Oh, come on. It’s Station 19’s swan song — you knew they weren’t going out without a visit to Seattle’s most recognizable landmark, the Space Needle. Well, perhaps “visit” is a bit misleading. Most people who visit the Space Needle don’t rappel down the side of it in order to save four trapped people during a power outage. Or do they? Maybe it’s part of some secret VIP tour or something. Very cool, if true.
Rappelling down the side of the Space Needle is, however, definitely where we find our first responders from Station 19 in “My Way,” which feels like a mirror image of last week’s gutting episode, “Trouble Man.” In the latter episode, Station 19 faced an onslaught of calls, each more difficult — on many levels — than the last, but most of the action happened off-screen; we were simply left with the aftermath. “My Way,” however, focuses almost exclusively on one call that we stay with for the majority of the episode. The Space Needle call is no less harrowing, though. And to top it all off, the firehouse remains completely out of whack following the previous shift. And if there’s ever a time you need to be a cohesive team, it’s probably when you’re tackling a disaster at a historic landmark.
The world is watching — no big deal
Andy, Andy, Andy. She’s had a tough run as captain of 19 thus far, and with the tension still ratcheted up from the shift from hell — Travis and Ben still fighting about Ben’s back? It is legitimately painful — the last thing Andy feels like doing at the moment is having her official captain pinning ceremony. Holding back tears, she tells Maya that she thought she’d be better at this, that “in a single shift, [she] destroyed this team.” Maya tells Andy to stop throwing herself a pity party. Everyone needs a Get a Grip friend, and for Andy, that’s Maya, and we love that for them. But just as the ceremony is about to start, Station 19 is called to a fire at the little ol’ Space Needle. Oh, and when I say “is called to,” let us not forget that the newest dispatcher for the Seattle Fire Department has started his first shift, and that person is none other than Jack Gibson. Listen to those dulcet tones inform firefighters of the absolute horrific disasters that await them! Jack has landed on his feet!
Back to the action: The last call Andy ran incident command for did not turn out well, we know this, and now, as the lead at an accident that will surely be national news, it’s time for Andy to redeem herself. No pressure or anything. Guess what? She’s pretty incredible! It’s not an easy scene for obvious reasons, and she has to split her team up to cover both locating and putting out the fire and rescuing the four people trapped in the elevator. While most of the team are dealing with the elevator (more on that below), Ben and Robert are on fire duty. Things go downhill fast: The two of them wind up trapped by the fire, their hose runs out of water, and they are running out of oxygen. For a few minutes, it’s easy to believe the worst. The two men certainly do: Robert whips out the ring he’s been carrying around to propose to Natasha, and Ben tells Dispatcher Jack to take care of Pru and to pass along a message to Miranda. They think they’re going to die! This is really it!
But not on Andy’s watch. As if she doesn’t have enough to do running the show here, she tells Natasha that she knows there are fire-extinguisher spheres at the power substation nearby where a surge caused a fire and this big blackout. She runs over there to get the spheres — each sphere can douse a full room on fire — and then books it up the stairs of the Space Needle to get to her firefighters. Eventually, they get Ben and Robert oxygen and get them the hell out of that Space Needle. I’m no expert or anything, but I’d call that all a major win for Captain Andy Herrera.
Okay, well, at least the Greater Seattle Area is watching
Not everything ends on a positive note, though. The other major aspect of this call is the aforementioned elevator. Vic is still not herself, and when Natasha gives her the news that Crisis One is going to be cut from the department’s budget, she sinks even deeper into this dark hole that seems to be consuming her as of late. Still, she does rappel down the side of the Space Needle in order to open the doors to that stuck elevator. She is a professional!
She has a lot to manage on that elevator too. One woman is having epileptic seizures, and a young guy is having a panic attack. She has to yell at them to shut up to get them to stop — it’s not a tactic Vic would typically employ. They get everyone off the elevator safely; it’s another big win for the department. It’s such a big win, in fact, that when Mayor Osman holds his press conference on the Needle disaster, he has 19 standing behind him as he commends their work. Victoria Hughes is having none of it. On live TV, she goes off on the mayor for cutting Crisis One, a program that saved lives today and every day since it began. She almost chokes that dude out! Travis tries to snap her out of it, but she is not happy about it and walks off. Andy is left with no choice but to send Vic home for the rest of the shift. Vic’s lucky to still have a job, Andy says. It’s a tenuous situation that surely we have not seen the end of just yet.
It’s finally Tuesday!
Okay, so you know how Robert’s been carrying around that engagement ring, waiting and waiting and waiting for Natasha to say yes? And how he has been making grand gestures but knows she wants the crisis taken out of their relationship — she wants to know they’ll work no matter what’s going on around them. She doesn’t want a big proposal; she wants Robert to propose on any old regular Tuesday. Well, Robert loses the engagement ring during the Space Needle call … but Natasha just so happens to find it. After the day is over, after Vic lets loose on Osman, Natasha finally realizes why she’s been keeping Robert’s proposal at bay: She’s lived a life where men have treated her like a chess piece, have tried to make her small — and she’s terrified that one day Robert will do the same. But that’s just silly, and we all know it. Still, she needs to hear Robert promise that he would never do that, and he does, and it’s swoony, and then Natasha pulls out the ring and lets Robert propose. She finally, wholeheartedly says yes.
A brother’s keeper
While Maya’s off at the Space Needle call, mending fences and trust issues with Beckett, Carina has her own chaotic day. On her way back from her first IVF appointment, with Liam in tow, Carina witnesses a car accident in a parking garage. She swoops into super-doctor mode while they wait for an ambulance and MacGyvers a bandage for Mac, one half of this story’s brother/sister duo, using one of Liam’s diapers. This storyline isn’t really about the accident itself — although we do run into Ruiz in his new private EMS/firefighter job, alongside his partner Dominic (played by new Station 19 addition Johnny Sibilly) — but is more about how the accident affects Carina, emotionally speaking.
When Carina spends the afternoon patching up a young man with a wildly overprotective older sister, she can’t help but think of her own brother, the dearly departed Andrew DeLuca. She looks down at Liam and wishes he could’ve met Andrew. When she gets the news that her eggs are not viable for pregnancy, all of this immediately has her thinking about how she won’t be able to give Liam a brother, how her dream of a family might not be possible. When she confides in her wife about all of this, it doesn’t take long for Maya to do two very lovely things: First, Maya reminds Carina that she didn’t want a family until Carina showed her what a family truly was (are you welling up yet?). Second, she proposes a new plan: What if they use Maya’s eggs to get Carina pregnant? These two will have their family, and we will all bask in its glow before the season is up, come hell or high water, okay?!
A pinning ceremony: take two
Not everything about that call was perfect, but it did end up being the perfect reminder of what’s important to 19 — family. So, by the time Andy’s badge ceremony starts up again, and her BFF Maya pins that badge on her uniform, Andy is more than inspired to talk about how firefighters “are family first.” “I am so proud to call you my family,” she says to the group, mostly made up of 19ers past and present, “and even prouder to answer the call with each of you beside me.” And if that didn’t hit you right in the heart, then you may be made of stone!