The third episode of the fantastic network slopfest that is 9–1–1 features one of its leads, Chimney (Kenneth Choi), getting what my roommate affectionately refers to as “Phineas Gage’d” and coming out of it pretty much unscathed. His wife Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) recently survived a brutal throat–slashing incident with little more than a line across her throat. This is a show that had shark attacks on the freeway in its second season and recently featured a subplot about a man cheating on his girlfriend with a woman who looks identical to his dead ex–wife (played by the same actress). So why did my over–the–top, feel–good firefighter show decide to get real sobering, real quick, decimating the plot armor that has always protected its leads without warning?
The death of a major character is never an easy thing to write into a television show. This goes doubly for procedurals, whose entire conceit is formula, repetition, knowing that the good guys will nab the bad guys by the end of the episode … or at least the multi–episode arc. Killing a character is easier in some cases than others (Grey’s Anatomy gives you more opportunities to knock people off than Friends does, just by virtue of genre), but it’s never simple. In some cases, it can be done pretty beautifully—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a formulaic monster–of–the–week show, comes to mind. In others, it can be done pretty awfully.
9–1–1 killing off its fire captain, Bobby Nash (Peter Krause), is one of the worst–handled deaths I’ve ever seen.
The broad strokes, for the non–spoiler–averse (though I guess that ship has already sailed) are as follows: There’s a lab where a superstrain of a virus is being made, because, like, sure, and an evil (kinda hot) scientist is developing an antivirus for it. She wants to unleash it on the world and then provide the world with a cure so she can make bank and win a Nobel prize and not get arrested and sent to jail for life or whatever along the way. The 118, the central station at which the 9–1–1 characters work, responds to a call about a fire in the lab. Four characters get trapped inside, and Chimney gets exposed to the virus, which has an incubation period of 90 minutes. While Bobby’s proto–son Buck (Oliver Stark) and wife Sergeant Athena Grant (Angela fucking Bassett) hunt down Evil Scientist, Bobby and co. tend to Chimney as he ails. Finally, the antivirus gets delivered, and Bobby administers it to Chimney—before locking himself inside a section of the lab, taking off his helmet, and revealing that he got exposed to the virus, too. Bobby decides to sacrifice himself for Chimney, allowing himself to die; it’s not suicide, which he’s attempted both before the timeline of the show and during the show, but it’s pretty close. He has a tearful goodbye with Buck, then with Athena, and then he stoops to pray.
We don’t see the body, which I’m really holding onto. The Golden Rule of Television is that if there’s no body, there’s no death. (Although we do see the bodybag … but let me theorize, okay?)
So, first of all, ouch. I’m sad. They killed a TV dad of mine! What the hell!
Second of all … again, what the hell? What a terrible choice, and what a terrible execution of a terrible choice.
It never sits comfortably when an explicitly suicidal character leaves a show unhappily, especially by self–sacrifice or “giving up”. Sure, 9–1–1 is far from the most egregious example I’ve seen on television, or even on a bad network procedural (do not get me started on Supernatural), but it’s still uncomfortable, especially with a line from Bobby about how Los Angeles was supposed to be “penance” for him. Does Bobby’s” self–flagellation have to end with him bleeding out from long–healed scars?
Suicide is fine to depict on screen—sometimes even good, because we can’t deal with the hard things in life if we don’t talk about them. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) has passively attempted to take her own life more times than I can count, but the show generally tries to address it tastefully, stressing the importance of her connections with her friends and family in keeping her around. TK Strand (Ronen Rubinstein) from 9–1–1’s Texan spinoff 9–1–1: Lone Star is introduced through an overdose, after which he works on healing, finds happiness with a new boyfriend, and ultimately realizes that things can get better, even if there are some bumps in the road. Even Buck from the very same 9–1–1 is passively suicidal on and off throughout the seasons, but he finds comfort in his sister, his best friend, and, of course, in his captain.
A captain who is now dead. In a show that doesn’t kill its characters. After an awful random mid–season two–parter, having Bobby leave behind a grieving wife, children, and station. It’s hard to imagine where the show can go tonally after this, and that’s a major flaw with this murder—the difference between 9–1–1 and Grey’s is that, while they’re both procedural dramas, the former tells you time and time again that everything will work out, while the latter’s thesis is that you can usually get through things even when they don’t work out. It’s crazy to pull the rug out from an audience that turns to a show for comfort and shoot them in the chest—and unlike season four’s Eddie Diaz (Ryan Guzman), they don’t get better following that sniping.
