Tonight FOX will air the 2-hour first season finale of 9-1-1: Lone Star. While I loved the original series, I wasn’t entirely sold on this iteration from the beginning. I really enjoyed Rob Lowe’s more humorous role in The Grinder, and was expecting more of the same in this series, but he’s a lot more serious in this role as a fire captain who’s also dealing with a cancer diagnosis. However, over time, the writers have allowed more humor to seep in. Another aspect of the show that initially turned me off was the ridiculously over-manufactured diversity of the firehouse. The writers have managed to cover the gamut of ethnicity, religion, sex, gender and sexual preference, so much so that it feels unnatural. However, this, too became less of an issue for me as the season went along, and the series has become a lot more like the original, with some pretty wacky cases of the week.
In last week’s episode, Owen learned that his experimental cancer drug was also being used to treat dogs with the same kind of lung cancer, and that some of these dogs had been abandoned by their owners. So he decided to adopt one of these animals, a Bernese Mountain Dog named Buttercup, and make it the firehouse mascot. While the others were excited, T.K. didn’t seem too pleased with his father’s actions. Was he upset that his father was showing more love and attention to this animal than to him, was he afraid of losing someone else to lung cancer, or was there some other unknown reason? Meanwhile, at the police department, in the wreckage of the the truck her sister was last seen in, Michelle found a phone belonging to her sister containing lots of frantic, paranoid ramblings that may indicate that Iris had a mental illness.
The cases of the week found the team having to deal with a pile of rattlesnakes in a laundry room, a Psycho-like situation where an adult male refused to accept that his mother had passed away, and a delusional man who had accidentally entered the wrong home and was threatening the “trespassers” who lived there. T.K. was accidentally shot in the chest while responding to the latter case—he was breaking into the room to help the family, but a child got scared and tried to protect his mother. The doctors were able to re-inflate his lung, but whether or not T.K. has any lasting brain damage still remains to be seen. As the episode ended, we saw a homeless camp and learned that Michelle’s sister Iris is actually still alive!
In tonight’s season finale, “Awakening; Austin, We Have a Problem”, Owen and the crew race to a gender reveal party gone horribly wrong; a father and son get trapped in a cave during a spelunking excursion; Owen helps T.K. reconcile the past; Judd and Grace aid Judd’s aging father.
Tonight, I’ll also be watching/recording The Good Doctor, All Rise, Manifest, Better Call Saul, Dispatches From Elsewhere, Spy Games, Breeders, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, The New Pope, and McMillion$.
