TL;DR: 9-1-1 Season 9 opens with its best premiere in years—funny, heartfelt, and full of space-bound chaos. Bobby may be gone, but the show’s spirit is very much alive.
9-1-1 Season 9
There are moments in television where you can feel a show rediscovering its own heartbeat. The ninth season premiere of 9-1-1 is one of those moments—that quiet but seismic breath a long-running drama takes when it figures out what it wants to be again. After the chaos, heartbreak, and whiplash of Bobby Nash’s death last season, I sat down to watch 9-1-1‘s Season 9 opener, “Eat the Rich,” with the kind of anxious excitement that only longtime fans understand. The kind that feels like seeing an old friend after a devastating fight. You’re not sure how to act—do you hug them, or brace for another blow?
And then, almost immediately, I found myself laughing. Like, genuinely laughing. Not the nervous, grief-tinged laugh of someone pretending they’re fine, but that surprised kind of joy that bubbles up when a show you love remembers that it can be weird, ridiculous, and still emotionally grounded. 9-1-1 has always been television’s most unhinged procedural—and I mean that as the highest compliment. It’s a series where firefighters rescue people from a rollercoaster, or deal with a man glued to his toilet seat, and yet still find a way to make you cry about mortality and family five minutes later. That’s its superpower: emotional chaos and human absurdity dancing in perfect sync.
But last season, that rhythm faltered. Bobby’s death, while powerful and narratively bold, left a gaping wound in the show’s structure. Peter Krause’s quiet gravitas anchored 9-1-1—his moral center balanced the show’s tornadoes of melodrama. Without him, Season 8 felt like watching the 118 team drift through grief in slow motion. Necessary, yes. Entertaining? Not always. So when ABC started teasing that Season 9 would include Hen and Athena going to space—yes, space —I thought, okay, maybe this show has finally lost it completely.
Turns out, I was wrong. In fact, that willingness to go there—to be unapologetically, spectacularly bonkers—is exactly how 9-1-1 got its groove back.
Six Months Later, the Firehouse Still Burns for Bobby
“Eat the Rich” begins with a six-month time jump, and you can feel the gap—not just in narrative time, but in tone. The show opens with a dedication ceremony naming the firehouse after Bobby, which is exactly the kind of thing 9-1-1 would do: heartfelt, a little cheesy, but earned. The man deserves a plaque. What I didn’t expect was how uneasy that tribute would feel. Chimney doesn’t love it, and frankly, neither did I. There’s something about stamping Bobby’s name on the building that feels too final—too neat. Bobby Nash doesn’t get closure; he gets echoes.
But here’s where 9-1-1 surprises you: it doesn’t wallow. Instead, it uses the grief as a throughline, not a prison. Chimney, who’s been acting as interim captain, keeps the team running with that perfect blend of awkward competence and quiet self-doubt that Kenneth Choi nails every time. Hen and Eddie have become the show’s new paramedic duo—a chaotic pairing that works better than it should—and Buck is, predictably, spiraling about it. This leads to one of the funniest stretches the show’s had in years: Buck sulking like a jealous teenager while Hen and Eddie bond over movies about whales. (It’s the kind of subplot that sounds like filler until you realize it’s a delicate metaphor about loneliness, friendship, and the human tendency to catastrophize change—classic Buck.)
The first emergency of the season is the kind of scenario only 9-1-1 could pull off without completely collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity: a tech billionaire (played by a deliciously smarmy Mark Consuelos) gets swallowed by a whale. Not metaphorically—literally. I can’t overstate how much joy this scene brought me. The team’s reaction oscillates between professionalism and barely-contained disbelief, and by the time Hen starts chest compressions on this Elon Musk-meets-Jonah parable, I was cackling.
Then there’s the antifreeze poisoning bus incident, a classic 9-1-1 cocktail of horror and ingenuity. A bus full of unconscious children, a desperate driver, and the 118 realizing the only thing that can save them is alcohol. Cue Athena and Hen raiding a liquor store like apocalyptic heroes, turning whiskey into medicine. It’s patently ridiculous and yet, by the time the kids are safe, you’re cheering.
