After ten seasons, is 9-1-1 deliberately ridiculous, or has it become a parody of itself without realizing it?
I love disaster movies. Give me an earthquake, a volcano, a giant tidal wave or some other catastrophe that turns an ordinary afternoon into a spectacularly bad day, and I’m there. Which is why I occasionally visit 9-1-1, particularly when a new season rolls around and the writers decide it’s time to destroy another chunk of civilization.
I’m a disaster tourist. I show up for the carnage, enjoy the spectacle and leave before everybody starts discussing their feelings.
So rather than dissecting every character motivation and relationship development, I’m looking at the two-part Season 10 premiere, “That Sinking Feeling” and “Fire in the Hole,” as one big, ridiculous disaster movie. Yes, I know the episodes aired a week apart. I watched them together on Thursday night. Don’t get your panties in a twist.
And what a night it was.
Welcome to Los Angeles. Watch Your Step.
Imagine arriving in fabulous Los Angeles for a vacation, discovering you’re only 16 miles from the ocean, and then learning it’ll take 78 minutes to get there. That’s big-city living for you.
Unfortunately, the tourists in 9-1-1 Season 10 Episode 1 have bigger problems than traffic. A massive sinkhole opens beneath a busy street, swallowing a double-decker tour bus, a man taking his driving test and a delivery driver who also happens to be an aspiring actress.
The driving-test guy has a pacemaker that’s malfunctioning because of the car’s electronics. Just another reason I hope I never need one.
Hen describes the sinkhole as a pie crust with no filling, which is a pretty good description of Los Angeles infrastructure having a particularly bad morning.
Naturally, the 118 comes to the rescue. That’s what firefighters and paramedics do, although the real ones generally don’t have to contend with a season-opening catastrophe involving half the city.
And I don’t want to minimize what actual emergency responders do. These people risk their lives, save strangers and sometimes even rescue the occasional cat, dog or duck. We’ve been watching fictional versions of their work since Emergency! and other television dramas brought firefighters and paramedics into our living rooms.
But 9-1-1 takes the ordinary dangers of emergency services and cranks them up until we’re somewhere between The Poseidon Adventure and Sharknado, which is precisely why I occasionally watch.
I’ve dipped in and out of the series over its ten seasons, and I understand why people enjoy it. It just isn’t my regular viewing material. I can only handle one ludicrous television show a week, and Line of Fire currently holds that position.
The premieres, though? Those are a different story, especially when we get moments like the tourist family deciding that nearly dying in a sinkhole was the perfect introduction to their new life in California.
Their teenage daughter was furious about moving during her senior year of high school. Dad gets trapped, she refuses to leave him, the 118 saves the day, and suddenly everybody is one big happy family in the ambulance.
Apparently, a near-death experience is all it takes to sell a teenager on moving to Los Angeles.
Are the writers deliberately being funny? Because it’s funny as hell. But if they aren’t, they take themselves WAY too seriously.
And if they are, does that mean the die-hard fans are in on the joke too? The way some of them take the Buck and Eddie bromance (or is it romance?) so seriously? Or at least a portion of that crowd.
Just wondering.
Where the Hell Is My Lava?
For an episode supposedly building toward a volcanic catastrophe, “That Sinking Feeling” takes its sweet ass time getting there.
We’ve got mysterious burns, dead aquarium fish, a scuba diver practically dissolving in increasingly acidic water, and Maddie trying to connect a collection of strange emergency calls.
Everybody is investigating something. Everybody is concerned. Everybody is busy.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting there waiting for lava to start running down the streets like a glorious B-movie disaster flick on Tubi.
At least give me something that looks like it escaped from the bargain bin.
I was surprised by how slowly things developed, especially after Season 9 sent Athena into space. How do you follow that? Apparently, by spending an extraordinary amount of time figuring out what’s happening underground.
And where were the seismologists? Shouldn’t somebody have noticed that Los Angeles was sitting on a geological disaster waiting to happen?
They eventually show up, although I wasn’t exactly reassured by the personnel sent to investigate. But if the appropriate agencies identified the problem before the catastrophe, there wouldn’t be much need for the 118 to save everybody.
