Evan "Buck" Buckley's (Oliver Stark) world will never be the same again. In Season 8 of the ABC first-responder drama 9-1-1, co-creator and showrunner Tim Minear decided to kill off his first main character: Capt. Robert "Bobby" Nash (Peter Krause), the proverbial glue that held the LAFD's Station 118 together.
The show's characters, much like its actors and devoted fans, have been left reeling ever since Bobby died after contracting a lethal strain of CCHF in the episode "Lab Rats," which aired just under a month ago. In Thursday's season finale, titled "Seismic Shifts," the remaining members of the fire station that Bobby helped build — as well as Bobby's widow, Sgt. Athena Grant-Nash (Angela Bassett) — will reach an inflection point as they respond to a high-rise building collapse and decide how to move forward in both their personal and professional lives.
After deciding that Bobby was going to meet his demise in the second half of this season, Minear told THR last month that he had called up each of his cast members individually to deliver the bad news, but none of the actors wanted to believe him — and then all of them began bargaining with him to keep Bobby alive. In the end, Minear still chose to move forward with this controversial storyline, but he wanted to spend the last three episodes of the season dealing with the emotional fallout of Bobby's death.
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Shortly before his passing, the fire captain told Buck — whom he considered his surrogate son — that everyone else was going to need Buck to keep the team together. In keeping with Bobby's wishes, Buck has tried to remain stoic in his interactions with other characters, but he reaches his breaking point in the penultimate episode while sitting in a confessional booth at the church Bobby used to frequent. "I keep on trying and I reach out, but everyone is just spinning away," he says out loud, pleading with Bobby's ghost to give him a sign about how to move forward. "We don't talk. We don't even eat together. Everything is falling apart, and I don't know how to fix it."
"I think that Buck is so empty after the death of Bobby," Stark told TV Guide at the Disney upfront in New York City on Tuesday afternoon. Grief is never a linear process, but the characters will certainly continue to lean on each other as they process the enormity of this loss. "I don't think there's ever any real sense of getting over it, but I think with time, you settle into things, and it'll come in waves, no doubt, and I'm sure throughout the next season, we'll see moments where it does slide backwards in the kind of healing process."
In the penultimate episode, Buck and his best friend Eddie (Ryan Guzman) — who returned to Los Angeles for Bobby's funeral after moving back to El Paso in Episode 10 to reconnect with his son, Christopher (Gavin McHugh) — got into an unexpected argument about how both of them have dealt with the aftermath of Bobby's passing.
"You don't really see Buck go at Eddie in [that fight]," Stark said of his approach to that memorable two-minute scene. "It's more Eddie coming at Buck, and there's a kind of defeated nature from Buck. And for me, it's a sense of, there's just a piece of him missing since Bobby's gone. And it's almost too much energy to conjure up to really get into a fight. He doesn't have the fight in him anymore, or at the moment. So I think that's where Buck is coming from."
Stark is well-aware that a growing subset of 9-1-1 fans have been clamouring for Buck and Eddie to cross the line from platonic to romantic for years — a storyline that Stark has said he would wholeheartedly support, should the writers ever choose to go down that road — but Minear has yet to commit to that course of action, even though Buck's sister Maddie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and his ex-boyfriend Tommy (Lou Ferrigno Jr.) explicitly questioned whether he had romantic feelings for Eddie earlier this season.
Regardless of whether or not the show chooses to explore that uncharted territory with "Buddie," ever since Buck experienced a sexual awakening of sorts — or a bisexual awakening, if you will — in Season 7, Stark has remained adamant about his desire to see Buck explore more of his bisexuality on his own. (Speaking of which, when will 9-1-1 actually let Buck say he is bisexual onscreen?)
"To be honest, since Buck and Tommy broke up in the sixth episode of the season, [there] hasn't been too much romance for Buck. He had one more encounter with Tommy in this back half of the season, but there have been such big, high, chaotic, dramatic moments with regards to the Bobby death," Stark said. "The personal storylines have kind of fallen by the wayside a little bit, as is what happens when such a huge event happens. So I look forward to, in Season 9, kind of plugging into that a bit more and delving deeper into it."
As for his personal hopes for Buck going into Season 9, which will premiere this fall, Stark hopes "the death of Bobby can mature Buck and kind of help him become the next Buck 4.0, 5.0 — wherever we are now — version of himself," he said with a grin. "That's the most important thing, that he uses this as a catalyst to mature and move closer to the person that he eventually wants to be."
Additional reporting by Kat Moon
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