[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 5, “The Mask.”] 9-1-1 celebrates Halloween the only way it can: with antics, wild crimes, and an emergency that hits too close to home.
Good news: Denny (Declan Pratt), the son of Hen (Aisha Hinds) and Karen (Tracie Thoms), will be okay after being hit by a car. Also in the episode, Buck (Oliver Stark) gets a boil after accidentally getting a real corpse for 118’s Halloween party.
Stark told TV Insider in the video interview above that 9-1-1 Halloween episodes are “always fun.” “I think this one was special because we all got to dress up, which I don’t think we’ve ever done before. That made it a more fun experience.” The makeup for the boils, however, is not.
“One of the challenges of the episode was trying to put in such a serious emergency and me being there with these sores on my face,” he added. “We didn’t want to take away from the seriousness of what was going on. So we had to find a way to hide me and not have my ridiculous face take away from the moment.”
Buck does have a bit of a breakdown after the sores appear, as both his boyfriend Tommy (Lou Ferrigno Jr.) and Eddie (Ryan Guzman) attest. While Buck has matured over the years, “this feels a little bit like early Buck, which I like,” Stark admitted. “He still overreacts and he still falls victim to exaggeration and goes to extremes with things. I don’t know if it’s a great example of his maturity, but to me it’s interesting and it’s pretty true to life.” We never completely lose our traits. We just learn to soften and soften them.”
Tommy sees Buck fall apart in this episode, and Stark teases there’s more to come, specifically in the next episode, and he’ll get advice from Bobby (Peter Krause). “I love that Buck is overconfident and goes to the people around him for questions and advice,” he says. “Buck’s going to learn more about Tommy’s past and that’s going to bring him down. And yeah, he’s going to have to lean on the people around him and get some real, I think pretty profound advice.” This is a refreshing take on Tommy’s past, not something we’ve seen in flashbacks.
Also featured in Episode 6 is a great scene between Buck and Eddie, who’s really going through that this season with his son Christopher (Gavin McHugh) in Texas. (We see him home alone at the end of Episode 5.) But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Buck and Eddie’s conversation focuses on that.
“I think that plays out a little bit in Episode 6. Eddie has a really beautiful story in Episode 6, and I think there’s a really beautiful scene between the two of us, me and Ryan, at the end of Episode 6 that says a lot about the relationship between them and how even though they don’t have to say too much to each other, they still know how to be there for each other,” Stark previews.
Looking further into the future, 9-1-1 will return to the world of Hotshots, the firefighter show Bobby was stuck working as a technical advisor on before eventually returning to 118 where he belongs. (Brian Thompson’s Gerrard took over that job on set.) “Everyone’s having a really good time with [that world],” Stark says. “Then I think in classic 9-1-1, it goes from fun episodes to some episodes that can be really dark.”
Watch the full video interview above for more from Stark, including what’s coming up and Buck’s Halloween costume.