So naturally, the earth has to keep its secrets.
Athena, now working as a detective, gets involved in a separate investigation that leads her into underground tunnels. And wouldn’t you know it, she’s down there when things start rumbling.
Finally, the sinkhole reveals its true nature. LAVA!
Glorious CGI lava erupts into the street, and one particularly obnoxious fellow who had been arguing with a seismologist gets a front-row seat to the eruption. A very brief front-row seat.
He screams as the lava comes crashing down, and the episode ends like the final scene of some magnificent low-budget disaster movie. That’s what I came for!
Unfortunately, it’s also where Episode 1 ends.
Highway to Hell — And Straight Into Tubi Territory
9-1-1 Season 10 Episode 2, “Fire in the Hole,” wastes no time getting back to business.
A news anchor describes the volcanic situation as a “highway to hell.” Come on. Don’t tell me these writers aren’t having fun.
Lava erupts, people scream, firefighters hide beneath their truck with expressions that wouldn’t look out of place in Sharknado, and the molten river starts heading downhill toward a massive traffic jam.
Now we’re talking.
And this is no River of Molasses. That lava is moving, and I imagine the people trying to escape it would gladly trade their current situation for something considerably slower and stickier.
Cars are abandoned. People run for their lives. Somebody inevitably decides waiting for professional rescuers is for suckers, tries to save himself and ends up in the lava.
There’s always one. One of the firefighters even acknowledges it, which makes the whole thing funnier.
It’s the same mentality as people in Chicago who think driving through a flooded viaduct after a heavy rain is a terrific idea. Different natural disaster, same questionable judgment.
Meanwhile, the hospital staff seem remarkably calm until they look up at the television and realize there’s a river of molten rock heading through Los Angeles. Wouldn’t somebody have alerted them?
Who cares? We’re watching a B-movie masquerading as a network television drama. And once I started looking at it that way, I was having a blast.
ABC could take the most ridiculous disasters from ten seasons of 9-1-1, throw them together and release a standalone movie. I’d watch it.
9-1-1: River of Lava in Space!
Tell me that wouldn’t find an audience on Tubi.
Detective Grant: Ass Kicker
Of course, no 9-1-1 disaster would be complete without Athena Grant finding herself in another life-threatening predicament.
Angela Bassett has been through enough fictional catastrophes to qualify for hazard pay. After everything that happened in Season 9, you’d think somebody might suggest she take a nice vacation.
Instead, she’s underground investigating a robbery-related mystery while the city is preparing to become a lava field.
Which brings me to a proposal.
Maybe it’s time for Athena to leave the 118 behind and get her own detective series.
Detective Grant: Ass Kicker.
Think about it. Angela Bassett could give Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU a run for her money. Or take on Hank Voight over on Chicago P.D.
ABC could even revive the old network rivalry game. Remember when The Rockford Files and Harry O arrived on competing networks in 1974? Imagine Bassett headlining her own detective drama against one of the established procedurals.
Hell, I’d watch her.
And does anybody else think Athena’s new detective partner, Detective Newell, looks an awful lot like her late husband Bobby Nash?
Peter Krause leaves 9-1-1, ends up heading a family of alphabet agencies on Line of Fire, and Athena gets a new partner who looks suspiciously Bobby-adjacent.
Maybe ABC is having a little fun of its own. Or perhaps they’re keeping their options open in case Bobby Nash needs to return from the dead someday. A conveniently extended dream sequence could explain everything.
Stranger things have happened. Just ask Bobby Ewing on Dallas.
Yes, I know Krause has another series. Since when has that stopped television from doing something ridiculous?
And if Athena does get her own show, perhaps she should move to Miami. A change of scenery might do her good. Although knowing her luck, she’d arrive just in time for a hurricane.
Somebody Call Joan Collins
The trouble with “Fire in the Hole” is that the writers can’t seem to decide how much fun they’re willing to have.
Hen gets some good lines, including a crack about trying not to become Pompeii. The volcanic destruction keeps getting more ridiculous. And then the show suddenly decides it’s time to wring every possible tear out of the audience.