The Emotional Gravity of Space (and Why Hen Deserves to Go)
The space storyline, teased heavily in promos, could have been a disaster—a shark-jump moment for a show that’s already flirted with the edge of disbelief. But 9-1-1 has always understood that spectacle works best when it’s grounded in character. The absurd becomes transcendent when it means something to the people involved.
So when billionaire Tripp Houser gifts Hen a trip to space after she saves his life, it feels earned. Hen’s scientific curiosity, her lifelong sense of wonder, her history of juggling medicine and emergency work—it all converges here. Of course she’d go. Of course she’d be terrified and thrilled. Karen declining the trip for ethical reasons (her company’s in litigation with Tripp’s) is the kind of moral realism that keeps the show from floating away into parody.
What follows is pure 9-1-1 gold: Chimney, Eddie, and Buck competing like toddlers for Hen’s plus-one spot on the space flight. The episode milks every comedic ounce from the premise—Eddie trying to win through sincerity, Buck through sheer chaos, and Chimney through endearing manipulation—but the humor never undercuts the heart. Each man’s motivation reveals something deeper: Chimney’s insecurity about filling Bobby’s shoes, Eddie’s need to feel purpose, Buck’s lingering grief disguised as FOMO. And in a quietly beautiful scene, Buck finally admits to baby Robert (Bobby and Chimney’s namesake) that he doesn’t even want to go to space—he just misses Bobby.
That’s the soul of this episode: grief refracted through absurdity, pain softened by laughter.
Athena’s Grief, and the Silence Between Calls
If Hen represents motion—forward, upward, into literal space—Athena represents stillness. Angela Bassett, who remains the gravitational force of this show, spends much of the episode in emotional stasis. While the 118 dedicates the firehouse to Bobby, Athena skips the ceremony to work a case. It’s classic avoidance: she’s not ready to mourn in public. Her undercover operation gets botched by the FBI, a reminder that even her professional control has cracks.
The subplot with her son Harry hits hard. When Athena learns he’s dropped out of high school and blames May, she lashes out—until Harry points out the truth: she hasn’t been present since Bobby died. It’s brutal, maybe a little unfair, but real. Grief doesn’t always make us noble; sometimes it makes us small, distracted, brittle.
There’s a moment later in the episode when Athena helps treat a woman suffering from flesh-eating bacteria. It could have been a throwaway case, but 9-1-1 uses it as emotional reflection. The patient’s isolation mirrors Athena’s, and through that empathy, she begins to thaw. When Hen later invites her to dinner, Athena finally accepts. The show cuts directly to Athena suiting up for her upcoming space trip with Hen—a brilliant visual metaphor for re-entry. She’s not healed, but she’s moving.
The Show That Refuses to Die (and That’s a Good Thing)
When 9-1-1 first launched, it was dismissed by some critics as melodramatic disaster porn. But what those critics missed is that 9-1-1 has never been about the emergencies themselves. It’s about the human response to them—the way catastrophe magnifies our vulnerabilities and resilience in equal measure. It’s always been about connection. And after Bobby’s death, the question hanging over the series was whether that connection could survive.
Season 9 answers that decisively: yes, it can. Because the connection was never just about Bobby. It was about what he built—a team of people who refuse to stop showing up for each other, even when it hurts.
The decision to lean into humor again, to embrace the bizarre, is what saves this show from its own sadness. It remembers that life goes on—messily, hilariously, beautifully. The 118 will keep fighting whales, drinking ethanol, and launching themselves into space, because that’s what grief looks like sometimes: surviving the absurd.
Final Thoughts
9-1-1 Season 9 doesn’t just recover from Bobby Nash’s death—it builds a new emotional foundation on top of it. By leaning into its signature mix of chaos and compassion, the show reclaims its identity as network TV’s most emotionally satisfying rollercoaster. Funny, strange, and unexpectedly moving, this premiere proves 9-1-1 still has plenty of fuel left in the tank—and apparently, a ticket to space.