There’s a way to kill a beloved character towards the end of a procedural that dramatically changes the show’s tone and strips away the plot armor that has protected its protagonists up until that point; the aforementioned Buffy death is near–perfect. Though Buffy isn’t a procedural in that it’s not a med/cop/first responder show, it’s a monster–of–the week, which, for these purposes, works just as well.
What Buffy does so stellarly, and what procedural deaths frequently fail at, is executing a series–affecting character death in the middle of a show that operates on formula. The tricky line to walk in shows like these is measuring impact—obviously, a major character death will upset pretty much everything, which is challenging when a key part of the procedural format is reliability, playing each episode out with a similar recipe.
When Joyce Summers dies, it’s unexpected, unremarkable, and irreversible. There’s nothing supernatural about it. Her daughters and their friends cannot get her back. Sometimes people pass, and it’s an awful, life–ruining thing; the second half of season five of Buffy, and the majority of season six, is about how grief shakes people’s worlds. There is an appropriate dampening of the tone—the main character’s mother just died!—and a flawless episode called The Body that covers the immediate aftermath of Joyce’s death.
Buffy is not the same after her mother’s death. Season six sends her on a depressive spiral. It sends her best friend into the depths of addiction. It nearly drives her little sister to suicide.
They get through it, though, and they get through it together. This is the first true hardship they’ve faced that they can’t undo or find anyone to blame for (and therefore stab to death); it’s scary in a way that nothing else in the show has been scary before. It’s scary because it strips away every metaphor.
It’s nothing like 9–1–1, whose writers I wouldn’t trust to properly pace and lay out a long emotional arc if my life depended on it. Despite the fact that its leads are (until now) invincible, they’re not shielded from emotional harm. The person most directly impacted by Bobby’s death is his wife, Athena, who has not only been in the trenches before, but has been in these very same trenches before. Her fiance was killed before the canon of the show, which we see her process in flashbacks and in real time. She has already experienced this grief. Why make her relive it, just when she’s starting to be healed?
(And that’s on top of her first husband leaving her, and her daughter attempting suicide, and a cold case involving child sexual abuse, and and and … you get the point.)
It leaves Bobby’s pseudo–son, who has parental issues like you’ve never seen before, without a parent. It leaves the woman who should be his successor, who has constantly been treated like she’s not enough, without an advocate and mentor. It leaves the person who has frequently been the one to narrowly escape death with yet another dose of survivor’s guilt. It leaves his mini–mirror, who has always felt alone and like he can’t lean on anyone, without a guide—and without even a second of screen time in the episode! Bobby’s death doesn’t introduce characters to any unique struggles or ultimately do anything new … except tank the show’s ratings.
There is a way out, though. As much as I wish this had never happened in the first place, I’m delusionally foaming at the mouth, reading too far into the lyrics of Work Song (which played over Bobby’s death … no grave can hold my Bobby down!), and speculating to conspiracy–theorist levels about script leaks, who’s on set, and which actors are playing mind games.
What if they did a reverse Buffy? What if they brought Bobby back?
If it was a fake–out, or if they retroactively decide to Easter–resurrect the canonically devout Catholic Bobby Nash following the outcry of hatred for the decision from the Midwestern wine moms and the gay teens on Twitter alike, it wouldn’t be the first time a procedural has reversed a main character death.
Famously, Criminal Minds brought back Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster) after her death at the end of season six, retconning her grave into a false one. Who’s to say the people over at 9–1–1 HQ won’t do the same?
Yeah, it’d be shitty writing, and it wouldn’t make up for the fact that Buck is totally about to get back together with his truly awful ex–boyfriend, but it’d at least be something. It’d at least give me hope that the newly–renewed season 9 won’t be the show’s last; after all, general audiences cannot be happy about this choice.
All of TV is secretly about routine and formula; procedurals are just more open about it. Violating rules is what makes a show interesting. But violating them senselessly, without any internal logic, is what makes a choice disastrous. If 9–1–1 wants fans who enjoy the show enough to watch a tenth season—or even retain decent viewership for its upcoming ninth—they’d better get back to their regular programming.