Take Leona, a physician who has a massive chunk of lava embedded in her midsection, for example.
She’s fused to the floor. FUSED. TO. THE. FLOOR.
And somehow she’s still talking, joking and diagnosing herself like she’s conducting rounds at the hospital.
She’s got a lava bomb practically the size of a coffee table sitting on her, but for a while she seems more conversational than half the people waiting for coffee at Starbucks. This is gloriously absurd.
Then the writers turn it into an extended deathbed scene, complete with swelling music, inspirational advice for young Harry and repeated insistence that Hen and Harry leave her behind to save other people.
My eyes were rolling so far back in my head I was beginning to worry they wouldn’t return.
The scene wants to be heartbreaking. But after presenting a woman casually conversing with a volcanic boulder lodged in her body, asking me to switch into full emotional devastation is a pretty tall order.
And that’s where the episode starts losing some of its magic.
We also get a seizure-related rescue involving a service dog, more emotional complications underground with Athena, and hospital drama involving a newly married couple and an extremely unpleasant burst of blood.
Then there’s a heavily pregnant woman trapped among the cars in the lava flow, because of course there is.
Buck gets his big heroic moment, with Eddie helping him pull off a rescue that makes Buck look like Batman dangling over molten rock. Everybody gets a chance to shine.
But the constant switching between outrageous spectacle and earnest melodrama creates tonal whiplash.
One minute I’m watching a disaster movie. The next I’m watching a nighttime soap opera. Then somebody gets sprayed with blood and we’re back in the bargain bin.
Make up your minds!
I don’t mind drama. Athena’s predicament in the tunnels provides a reasonable amount of tension to balance the insanity aboveground. But the episode keeps piling on emotional crises until the sheer weight of them starts crushing the fun.
Even Jennifer Love Hewitt seems to be playing everything so straight that I wonder whether she received the same script as everybody else.
And Angela Bassett? She’s terrific, but some of this dialogue is cheesy as hell.
Maybe she should embrace the absurdity completely and channel her inner Joan Collins in Empire of the Ants. Put Bassett on an island battling giant insects. She’s already done American Horror Story. I think she could handle it.
At least we’d know what kind of entertainment we were getting.
Is 9-1-1 In on Its Own Joke?
That’s the question I kept returning to throughout these two episodes.
When the writers have a news anchor describing a volcanic eruption as a highway to hell, or a firefighter acknowledging the inevitable idiot who tries to escape lava without help, it certainly feels like they’re winking at the audience.
And when 9-1-1 embraces that ridiculousness, it’s a lot of fun.
But then the show turns around and treats its most absurd situations with such overwhelming seriousness that I’m not entirely convinced the writers know how funny some of this material actually is.
Maybe they do. Maybe that’s the secret to ten seasons of 9-1-1: give the audience an impossible disaster, let the 118 perform miracles, throw in some romance and family drama, and send everybody home happy.
There’s certainly an audience for it.
And despite all my complaining, I enjoyed myself.
I didn’t need to understand every character’s backstory or remember every development from Season 9. I came for the disaster, got my CGI lava, laughed at the absurdity and occasionally rolled my eyes hard enough to risk injury.
That’s a pretty successful Thursday night.
Will I watch Episode 3? I’m undecided. Although hearing Maddie suggest she’s going to move the lava in the preview certainly caught my attention.
Because I swear I’ve seen that movie before.
🔥 The Verdict: WATCHABLE
9-1-1 Season 10 Episodes 1 and 2 deliver enough volcanic insanity, ridiculous rescues and glorious B-movie nonsense to earn a WATCHABLE.
“That Sinking Feeling” takes too long to unleash the catastrophe, while “Fire in the Hole” finally gives me the lava I wanted before burying too much of the fun beneath overly earnest melodrama.
The tonal whiplash is real, and some of those emotional scenes are more exhausting than moving.
But when 9-1-1 lets its freak flag fly, it’s entertaining as hell.
I’ll take two episodes of outrageous disaster tourism over an entire season of cinematic Nyquil.
Still, I’d rather see the whole thing released as 9-1-1: River of Lava in Space!
Now that’s a movie I’d watch.
