Critic’s Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
4.5
Blockbuster disasters are a 9-1-1 thing at this point.
While 9-1-1: Contagion is certainly no earthquake, tsunami, or cruise ship disaster, it’s still a larger emergency— a good one at that.
But with only five episodes left this season, was another multi-episode emergency really necessary?
That’s a question I couldn’t help but ask myself as the 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 14 went on. If only because we started the season with bee-nado and are just coming off the two-parter involving Maddie, Athena, and Amber Braeburn.
If there’s an opportunity to go big or go home, 9-1-1 will always go big, but it would do well to remember it doesn’t always have to.
The bee-nado and plane emergency were enough to sustain this season as the big-ticket disaster. And considering we are running out of hours this season, it feels like we’re being cheated out of more stories involving the characters and their personal journeys.
I promise we love more minor emergencies sprinkled throughout and a heavy emphasis on the character journeys. That’s always been at the heart of what makes 9-1-1 so damn special.
But I say all of that while also saying that this was another engrossing installment, and it would have been one of its best if I could believe for a single second that the stakes were as high as the show wanted me to believe. And I want to believe so badly!
Before we get into all that, there were two emergencies during this one, with the bus crash devolving into something we seldom see on this show lately: more Ravi development!
Ravi has been a recurring background player for many seasons now, and I appreciated the show poking fun at the fact that we still don’t know a ton about him by him saying as much when Buck tried to befriend him during 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 11.
9-1-1 doesn’t have the biggest cast, but there is a lot going on in any given hour, which means there are countless times when main characters go missing for episodes on end because other characters or emergencies take precedence.
Those characters are often still physically present in the episode, but they are missing for all intents and purposes.
That’s not unique to 9-1-1 and a common issue with procedurals in general.
So, Ravi just hasn’t been someone we’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with over the years. The last time we spent time with him, he was considering whether or not firefighting was for him, which also came back around here.
The bus emergency should have been fairly simple since they got very lucky when the 118 arrived on the scene. There were no fatalities and not even that many people in danger, all things considered.
If you’ve watched enough of this series, then you know that typically, things are never THAT simple, and when Ravi got the woman out of the car, I had a feeling that perhaps there was something both he and the audience were missing.
Did your heart drop when the woman said that her baby was still in the vehicle?
That bus and the surrounding cars were just waiting to explode, and the minute Bobby took off to find the baby, there was just an ominous air floating over that scene, as evidenced by literally everyone’s faces as they watched Bobby disappear into the smoke.
The explosion was scary, but again, there was zero worry about Bobby making it out alive because we all saw the promo of him in other parts of the hour. However, it was still a scary moment overall because a baby was in danger.
The power of television meant the baby had not a speck of soot on them and no smoke damage, but the scene became less about the miraculous save and more about Ravi’s mistake.
And that’s precisely what it was: a mistake.
But the thing about mistakes when you’re a first responder is that sometimes mistakes lead to tragedy.
Ravi thought he cleared the car, but the baby car seat was covered, and he must have missed it when he initially looked through the vehicle. He was then hyper-focused on the unconscious mother and everything just sort of broke down from there.
Ravi is a solid firefighter and has proven that on numerous occasions, but this is the kind of situation that would spook anyone because of how close of a call it was.
Had the mother not woken up to tell them about the baby, or Bobby had gone in a few minutes later, there could have been a much different outcome for both that baby and Bobby.
It was nice to see Buck taking that ‘make new friends’ thing seriously by grabbing a beer with Ravi again and being a soundboard for him when he expressed his fears.
Buck has proven himself to be quite the motivator lately.
With Eddie during 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 12 and 9-1-1 Season 8 Episode 13, he was paramount in helping Eddie through his Texas-sized problems, and here he was extremely helpful when talking Ravi down from making an impulsive decision.
Sometimes, telling someone to get back on the horse can feel inadequate, especially when it’s much easier said than done. But Buck has been there before, as in he’s made plenty of mistakes over the year, and he’s never given up.
Even though he did falter, everything was okay in the end, and it was a major learning experience for him. And something he will never do again, as we saw in the next part of the hour, which centered around the lab fire.
Those laboratories where viruses are housed are extremely scary when you think about it and when you’ve seen enough horror films!
The beginning of 28 Days Later always comes to mind, and how quickly a breach caused all of England to crumble in…you guessed it! 28 days!
Moira gave off heavy mad scientist vibes, which was obviously the point. She went behind the backs of everyone, including her superior, to make headway on a cure for a deadly virus but skirted the rules to do so.
On the one hand, she wasn’t wrong when she pleaded her case because the longer you wait for something to change instead of changing it yourself, the more likely you are to get left behind.
But fiddling with incubation periods and developing cures you don’t know will work is no small thing, and there are rules and regulations regarding those kinds of things for a reason.
You’re working with hazardous things, one false move or one incorrect hypothesis, and you’ve suddenly got a much larger problem.
The gag of everyone hating Moira at the job felt like overkill until she started talking. Then when she went full-on villain, there was no saving her because you knew she was about to do something completely irredeemable.
It was frustrating just how long it took everyone there to put two and two together, but the 118 were handcuffed from the start because Banting wasn’t being upfront or truthful with them about anything.
And yes, there was a fire down there but there was no time for them to get fitted with more than DUCT TAPE?!
Banting was much too busy trying to save his own ass and not very concerned with the fact that he was putting people in danger by not telling them the full scale of what they were walking into.
Everything about this one felt wrong from the start, like a wrong move could make a simple search and rescue and contained fire turn into something else entirely, which was exactly what happened.
