Everyone knows what an amazing job Peter Krause did in the death scene for his 9-1-1 character, from the cast to showrunner Tim Minear to fans to the lead of the now-over spinoff, 9-1-1: Lone Star. Buckle up, Lone Star fans. If you’ve been reeling from Bobby’s emotional exit in the latest season of 9-1-1: Lone Star, you’re not alone. Viewers everywhere are still processing the heartbreak, and now, Rob Lowe—who played the beloved Captain Bobby Nash—has finally spoken out. Let’s unpack the emotional weight of this twist, what Rob Lowe has to say, and where the series might go from here.
“I watched it and thought it was beautifully written, beautifully acted. Peter is a spectacular actor,” Rob Lowe, who played Owen Strand for five seasons of the Fox series before it ended this January, told Variety. “At a certain point in a show like that, and Tim has said this publicly, every once in a while, you’ve got to knock down a few walls if you want to keep the house structure sound. Ironically, it might rejuvenate the show into a whole new area, but it will never be the same without Peter, who was, from the beginning, just such an amazing actor. And the way he played that death scene was emblematic of his nuance and subtlety. I’ve just always been a fan of what he and Angela [Bassett] and the rest of the cast do on that show, definitely.”
It was in 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 15 that Bobby died, having been infected with a super-strain of CCHF (Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever). It was in the previous episode, the first of the two-parter, that the 118 entered a lab to deal with a fire. During an explosion, Chimney (Kenneth Choi) lost his face mask and was exposed. And so when there was only one dose of the anti-viral, and by that point, Bobby knew he was infected, the captain gave it to his firefighter and friend, only revealing he, too, was sick after everyone had been evacuated.
Minear told TV Insider that killing off Bobby was a strictly creative decision. “Nobody wanted Peter to leave, most of all me, but I just felt like we’re going into Season 9 and it would’ve been comfortable to keep everything status quo and happy happy. But it’s a first responder show, and I put these people in life-and-death situations, except you could probably look at it and say I just put them in life situations because no one ever dies. So it just felt like it was time,” he explained.
He also shared how Peter Krause contributed to a key moment in Bobby’s death scene and his final moments, as he said goodbye to his wife Athena. “What I saw in him was a combination of Bobby and Peter,” Minear told us. “It was tricky how we were going to approach this because just based on what that virus was and what it does, the thing could have turned into a ghoulish, body horror, horror movie, which is not what we wanted. You have to understand what’s happening, but we also just didn’t want it to be a particularly ugly death, which is what this would be. And it was Peter’s idea to turn away from Athena and go to that table and kind of get into a prayerful posture. That was Peter. That was all Peter. So I just thought that was a really lovely choice on his part. And it just kept things kind of elliptical and kind of non-linear because what you’re really watching in those last whatever, two minutes, probably would’ve taken place over some hours.”
