‘9-1-1’ Finale: Buck’s Big Decision and Athena’s New Chapter

The 9-1-1 Season 9 finale didn’t ease anyone into its final moments. After a full hour of chaos — a gunman loose in a hospital, Eddie bleeding out in an elevator, Buck and Harry crawling through air vents like it was Die Hard — the episode closed with two of the biggest character shifts the show has pulled off in years. Athena Grant is now a detective. And Evan Buckley might just be a dad.

In the closing moments of “Hearts and Flowers,” Buck (Oliver Stark) signs paperwork making him the legal guardian of 4-year-old Theo — the boy whose parents, Kameron and Connor, used Buck as a sperm donor before both dying in a tragic accident. Buck had always kept his distance, never intending to be part of Theo’s life. Now he’s the one signing the forms.

It’s a lot. And Stark is the first to admit it caught him off guard.

“I was pretty apprehensive,” Stark, 34, told Us Weekly. “Tim called me about it, and I said to him, ‘That’s a pretty big change. Like, that’s huge. This doesn’t mean that all of my scenes are going to be just about this, right?’”

Showrunner Tim Minear talked him off the ledge — and quickly. The plan for Season 10, Minear confirmed, is to let Buck’s new situation ripple outward and pull in the rest of the cast around him, particularly best friend Eddie Diaz (Ryan Guzman), who is already a single dad to teen Christopher.

Why Buck Said Yes — Even If He Didn’t Fully Think It Through

So what actually drove Buck to that decision? According to Stark, it’s messier and more human than a single clean answer.

“Like most decisions, it’s a little bit of both, right? Everything all at the same time,” Stark told Variety. “I think he probably feels some kind of duty and obligation, not necessarily because of the sperm donor aspect, but because it was his friends. And maybe even an element of not being able to save them — not that it was ever his fault. But I could imagine him to be a character that would shoulder some kind of blame like that, regardless.”

Minear sees it the same way — and doesn’t think Buck’s visible happiness in that final scene was a performance mistake, even though Stark himself briefly worried about it.

“I think it’s completely within Buck’s character to make a decision like that without thinking it through entirely,” Minear said. “But he absolutely wants this right now. It’s funny, because I talked to Oliver, and he kind of felt like, ‘Maybe I played the ending wrong, because I seem so happy that Theo is there, and am I thinking about the tragedy that he has to be there because his parents died?’ I don’t think he played it wrong at all. I thought he played it perfectly — but that’s really the exploration for Season 10.”

Stark is deliberately careful about the language here, too. He’s reluctant to use the word “father” just yet, pointing out that Buck is fostering — not adopting — and that the character himself isn’t walking into this thinking he’s suddenly a dad.

“I don’t think Buck is, at the end of Season 9, thinking, ‘I now have a child,’” Stark said. “I think he thinks, ‘This was my friends’ child who is now parentless.’ I don’t know if that’s what it will turn into, but I think it will be important to show the difficulties involved with that process.”

Part of what shifted Stark’s own feelings about the storyline? The twins playing Theo. Lincoln and Theodore Sykes, who share the role, apparently won him over completely on set.

“I love working with them,” Stark said, visibly lit up about it. “I cannot articulate how much fun I’ve been having with them. They’re just so great to be around. And so it’s made me feel really, really excited for whatever the story line looks like going forward.”

He also sees this as the natural next step for a Buck who’s done a lot of growing this season — including his battle with opioid dependency, which Stark is proud of but doesn’t expect to resurface as a direct consequence of the new stress in Buck’s life.

“I think his issues with the pills were tied to his pain to begin with,” he said. “And I think a big part of that story line was showing how quickly it can start, and how quickly, if you go by the right routes and look for help, how quickly you can pull yourself out of it. I don’t think the plan is that it’s going to recur as an issue for Buck now and then.”

Athena’s New Title — and the Goodbye She Needed

While Buck’s arc was the emotional gut-punch of the finale’s final minutes, the episode belonged to Angela Bassett. Athena survived not one but two attempts on her life — first from the shooting by Detective Hooks, then from trafficking conspirator Anatoly, who came to the hospital to finish the job himself after Hooks framed Athena for his father’s death.

The sequence inside the hospital was relentless: May (Corinne Massiah) and Ravi (Anirudh Pisharody) moving Athena to a new room without a ventilator while hiding from an armed gunman; Chimney and Hen racing to keep a shooting victim alive; Buck and Harry cutting hospital power from inside the air vents. Hooks was ultimately caught trying to sneak into Athena’s room himself — only to find officers waiting for him.

Athena lives. And when she comes out the other side, she’s a detective.

The career change was earned through a coma dream sequence with her late former partner, Officer Brogan McCluskey (Karl Makinen), who helped her find her way back. Fans who were bracing for a Bobby appearance — Peter Krause’s character died earlier this season — didn’t get one, and Minear explained why.

“Obviously, if I could have done something like that, that would have been great,” Minear said. “But Peter had moved on to his pilot at that point, and so McCluskey made sense to me. I didn’t just pull him out of the distant past. She had those flashback scenes in Episode 4 with McCluskey and Young Athena. And so it really was Athena’s track in this episode.”

The choice also let the show move forward rather than linger. Minear had spent most of Season 9 giving every character space to grieve Bobby properly — and this finale was about turning the page.

“I wanted to move past that, after the Buck episode with the opioids,” he said. “Athena’s track here is really a career track. It’s about her being a cop. It’s about the danger that she’s in, and also, is she ready to make a change? So McCluskey made the most sense to kind of jump the hurdle into her becoming a detective.”

Eddie, May, and What’s Next for the 118

Eddie’s subplot in the finale — stabbed by Anatoly while praying in the hospital chapel, then spending the entire episode bleeding out alone in a locked-down elevator — was designed to do more than just put Ryan Guzman’s character in danger. Minear said the scene was specifically meant to land the villain for the audience and give Eddie’s season-long journey toward peace with himself a meaningful final beat.

“That was an important moment for me, just for Eddie’s character,” Minear said. “But it also really landed the villain in the story. And once Eddie gets stuck in an elevator and he’s bleeding out, it just adds another element to the story that I think makes it more suspenseful going to Athena.”

Eddie is found and saved. His work helping migrants — most of whom are granted asylum in exchange for testifying against their traffickers — also wraps with him setting up the star witness with family in Texas.

And then there’s May. Her enrollment in nursing school wasn’t exactly a shock — she’d been talking about it for episodes — but it closes out a meaningful arc for Athena’s daughter and sets up what looks like a more active role in the medical side of the show going forward.

Season 10 is shaping up to be a different kind of year for 9-1-1. A new detective. A firefighter learning what it means to be a parent. And a little boy named Theo who already has a lot in common with the man who just signed the papers to bring him home.

“Kids can be such mirrors for who we are,” Stark said. “And I don’t think it’s going to be easy.”