9-1-1 has been drumming up the hype for the last week for episode 15, “Lab Rats”, the second part of season 8’s two-part “Contagion” event, and, Jesus Christ, I need a minute before I start this recap.
Warning: major spoilers for 9-1-1 season 8 episode ‘Lab Rats’ ahead…
“Lab Rats” jumps straight into it, after leaving an infected Chimney (Kenneth Choi) at death’s door in the SoCal Tech lab and evil scientist Moira on the run with the cure. From there, Buck (Oliver Stark) and Athena (Angela Bassett) team up to hunt down Moira, and the army and FBI team up to hunt down Buck and Athena.
Meanwhile Bobby (Peter Krause), Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Ravi (Anirudh Pisharody) are met with obstacle after obstacle in the lab, but hang in there while Chim slowly bleeds out.
Some subterfuge, a high-octane helicopter chase and a dose of antiviral serum later, things are starting to look up for our first responders. It’s all happy tears and relief as Chim starts gaining back his life force, and the army finally releases the 118 from the lab as a soft and hopeful acoustic track plays in the background.
Much of the episode boils down to the same tried, tested and beloved formula: emergency, hit some snags, ‘oh no, will they make it?’, solve the snags, ‘hooray, they made it’, dramatic end credits music. But just as the “Lab Rats” is wrapping up the emotional rescue, it throws us for a loop.
Suddenly, Bobby is back in the lab, door closed, with a panicked and extremely confused Buck peering at him from the other side of the glass. And oh Christ… In the excitement of finding the cure, I completely forgot about the “Lab Rats” teaser, and the shots of the 118’s faces contorted into pure anguish, and the body bag being lifted out of the lab. Captain Bobby Nash contracted the virus, and now he’s going to die.
Resigned to his fate, he slowly takes off his mask, revealing to Buck the black bags under his eyes, and the blood leaking from his nose. ‘You’re gonna be okay, Buck, remember that,’ he says. ‘They’re gonna need you. I love you, kid.’ And, oh.
As if it couldn’t get any more devastating, we’re met with a shot of Athena, looking straight down the plastic tunnel to the lab, anxiously waiting for her husband to emerge. But he doesn’t, and he won’t. He’s dying, and it’s time to say goodbye. What transpires is easily one of the most devastating scenes in 9-1-1 history, made all the more gut-wrenching, heart-aching and – not to be overly dramatic – life-altering by Hozier’s “Work Song” echoing over it. Then silence. They carry out the body bag, hone in on the abandoned captain’s helmet, cut to black.
Even eight seasons into the show, Bobby’s death has come far too soon. But timeline aside, the way he went also feels so fitting for the character. He spent the last two episodes looking out for his team – performing field surgery on Hen’s collapsed lung, getting creative with Ravi’s oxygen tank, and administering the only existing dose of antiviral to Chim – while actively dying under the cover of his mask and turnouts. It was only after everyone else was out and safe that he fully allowed himself to process what was going on.
He came to LA a broken man, alone and suicidal with 148 bodies on his conscience. Now, he’s dying a hero surrounded by family. He repented, and then some. And now he wants to live, but he knows that he can’t if his new family are to live too. And it would be devastating if I wasn’t convinced that the whole thing was a fake-out and Bobby is still alive.
Maybe I’m in the denial stage of grieving a fictional fire captain. Maybe I’m delusional. But I beg you to hear me out while this gets Pepe-Silvia-meme levels of conspiracy theory, because I have a lot of questions.
Firstly, I know they carried Bobby out in a body bag and he appeared to bleed out on screen right in front of us. But they also spent much of the last two episodes going on about how this new strain of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever is unlike anything they’ve seen before. They don’t really know how it works. They could take a guess, but everyone seemed shocked every time Chim started coughing up blood or exhibiting a new symptom.
Perhaps this new CCHR makes you bleed out and die. But perhaps it slows your heartbeat to an almost undetectable level until you sweat it out of your system and recover. Perhaps no-one in their right mind would want to perform an autopsy on a body that contracted a highly contagious novel virus, so they just stick our dear captain straight into the coffin, turnouts and all, and he’s forced to radio emergency services to get him out. Who’s to say?
