Poor Buck (Oliver Stark). His best friend Eddie (Ryan Guzman) is moving to Texas. His sister Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) has been kidnapped by a serial killer. Even the dog he bonded with after saving it from a fire at an animal shelter has left him (for his family, who’d been looking for him).
“That just sounds like a usual week for Buck on 9-1-1,” Stark points out in TV Insider’s video interview above, about the midseason premiere. “He’s got some things to work through, that’s for sure. It’s a character that’s faced a lot of abandonment in the past, and this is for sure, as we see during 809, going to stir some of that back up for him. So it’s a bit of PTSD on the abandonment front, but things fall into place the way they’re meant to and he’s just going to have to roll with the punches and work it out as he goes and not as we see him do some of in 809, try and stand in anybody else’s way.”
He’s referring to Buck’s attempts to “help” Eddie find someone to sublet his house when he moves to Texas to be near his son. Buck instead chased around candidates, then spilled to the others at the 118 about Eddie’s plans — after he’d asked him not to. Things are tense between the two men for a bit, but then Buck reveals that he’s going to sublet Eddie’s house and has already given his notice on his loft. “That loft space does not exist anymore,” Stark confirms.
Looking ahead to Buck and Eddie’s goodbye when the latter leaves for Texas, “We’ve seen at the end of 809, Buck has kind of patched things up with Eddie and taken a big step in the direction of apologizing for his previous sabotage. But yeah, there’s still a goodbye to come between them and it’s going to be finding that line between emotional and sad, but also you have to go and do this thing and I understand that and I’m happy for you,” previews Stark. “He says at the end of 809, ‘You’re going to where you belong,’ and that’s not geographically where you belong, but it’s with Christopher.”
Meanwhile, there is the thriller storyline of Maddie, who was the one to answer the call from a serial killer crying and wanting to be stopped. She even thought that she stopped him by talking him into turning his gun on himself to save his latest victim … only to be kidnapped in the final moments by the real serial killer, the missing persons detective played by Abigail Spencer! And we can’t forget Maddie’s pregnant!
We’ve seen how Buck has handled Maddie being taken in the past — in the series’ most traumatic episode so far, “Fight or Flight,” by her abusive ex-husband Doug (Brian Hallisay) — but Stark says that this time will be slightly different.
“There’s a slightly more rational response this time and not as maybe gung-ho as we’ve seen from him in the past. And he’s going to try and weigh up a few more options before jumping to worst case scenario,” he says. Furthermore, he teases, “Jee is key to discovering Maddie’s disappearance.”
