Tornadoes, space missions gone wrong and scheming ex-girlfriends can’t stop the first responders of the 9-1-1 universe. Last week’s episodes of 9-1-1 and 9-1-1: Nashville teased incoming natural disasters in Los Angeles and Nashville, kicking off some pretty weird starts to this new era of 9-1-1. Remember when the emergencies were literally down to Earth? Athena and Hen’s trip to space makes Season 3’s tsunami look like a normal walk in the park. At least in Tennessee, tornadoes are a catastrophe that’s to be expected and prepared for. But trust me, as someone who spent many days crouched over in school hallways or crammed in a bathtub with my sister listening to the sinister tornado siren, they never get easier.
I regret to say that I’ve never had the oh-so-wonderful experience of going to space or looking up at the sky and seeing unidentified objects hurling towards me, so I can’t speak about how accurately 9-1-1 portrays the calamity of it all. But sometimes you can kind of just tell when something isn’t all that true to life, you know? Had the show not killed off Bobby Nash for realism, I’d give it a pass for embracing the goofiness. But these are the cards the series has dealt itself, and I will play them harshly. And 9-1-1: Nashville — you’re not off the hook either.
Tornadoes, space missions gone wrong and scheming ex-girlfriends can’t stop the first responders of the 9-1-1 universe. Last week’s episodes of 9-1-1 and 9-1-1: Nashville teased incoming natural disasters in Los Angeles and Nashville, kicking off some pretty weird starts to this new era of 9-1-1. Remember when the emergencies were literally down to Earth? Athena and Hen’s trip to space makes Season 3’s tsunami look like a normal walk in the park. At least in Tennessee, tornadoes are a catastrophe that’s to be expected and prepared for. But trust me, as someone who spent many days crouched over in school hallways or crammed in a bathtub with my sister listening to the sinister tornado siren, they never get easier.
I regret to say that I’ve never had the oh-so-wonderful experience of going to space or looking up at the sky and seeing unidentified objects hurling towards me, so I can’t speak about how accurately 9-1-1 portrays the calamity of it all. But sometimes you can kind of just tell when something isn’t all that true to life, you know? Had the show not killed off Bobby Nash for realism, I’d give it a pass for embracing the goofiness. But these are the cards the series has dealt itself, and I will play them harshly. And 9-1-1: Nashville — you’re not off the hook either.
Let’s start with 9-1-1. As silly as going to space is for the series, the one thing I love about this storyline is how much it spotlights Karen as another hero in this entourage of brave families and friends. The episode features mockumentary-style interviews with the passengers heading up to space: Athena, Hen, Parker (a solar energy tech bro), Trish (Tripp’s fiancée), and Lewis (a high school football coach and former astronaut slated for Apollo 18). Hen talks up Karen big time, and not in a “I’m going to make this up to you when I get home so we don’t have a huge fight” sort of way. Hen genuinely sees Karen as a hero worth looking up to.
Karen is letting her jealousy get the best of her, knowing that she let her biggest dream slip right through her fingers, but for morally ethical reasons. It really seems like 9-1-1 is setting Karen up to actually see her dream become a reality, possibly putting on a spacesuit herself and saving the passengers from their floating box of doom. The launch takes place seemingly not long after Tripp invited them to tag alone, and I have to say, getting drunk before being catapulted into space? Not a great choice there, Hen and Athena.
Anyway, the PR move is broadcast live to the entire world, watching as these brave, poor souls float around in a little capsule with no controls nor current astronauts. This becomes important right about now. Tripp sent the group into a geomagnetic storm (think “space hurricane”), despite being told to shut the mission down. The storm hit a SkyLoop satellite, as we saw in the previous episode, sending it to collide with the capsule.
Thankfully, the passengers manage to get some control of the capsule because of Parker’s tech skills, Lewis’ Apollo 18 memorabilia, and Trish’s hilarious words of encouragement. Parker suffers a medical emergency that Hen saves him from. And where does Athena fit into all this? Well, she’s the jinx, as Hen (sort of) jokingly reminds her. Athena and vehicles of transportation do not mesh well together, as we saw in the beginning of Season 8 with her landing an airplane all by herself. Despite their small win, they still have no communication with anyone on the ground. Karen swoops in like Wonder Woman, working with the dispatch team to connect to satellites from the 1990s that are still functioning during the storm.