Secondly, why would they kill off a character as major and beloved as Bobby Nash with three episodes left of the season? The finale would have been an obvious choice to throw in a main character death, and the penultimate episode would have also made sense, giving the rest of the gang time to grieve and process the loss before setting up season 9 for life without him.
But episode 15 of 18? That’s just bizarre. We’ve got the funeral to, um, look forward to (?) after a short hiatus, but then what the hell are they all going to do for the following two episodes? 9-1-1 is a show that likes to follow a clear-cut formula, so this really does feel like a bait-and-switch.
Thirdly, Bobby just had a near death experience at the end of season 7. They even gave him an emotional musical montage where he imparted wisdom to the rest of the 118 and got to say goodbye, before stopping his heart for 14 minutes, putting him in a coma, and then reviving him like nothing happened. Why do that and then do this? You have to wait your turn for an NDE, you can’t just jump the queue like this. (If nothing else, at least the team actually seemed to feel something about the prospect of Bobby dying this time, instead of barely batting an eye in a hospital waiting room while Athena went off-grid with a vendetta and a gun.)
Then there’s also the fact that Bobby saw in the start of season 8 away from the firehouse, trading his captain’s helmet for a technical advisor seat on the set of TV firefighter drama Hotshots of all places. The move was pretty fun at the time, especially as we got to see him metaphorically spar with lead actor Brad Torrance (Callum Blue). But then that storyline was stretched for pretty much the whole of the first half of the season, well after Bobby rejoined the 118.
Why would 9-1-1 – a show first and foremost about found family – have Bobby spend most of his time with a random character we only met in the season premiere if they were going to go and finally kill him off in the second half of the season? Surely it would have made more sense to spend that time progressing his relationships with Athena, Buck, Chim, Hen, Eddie (Ryan Guzman) and Ravi, and it would probably have made the gut-punch delivered by his absence more devastating too.
And on the subject of Eddie, why would they have Bobby die-die, for realsies, while one of the core members of his crew was not only in El Paso but not even mentioned in the episode at all? That feels pretty shit for Eddie, to be honest. Bobby has formed unique and complex relationships with each member of his team over the years, and Bobby’s dynamic with Eddie has been among the best of them, from them bonding over their experiences as fathers to sharing their grief and supporting each other as widowers. If Bobby really is dead, not having Eddie there with the rest of the gang feels a little off.
Another storyline that doesn’t make sense with this new context is Bobby’s A plot in “Holy Mother of God”. Directed by cast member Aisha Hinds, the whole episode was a banger and saw Bobby reconnected with his estranged brother and faith healer mom. But if that was going to be Bobby’s final ever storyline before his death, then why? What’s the point?
Besides flashbacks to Bobby’s childhood in season 7 episode “Step Nine”, Bobby’s immediate family have never really been part of his story. That’s always been Marcy, Brooke and Bobby in Minnesota, and then Athena and the kids in LA. So why bring them into it now? For closure? 9-1-1 always loves a bit of closure, but did we really need it here, especially if it was to be the last closure Bobby Nash was ever going to get?
Then, off screen, there’s also the fact that the show filmed the whole funeral procession that we see the teaser for the next episode in public, in broad daylight on the streets of Los Angeles. Someone even streamed a lot of it on TikTok. They didn’t seem to be trying that hard to keep it a secret. Glimpses of a mysterious funeral might have got people talking and speculating, but this one featured the Grants leading the procession, a 118-branded casket on the back of a fire engine, and a turnout jacket hanging off it with ‘NASH’ splashed across the back. There was never any question about who this funeral was for.
Honestly, the whole thing smells fishy to me. Killing off Bobby Nash, a character whose arc has heavily featured his faith and journey with Christianity, the day before Good Friday, only to have him be resurrected when the show comes back after the Easter break would be too good to resist, especially with a ninth season already confirmed.
I’m saving my tears for now, more than happy to continue hoping we’ve had the wool pulled over our eyes.
So let’s circle back on this in two weeks when I’m either vindicated or even more delusional about the whole thing.
Season eight of 9-1-1 returns on 1 May on ABC in the US, and 2 May on Disney+ in the UK.
The post 9-1-1 season 8 episode 15 recap: Why we’re convinced [spoiler] isn’t actually [spoiler] appeared first on PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news.