TL;DR: 9-1-1 Season 9 Episode 6 tries to juggle four major storylines and drops two of them. Chimney finally becomes Captain — but in an off-screen whiplash moment. Harry’s firefighter journey is the saving grace, Athena revisits old wounds in a predictable case, and Hen’s health scare lacks stakes. As a mid-season finale, it’s underwhelming, but it sets up a cleaner runway for the remaining episodes. Fingers crossed the show uses it well.
9-1-1 Season 9
Every long-running procedural has That Phase — the era when plotlines wander like an NPC stuck in a wall glitch, characters loop their emotional arcs like someone hit the rerun button, and episodes feel like they’re doing cardio without going anywhere. With 9-1-1 Season 9 Episode 6, fittingly titled Family History, I feel like the show has sprinted face-first into that wall and is now insisting everything is fine while its eye twitches.
As mid-season finales go, this one is… well, calling it “lackluster” is like calling Buck “occasionally impulsive.” Technically true, but you’re being generous.
After a premiere that literally launched its characters into space (because 9-1-1 saw Gravity and said “hold my fire hose”), the season has spent five episodes dragging out three major arcs: Chimney’s captaincy identity crisis, Harry’s destiny as a firefighter, and Hen’s slow-burn medical mystery. This week finally wraps two of those up — except it does so in the narrative equivalent of someone running into frame to quickly tie off a subplot before sprinting away.
And as someone who’s given years of emotional bandwidth to the 118, I’m begging the show to pick a lane and stop fishtailing across four storylines at once.
I’ll be honest: I’ve been rooting for Chimney to become Captain ever since the writers started dangling the idea like a shiny carrot in front of us six seasons ago. Chimney is the soul of the 118 — the guy who can MacGyver a rescue, mediate a feud, and emotionally stabilize literally everyone except himself.
So imagine my horror when this long-awaited moment — the culmination of nine episodes of “will he/won’t he” stress spiraled across Eddie, Maddie, and the entire fandom — happens off-screen.
This is the kind of creative decision that makes me pause the episode to stare at my reflection in the black mirror of my TV and whisper, “Why?”
We see Chimney waffle, we see him nearly pass the captaincy to someone else, we see Maddie nudge him… and then suddenly, poof! He’s at dinner with Chief Simpson, and five minutes later they’re swearing him in like the show realized it was late for a dentist appointment.
As a writer, I get that juggling four emotional arcs in 43 minutes is a narrative nightmare, but cutting the actual decision-making moment is like skipping the climax of a rom-com and going straight to the wedding montage.
Still, Chimney finally wearing that Captain badge does feel like the right step — a fresh arc unconnected to the grief fog of Bobby’s death. If Season 9 is a transitional reboot era, this is one of its better pivots. Now the show just needs to commit to letting Chimney lead without backpedaling into self-doubt the next time someone gives him a weird look.
Meanwhile, Athena’s storyline this episode feels like 9-1-1 doing that thing where it remembers its deep character history and pulls on old emotional threads to make us care — and honestly, I respect that. The cyberbullying case that mirrors May’s Season 1 trauma should’ve been a gut punch.
And parts of it are! Angela Bassett could read a grocery list and make me feel things.
But the twist — that the bully is actually the victim’s mother — is lifted straight from the Netflix documentary Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, right down to the reveal mechanics. As someone who consumes way too much true-crime media, I recognized the setup before Athena even started side-eyeing the mom.
Predictability doesn’t ruin the emotional beats, though. The conversation between Athena and May is a highlight — the kind of character-driven moment where 9-1-1 remembers why we fell in love with it in the first place. A procedural is only as strong as its heart, and the Grants remain the show’s most reliable pulse.
Now let’s talk about the storyline that actually sings: Buck training Harry for the firefighter academy. Every scene here feels like the show breathing again — playful, earnest, character-driven, with just enough emotional oomph to anchor the fun.
The training montage (because of course there’s a montage) is peak 9-1-1 chaos. Buck has the unhinged enthusiasm of a golden retriever given the keys to a home gym, and Harry meets it with the earnest determination of a kid trying to impress the cool older cousin.
The callback to Harry’s Season 7 arrest adds genuine stakes and continuity — something this season has been oddly allergic to. When Buck advocates for Harry with Chief Simpson, it feels like old-school Buck: reckless heart, heroic spine. This is the Buck I signed up for.
And Harry getting into the academy? A win we desperately needed in an episode that otherwise feels like it’s checking boxes.
Look, I adore Hen with the burning devotion of someone who cried real tears during her paramedic exam arc. But when 9-1-1 introduced her “mysterious health symptoms,” I didn’t feel fear — I felt narrative fatigue.
Bobby just died. Athena went to space. Hen already had a near-death arc. The show cannot keep throwing medical trauma at its most stable characters without it turning into emotional white noise.
We all know Hen isn’t dying. The episode knows Hen isn’t dying. The cliffhanger MRI scene knows Hen isn’t dying.
So instead of tension, what we get is a storyline that feels like someone in the writers’ room drew “health scare” from a hat and committed to it because they’d already rented the MRI machine prop.
Maybe the back half of the season will give this plot more purpose — something thematically tied to Hen’s growth, her marriage, or her role in the 118. But right now, it plays like filler in a mid-season finale that desperately needed stakes.
Procedurally speaking, this episode doesn’t feel like a mid-season finale; it feels like Episode 4 wearing a trench coat and hoping we won’t notice. The pacing is scattered, the arcs land softly, and the emotional beats lack the punch that 9-1-1usually reserves for its tentpole episodes.
It’s almost like the show accidentally shifted its finale marker because the four-episode “space disaster” extravaganza threw off the schedule. And honestly… that wouldn’t surprise me.
But here’s the thing: despite the clunkiness, despite the off-screen decisions and predictable twists, I still believe 9-1-1 can course-correct. It’s been through messy eras before. It always finds its footing again. And with Chimney stepping into Captain mode and Harry finally on his firefighter path, the back half of the season actually has a clean slate to build something better.
At least, that’s the hope I’m clinging to like Buck clings to any excuse to emotionally overshare during a rescue.