It was a bad sign the second Chimney had to go up in the vents again, and I was glad they had Buck acknowledge the encephalitis from 9-1-1 Season 7 Episode 6 because that was a MASSIVE thing that almost killed Chimney on his wedding day, and they couldn’t just ignore that.
Roz ended up being the MVP of this whole damn episode, but would you be able to hold your breath for however long it took them to pull her through the vents and then out of the lab?
I am fine suspending my disbelief when the occasion calls for it, but something about that whole thing gave me pause because it had to have taken a few minutes at least.
Ravi, still reeling from the baby and the bus crash, was on a mission to find Moira, and this was once again when Banting being honest with the team would have helped a lot because they would have known much sooner that she was not even in the building.
Instead, they were still in there trying to look for her, and when every moment matters, those crucial extra seconds down there, arguing for some of it, put them right in the path of that explosion that changed everything.
We’ve seen the 118 involved in all kinds of disasters, but seeing their bodies flying all over a lab, knowing there was a disease permeating the air, was a whole other level of chilling, as was seeing that glass door close and knowing that the 118 was now tapped inside with the virus.
Everything from there on out just kept getting worse and worse because you knew, at some point, someone from the team was going to catch the virus, because that’s how these things go, right?
You won’t ever get through a movie about a contagion without at least one person getting infected.
That bad encephalitis omen pretty much guaranteed Chimney would be the unlucky one again. Can we give this man a break? Can we give everyone a break?
It’s a near-death experience after a near-death experience on this show, but the day is always saved in one way or another.
Things were going well for a bit once Athena arrived on the scene and wouldn’t get off anyone’s neck until she ensured someone was working on a way to get them out of there.
We’ve seen Bobby, Chimney, and Buck “die” before, but have we seen Hen be in serious, serious danger before this? My memory isn’t what it once was, but I can’t think of a time she was this wounded before, to the point where they had to perform surgery on her in the field.
I’m a sucker for times in which things are dire, and someone has to step in to work a miracle, and 9-1-1 has always excelled at that. There are so many times in life when you depend upon the kindness of strangers, or in this case, found family, to survive a devastating ordeal.
It was nice that the 118 weren’t isolated down there because they could have easily gone in a direction that completely cut them off and forced them to figure things out on their own without being able to contact anyone outside.
Instead, Maddie was there on the line, as were Athena and Buck when necessary, and the latter two even had eyes on them while they were inside, thanks to the Army.
When Hen survived that risky operation, it seemed like everything was going to be okay in the interim and that maybe they’d get out of there. But then they discovered that the virus somehow went airborne and sped through the incubation period, necessitating the need for another 9-1-1: Contagion (!) hour.
Chimney started bleeding out of his orifices, and suddenly, it became a much different kind of rescue because they had someone infected with the virus amongst those they were trying to bring back into the “real world.”
I hated how everything went from here with Colonel Hartman because he was too cavalier with people’s lives.
There was an obvious solution: Get that cure and give it to Chimney instead of allowing him to die. No one else down there was infected, and if that cure worked, then they could bring everyone out just like they had planned to all along.
If the cure didn’t work, at least they tried and didn’t let Chimney die down there without attempting to do something. And you’d know the cure wasn’t worth a damn in the end.
But Colonel Hartman’s commands fell on deaf ears because the 118 was never going to sit there and let Chimney die if there was something they could do about it. To hell with demands and supermax prisons! Surely there’s a solid LAFD attorney out there.
Side note, we need more Athena and Buck team-ups because they are both the right kind of persistent and stubborn to get things done. While outside, there wasn’t a whole lot they could physically do, but that didn’t stop them from being in every conversation and just there at every turn.
Without them being there when some of these conversations took place, they may never have figured ANY of this out. They’re the duo that doesn’t balance each other out, but instead encourages each other’s rebellion!
Once it was discovered Moira wasn’t in the building, it was obvious she had the damn cure, and that would lead us into part two.
Chimney’s dying. The 118 is still trapped. Moira is walking around the city with a cure for a deadly virus on her shoulder. Eddie’s still in Texas.
Is Chimney going to die? It’s doubtful, but how will they quickly find Moira in a city of millions?
Will this be the emergency that FINALLY raises those stakes? It’s a good thing there’s a second part, I guess!
Loose Ends
- The gender reveal gone wrong felt very randomly placed in this hour because this wasn’t really an episode about character development outside of the stuff with Ravi. Though, it did serve as a reminder how quickly things can change in Chimney’s line of work. I hope they got a refund for that cake!
- Maddie calling Chimney right before he was about to perform surgery, and you think it’s because she was freaking out about the situation and Chimney potentially about to die AGAIN. She really was freaking out but also wanted to check him for symptoms. I love them, your Honor!
- Athena really doesn’t want those kids back in her house— oh my god! I can’t blame her for wanting to create a dream house for herself and Bobby, but May and Harry were upset, and I couldn’t blame them.
- Do you think Eddie and Christopher were watching this unfold on the news in El Paso? Buck should call Eddie to see if he has any suggestions on what to do. He has a Silver Star.
- I said it earlier, but Roz was truly the MVP. Without her, everything goes badly.
One part down, and one more to go!
I still don’t know if the two-parter was necessary at this juncture of the season, but I won’t deny that I was entertained.
What about you all?
Are you a fan of the multi-episode arcs?
What is coming our way in the second part?
Drop all your thoughts below so we can talk it out!
AND in case you missed it at episode’s end, we have a look at what’s to come in the second-half of this two-parter!
Will Chimney be saved in time? Will the 118 ever get out of that laboratory?
We may not be ready for what is sure to be a heck of conclusion!
Check out the promo below!
You can watch 9-1-1 on ABC at 8/7c on Thursdays.
Watch 9-1-1 Online
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