“It’s driving you nuts, isn’t it?” guest star Devin Kelley asks Ryan Guzman in a sneak peek video from season 7, episode 9, “Ashes, Ashes.”
“Have you figured it out yet…why I look so familiar to you?” Kim (Devin Kelley) may be asking the 9-1-1 audience that question just as much as she’s asking Eddie (Ryan Guzman).
In a season 7, episode 9 preview clip exclusive to Entertainment Weekly, Kim catches Eddie staring at her…again. We at home know it’s because she’s a dead ringer (pun intended) for Eddie’s deceased wife, Shannon, who is also played by Kelley. But the firefighter attempts to play off her questions: “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Its driving you nuts, isn’t it?” Kim teases him before revealing that she was once a series regular on a short-lived TV show called Failed System, a “big network show about a young team of lawyers who fight to get the wrongly accused out of prison.”
“Well maybe that’s it then,” Eddie replies, “or maybe I just like looking at you.”
“I wanted to revisit [a] primal wound for [Eddie,] and we’re going to see more deeply into that wound than we have before,” 9-1-1 co-creat or and showrunner Tim Minear has told EW about bringing Kelley back as Kim. “Eddie has always been dealing with the loss of Shannon — with his idealized version of what that marriage could have been, but never was. I do think he has a romanticized, idealized version of what their future could have been together. And in fact, what their past was together, which you will discover a little bit more in the [this week’s] episode.”
Minear has referenced Vertigo as an inspiration for Eddie’s fixation on Kim and emphasizes that it might not be healthy — or end well: “I mean, it’s dangerous when you silo yourself off into your fantasy world. You might be hurting people inadvertently, and it starts to become kind of obsession.”
But Kelley has told EW she hopes spending time together can lead to “a catharsis, and there is healing that can come for Eddie by exploring the past with Shannon and then seeing the future with Kim — who is very representative of Shannon.”
This episode will tell. (It will also hopefully explain what’s going on with that explosion at Bobby and Athena’s house we saw in the teaser at the end of last week’s episode…)
