much more to come.
The entire cast—Angela Bassett (Athena), Peter Krause (Bobby), Aisha Hinds (Hen), Kenneth Choi (Chimney), Oliver Stark (Buck), Jennifer Love Hewitt (Maddie), and Ryan Guzman (Eddie)—sat down for a conversation for Paley Fest Fall TV previews that teases what’s ahead.
Bobby and Athena’s New Home
At the end of Season 7, Bobby and Athena’s house was burned down. Now, in Season 8, they’re house hunting while living in corporate housing, Krause reveals. “We go through a little tug of war about what exactly we’re going to do for housing, but we have filmed a scene where we’ve got a sense of direction,” he teases.
Bassett points out a must-have for them, considering Bobby’s cooking, is a “great kitchen.” But what’s important to the couple is “that feel of family and community,” she adds. “You know when you feel it. I think they’re simple people. I think at heart, they’re just regular people with a beautiful blended family. … I don’t think they’re grand and over the top, so that’s definitely not going to work for them, but they each have their own ideas and, like always, they have to meet in the middle.”
Eddie Without Christopher
To say Eddie’s personal life got complicated at the end of Season 7 is an understatement; he met a doppelganger of his late wife, and his son and his girlfriend walked in on them together in his house. Christopher (Gavin McHugh) then decided to go live with his grandparents, Eddie’s parents.
Going into Season 8, “everybody’s kind of left except for the 118. That’s his sounding board and the shoulders he relies on,” previews Guzman. “As we’re trying to find and navigate our time with a new captain, we are all finding our own paths. Eddie specifically, I think, is just trying to make positive choices. Everything’s kind of gone to the worst-case scenario for him in his life, so he’s just trying to make the most positive choices he can.” Hopefully, those choices reunite father and son sooner rather than later!
Buck and Tommy’s Relationship
One of the surprises of Season 7 was Buck exploring his sexuality and dating Tommy (Lou Ferrigno Jr.). They’re still together when the new season begins.
“We don’t really have too much of a time jump moving into this season, so the relationship with Tommy is much where it was left off,” explains Stark. “It is in its early stages. They’re still learning and figuring things out about each other and what a relationship might or could look like.”
The 118 vs. Gerrard
Bobby quit, and by the time he realized he wanted to take that back, there was a new captain at the 118—its former boss, Gerrard (Brian Thompson), under whose leadership the firehouse was not a happy place with a team that felt like a family. Both Hen and Chimney worked under him before Bobby came along. Now, that’s what they’re all dealing with in Season 8.
“[Hen] has a terrible history with Gerrard, and so that sense of her feeling grounded and that sense of family is turned on its head for her,” Hinds previews.
Buck might be struggling with the changes at the 118 the most, admits Stark. “He is quite set in his ways and I think he feels very loyal to Bobby and he certainly butts heads with Gerrard in the first episode. Buck is someone who, in the earlier seasons, [had] some issue with authority and knowing his place, and that certainly rears its head again. He was somewhat settled in his role with Bobby as captain, but a change in leadership has brought that old self out again, and he’s rebelling a little bit as we move into this season and not very successfully.”
Bobby’s New Job
Bobby is still around firefighters—just fake ones. He’s now a consultant on a first responder TV show, Hotshots. “We have a wonderful consultant on the show named Mike Bowman, the former LA Fire Chief, and I’m not modeling how I’m handling things on Hotshots, the show within the show at all on him, but it is a fun little extra layer that [showrunner] Tim Minear has created to comment on disaster emergency shows on television,” shares Krause.
Hen and Karen’s Foster Problem
Near the beginning of Season 7, while Hen was acting as captain while Bobby was on a cruise with Athena, Councilwoman Ortiz’s son died after refusing care at a scene. Ortiz then looked into Hen’s “mistakes,” and the result was Hen and Karen’s (Tracie Thoms) foster license being revoked. To ensure Mara wouldn’t go back into the system, Maddie and Chimney took her in, until Hen and Karen’s situation is fixed.
“It’s really beautiful having the opportunity to kind of foster family—no pun intended—offscreen and on-screen literally and figuratively, to just kind of dig into what that journey is to be foster parents, to go through the hope and then go through the heartbreak,” says Hinds. “Vacillating along the lines of that pendulum has been really rich and rewarding as an actor, but it’s also just a great space to be informed by and to inform the work.” When it comes to Mara, “We’re hoping that we get to keep her,” Hinds continues.
Bees!
9-1-1 kicks off its seasons with a major premiere, and this is no exception. This time, it’s millions of killer bees loose in Los Angeles, forming a bee-nado. “It’s going to cause quite the buzz,” Stark quips before noting that there were no real bees around them. “It’s more about the chaos that the bees—the bees is the starter emergency, and then the chaos that ensues from the bees, how do they affect different things around the city and so on and so forth,” he adds.
